“Sure,” agreed her husband.

“You’d want for nothing,” she smiled as she imitated the Southern accent. “I know,” she continued, “what it is like to feel disorientated. Most of the time I feel out of this world.”

Jack passed the night being led cheerfully through all that had happened to her: who had died, what she’d seen; while her husband, on cue, filled in the facts, the concrete details. If Catherine was here, he thought, she’d despise him. A sense of how Catherine would hate him sitting here drinking and enjoying the random world swept through him. She’d have left long ago. Her negativity returned to him and it stirred in his consciousness like a malignant spirit. As the woman spoke, he thought of Catherine. His empathy for the couple felt sacrilegious, and his genial drunkenness profane.

“You can’t sit on the stile,” said Jack.

“What’s he talking about?”

“Never mind him,” she told her husband, “he’s high.”

Next morning he went outside to shout for the dog. Through the breeze came the stink of piss. He stood against the gable of the small cottage and tried to remember anything that might save him. A low mist was swirling along Gleann Thomáis. On the other side the white sea was floundering on Seagull’s Rock. Salt fell in the garden. And his great wonder was – would Catherine, wherever she now was, think of him? Would she be able to look back without pointing the finger of blame?

He was standing at the gable, and someone brushed by him and entered the cottage. She was sitting there in judgment on his mind. As he might at this moment be sitting in hers. He walked directly to Belmullet and from the post office phoned the theatre.

“Could I speak to Catherine Adams?” he asked, businesslike.

There was silence a while, then a muffled conversation. He whistled tunelessly, then like a man making an obscene phone call he started whispering into the receiver.

3

A Taxi Through New York at Midnight

Jack took the bus to Ballina, from where he intended to catch the train to Dublin. His intention was to go to the theatre, stand outside it for a while and hope to catch sight of her. There would be no argument. No. If she spoke to him, then he’d reply. If she didn’t, he’d return to Mayo. It would be as simple as that. It would be enough for her to see him standing there.

Yet the minute he stepped on the Ballina bus his scheme foundered. He could not envisage himself ever reaching Dublin. He thought he was living through a nightmare that would soon end, like all the others did. But it didn’t. With each day he was being pushed deeper under until he’d make a decision to change everything. What was the point? He was no longer able to control the darkness. But darkness was too broad a word for what was overwhelming him, as was overwhelming the wrong word, as all words were the wrong words when they had not been lived in. Everything, in fact, was happening in lurid technicolor. The wall that separated him from everyone was growing higher and more impenetrable. Reality had been a small window at the end of a dark corridor. Now a wall had gone up in front of the window. It was a skin-coloured wall.