The summer after she took her degree Catherine came down to the Mullet alone. She took a walk on the beach. Away in the distance she saw another windblown figure approaching her. The figure would stop, bend, go on again. For ages and ages they headed slowly towards each other. Eventually she saw it was a wild-looking man with a plastic refuse sack who was collecting timber from the wrack. At last they reached each other.

He was wearing a duffle-coat and no shirt.

“How are you!” she shouted.

“I’m alive, I think,” he yelled. “Where are you from?”

“Belfast.”

“Do they have wind up there?”

“Sometimes,” she shouted, taken aback.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he yelled, “I thought there might be some place on this godforsaken earth that the wind would leave untouched.” And at that he moved on, as did she. At a local pub she enquired where Jack Ferris lived. “He stops above in Thady’s,” she was told. She touched up her face in the toilet mirror and then looked into her eyes for a while.

She walked through the gaeltacht area with the same mixture of feelings that would unnerve her as she’d stride through West Belfast.

Smoke spiralled from the chimneys. The men unashamedly viewed her as she stepped through the small cottages. They turned aside and called out flat, timid greetings, which she answered nervously. She reached the lane that the barman had marked on the map he’d drawn for her. She was met by a blast of wild wind which flew up between the narrow ditches. Fresh cowpats steamed on the grass. A race of warm water ran to her left. She stole curiously down.

A few stunted oleria, whipped inland, announced the low, galvanize-roofed, whitewashed, three-roomed cottage. The first little window she came to she looked in and saw two beds pulled over at angles to a roaring fireplace. Trousers and shirts hung from a cord above the mantel. In the middle room, the remains of a breakfast sat on the kitchen table. Yellow plastic fishing gear was strewn on the floor. Under a window on the far side a bicycle sat upside down on its handlebars and saddle, and beside it, two uncocked rifles rested against the sill. In the third room, lined with books, a huge old-fashioned typewriter, big as a tractor, sat on a green table. She withdrew, knocked and turned away.

“Come in, Josie,” a strange voice called.

“It’s me, Catherine.”

“What?” shouted Jack.

“Catherine Adams,” she said.

“Jesus,” she heard him say.

She pushed the door in. She walked on towards the far room where Jack was sitting on the side of one of the beds in his underpants.