‘I have Type 1 diabetes!’ he sobbed. ‘I can’t deal with this shit!’

Oh but I laid it on with a motherfucking trowel. I brought him to the pits of despair and showed him around. My threats were veiled and made stranger by the serenity of my smile. I said I expected him on the porch at eight o’clock, in his track pants and his Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt. But before that he would have a job to do. We rose from our haunches and I caught the scruff of his neck and I led him along the aisles to the paint racks – Saturday-men watched, staff in yellow cover-alls watched, but no one approached us – and I showed him the white paint, how much of it there was and how cheap it was, and I explained I’d be pulling a spot check on the rain shelter at seven o’clock, sharp.

I let go of him then. I sucked up the last of my calm, and I said:

‘Listen, Aodhan, we’re doing a shopping run this afternoon … Can I fetch anything in particular? You two go for that barbecue salmon in the vac-packs, don’t you?’

I left him ashen-faced and limp. I prowled the aisles some more and now these hot little barks of triumph came up as I walked. The Saturday-men avoided my eyes, and they scurried from my path, and I barked a little louder. As I’m here, I thought, why not pick up a couple of things?

So I bought an extendable ladder and a claw hammer.

The automatic doors registered my presence at once and I was let outside to the sun-kissed afternoon. I propped and extended the ladder against the front of the store and I climbed with the claw hammer hanging coolly in my grip. It took no more than a half-dozen wrenches to loose the exclamation mark

!

from the Do-It-Rite and carefully I placed it under my arm – it was light as air – and I descended. I walked across the car park. I placed it carefully on the tarmac in front of the Volvo – my intention was to drive over it and smash it to pieces – but then I thought, no, that would be too quick. So I got down on my knees and I started to tap gently with the hammer at the blue plastic of the exclamation mark

!

until it began to crack here and there, and tiny shatter lines appeared, and these joined up, piece by piece, until the entire surface of the

!

had become a beautiful mosaic in the blue of the sign, like the trace of tiny backroads on an old map – marking out lost fields, lost kingdoms, a lost world – and I was serene as a bird riding the swells of morning air over those fields.

The squad car appeared.

FJORD OF KILLARY

SO I BOUGHT an old hotel on the fjord of Killary. It was set hard by the harbour wall, with Mweelrea mountain across the water, and disgracefully grey skies above. It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings. The night in question, the rain was particularly violent – it came down like handfuls of nails flung hard and fast by a seriously riled sky god. I was at this point eight months in the place and about convinced it would be the death of me.