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HOME

SICK

NESS

Stories

Colin Barrett

Grove Press

New York

Copyright

Copyright © 2022 by Colin Barrett

Jacket design by Matt Broughton

Jacket photograph: Lava and landscape, Getty Images

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

‘A Shooting in Rathreedane’, ‘The Ways’, ‘Whoever is There, Come on Through’ and ‘Anhedonia, Here I Come’ first appeared in the New Yorker; ‘The Alps’ first appeared in Harper’s. An earlier version of ‘The Silver Coast’ was commissioned by RTÉ Radio 1 for SPOKEN STORIES 1: Independence and first broadcast in 2021

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK.

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: May 2022

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5964-9

eISBN 978-0-8021-5965-6

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

For

Lucy, Ellie & Daniel

Contents

A Shooting in Rathreedane

The Ways

The Alps

Whoever Is There, Come On Through

The Silver Coast

Anhedonia, Here I Come

The Low, Shimmering Black Drone

The 10

A SHOOTING IN RATHREEDANE

Sergeant Jackie Noonan was squaring away paperwork when the call came in, just her and the gosling, Pronsius Swift, in Ballina Garda Station. The third officer on duty, Sergeant Dennis Crean, had run out to oversee the extraction of a Renault Megane some young ­lad – sober, apparently, just a nervous ­non-­local negotiating the cat’s cradle of back roads around Currabbaggan – had nosed into a ditch a half mile out from the national school. The car was a ­write-­off but the lad had got away without a scratch, according to Crean, and he was a lucky lad because Noonan knew the roads out that way and they were wicked; high ditched, hilly and altogether too narrow, scantily signposted and laced with ­half-­hidden, acutely ­right-­angled turns it took only a second’s inattention to be ambushed by.