But first he had a gin and tonic in the Plough bar alongside a group of Abbey technicians. Then a gin and tonic in Mulligan’s among the dockers and journalists. He coughed up the white phlegm that now attended all his drinking, shoved a finger into his hip and drank a third in a pub he didn’t know. The afternoon news came on the TV. He recognized the area of Belfast that was being shown.

“I used to live there,” he said to the drinker beside him.

“You’d want your head examined,” the man replied.

The last drink he took he could not swallow. He retched violently on the street. He crossed over at Trinity, sweating heavily. A pigeon swung out of Wicklow Street and, turning to the right, flew low up Grafton Street over the heads of the advancing, retreating pedestrians. He walked up Wicklow Street, then turned left. Everything was as he visualized it, except perhaps for the pedestrians about their business. He looked into each face as you’d look at the names of stations flying past from a train.

The railings came to an end on his left. Now was the moment. He walked like a man with a fine sense of purpose. He was about some urgent business. He lit a cigarette and looked at the sky. He asked someone the time. I have an arrangement, he said. But she did not appear. Yet he had so convinced himself she would be there that he traversed the street countless times.

He walked into a bar he knew she used.

“Where’s Catherine?” the barman repeated his question. “I saw her here – when was it? – oh, yesterday.”

Jack nodded. He understood. He was a day too late. This was how it would be from now on, he knew. They would arrive at a place where they thought they would meet. But they would arrive a day early, or a day too late. Soon it would be a year too early, or a year too late. But what length of time it was made no difference. He would imagine a place and go there to find she had just been, or hear, in the future, that she had just stepped through the door after he was gone.

He sponged smooth the wet cement floors. Threw bucketfuls of sea gravel on the path. And took a dead crow down out of the chimney.