“Intensity, passion, vivid characterization and a bold way with big themes”

JAN VALLEY, Independent on Sunday

“It is a beautiful piece of work; no doubt about it, the real stuff”

JAMES KELMAN

“I have read A Goat’s Song three times now and I am going back to read it again . . . It haunts my dreams”

PATRICK MCCABE, Sunday Tribune

“One of the most powerful Irish novels of recent times”

DERMOT BOLGER, Sunday Independent

A GOAT’S SONG

Dermot Healy

I

CHRISTMAS DAY IN THE WORKHOUSE

1

Waiting for Catherine

The bad times were over at last. He stood on the new bridge that opened onto the Mullet and waited for Catherine to appear. In the side pocket of his jacket, folded into a notebook, he had her letter. Just when he’d given up hope it had arrived. I love you and want to be with you, she had written. The last time he’d heard her speak, her voice was a crackle of disembodiment, a screech of static over the radio on the boat. Now her words were clear and purposeful. She was coming back to him.

If only he had known earlier he would never have been plunged into such despair, nor imagined such desperate revenges as those his wounded mind concocted in his dark cottage. But that was all finished with. When he’d lifted the letter off the floor of the wet hall in Corrloch he hadn’t known what to expect. The words were blurred and damp. His own name on the envelope had faded into a wash of blue ink. And even as he’d read the letter he had not taken it in.

The truth was that his first reaction was one of disbelief. He was ready for the worst as he tore open the envelope. He had steeled himself against hope. Over the time they’d been together hundreds of love letters, notes, scribbles, cards had come from Catherine and he had put them by after one reading. Only when her anger was raised to fever pitch by some argument he had started would he take note of what she had written. Only when he had forced her to admit to some disloyalty would her words leap off the page. His hunger for hurt was insatiable. But now he had to find new reserves within himself to deal with her declaration of love.

This letter was different. It was not what he had imagined. The brave words of tenderness and trust she’d written confounded him. He had expected the worst and couldn’t believe that it wasn’t going to happen. He even resented the fact that they could be starting over.

The letter he had been expecting would have told him the relationship was really over. Instead this brief, tender missal of love had arrived. I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you. It was wonderful to hear you over the radio on the trawler. You sounded strange. We have a break this weekend and I’ll be down to see you. There are other people and we could be with them. But we know we want to be with each other. Let’s grow old and sober together. Meet me at the bridge some time Saturday afternoon. It took a great effort to separate his perspective from hers. And yet he had to enter her mind completely to believe what she’d written. Which came first he wondered: the words into which she poured her heart unashamedly, or the emotion that in a panic selected the words? She was letting go the addiction to self. She had done what they say you shouldn’t, she had given herself to another person.