‘Wounded’, her father would call the bog, all wet-eyed as he gazed out soulfully and swirled in his hand like a gigantic glass of Masi.

The house had a bog stream run through it – there was the low constant murmuring of its brown tarry waters. She lay on the six-inch-thick glass panelling over the stream as it ran the length of the open-plan space. It wasn’t a room; it was a space. Sometimes tiny eels swam through, sperm-like. Her father had driven out with her, that first weekend, and he conspicuously left every blade in the house in its place. He was phoning nightly from Granada and acting so blithe. The Sabatier kitchen knives were right there on their block. She got up and went around the room and flicked all of the lamps on.

She slid the glass doors and stepped outside and she looked back into the lit space – a magazine shot. Minus people. She turned and looked out beyond the expanse of the bog, where the ground fell away, so quickly, and there were low reefs of dune, and then a descent to superlative, untenanted coast. Each year it lost about a metre to the Atlantic – it was coming towards the house, the water. This was Clew Bay, in County Mayo, and hundreds of tiny islands were strewn down there. They were inky blobs of mood against grey water. It was a world of quiet dimly lit by the first stars and a quartermoon. The house behind her was silent as a lung.

She went back inside and crawled onto the low grey couch and sounded an animal’s groan. She felt like she was sucking up all the poisons the planet had to offer. The house had been tested for radon, and there were trace elements, it was reported, and she breathed deeply, with a cupped hand in her crotch, and she tried to suck it up but radon deaths were slow. A sick tiny flutter from her crotch like the heartbeat of a gerbil. She found the remote and hit up UK Memories and sure enough there was a 1940s stiff-upper-lip playing:

‘Chin up, wren, t’will soon be over!’

Vehy-mach-hah-lone. She closed her eyes for the swoon of the matinee strings. She felt the heaviness of the sorrow that hovered above – she saw it as a kind of airship. The pizza cheese re-formed and coagulated in her gut. She waited for the faces to form once more in the plate glass of the windows.