Something was wrong.

Someone had been living through all of this on his behalf – a stranger. Now he had to create something from nothing. A man. He didn’t know what expression he should wear. What politics he had. Or the architecture that surrounded him. Yet once, out of habit, he walked in his shoes.

For her he must remake himself. But she had all the materials which he needed to begin.

As he sat waiting in the darkened sun lounge in the early evening, a bus disgorged a gaggle of youths and six priests onto Main Street. It had begun raining and they were drenched in the downpour. “That’s a shocking evening,” a priest said to Jack. The youngsters were sent into the eating house beyond the lounge for chips and sausages. Immediately they created an uproar. The sorry-looking priests, with brandies and gins, came into the lounge. A buxom woman brought them salmon sandwiches.

“Where are you from?” Jack asked the priest nearest to him.

“Castlebar,” he replied. “We are giving the altar boys of the diocese a day out.”

“You didn’t, by any chance, pass a Lada on the road?”

“I’m sure we passed plenty,” the priest laughed.

Jack looked into his eyes. “A blue Lada. Maybe it was broken down. And a woman. She’d be wearing a black scarf.”

“Not that I can remember,” said the priest.

The priests hunched over their drinks in a single-minded way. Some wore old childish ganseys, others black, loosely knit vests. Here the back of a neck bulged, there it was graceful and white and reeked of a fleshly morbid sensuality. They chewed the white bread and lettuce with relish. One man, back from the missions, tanned and feral, talked of Chile, the Shining Path and Christopher Columbus while he sipped a Baileys Irish Cream. Then their conversation dropped to whispers. Jack gagged a little, and stabbed a finger into his thigh to control his stomach. His eyes watered.

“Don’t look so sad, me buck,” the missioner called across, “it might never happen.”

The nausea made Jack swoon. He gagged again and pressed his finger deep into his thigh till the nail punctured the skin. The smell of old drink seemed to erupt from the pores of his body.

He was standing in the rain down on the Shore Road looking out at the violent sea which made no sound. Turning, he saw two dogs watching him, also silently, through a blue galvanize gate. One stood, his snout resting on his forepaws in the hole behind which the bolt is shot home. The other was stretched flat out on the cobbles so he could see under the corner of the gate. They were brown-and-white sheepdogs. Daisy lay in the middle of the road with his snout cushioned on a handful of grass and watched them. The three dogs and the man regarded each other silently.

The hotel gardener, shaking his disconsolate head and fingers, as if he were feeding birds, foundered down the road.