Too many lunatic summers, dull and sluggish, drag the sense out of a hot skull. She looks around, remembering vaguely where she is. This place, Nobber, like any object, has been worn down by too frequent a use. It has lost its ambience, its texture smoothed to nothing. Too much familiarity has made it insensible, drained it of meaning. Every footstep is a sign, but there is no one left around her who makes these marks. Her shadow is another self that walks ahead of her, but sometimes it stalks her, wishes her harm. It is nothing now; the sun is too high, and she is unfamiliar with so much light. Every door is a new history. New rooms are new consciousnesses; thresholds of the self, created in the crossing. Other bodies, multitudinous and full of breath, are portals to keen pain and oceanic pleasure. The world, at every moment, is renewed, and it is shocking, and it is cruel. A vague pressure mounts behind her forehead, making her dissonant and jarred. The sickness is like this pain, not an immediate reckoning, rather a slow attenuation that unravels into a lazy catastrophe. The persistent throbbing emerges from behind her eyes and creates a swirl in the centre of her vision, a little blur whose borders are the clarity of life. She grits her teeth, and to escape the constant pain in her, invents herself. Mary will become a new person, one who does not suffer, and there will be no meaning behind her transformation but the pain it conceals.

‘It has never been so bright in my lifetime,’ she says aloud. ‘I am covered in filth. I have never seen how dirty I was.’

She takes a few steps and some muscle in her knee spasms. She awoke drunk, she thinks, but perhaps I have been drunk for years. She sips at the cider as she moves. Behind her the little Gael is hurrying her on, calling after her. A chestnut mare ahead of her, unsteady on its feet, sidesteps.

‘I will ride you to Moynagh lake,’ she says to it. ‘To any lake, it does not matter. I must wash myself.’

The mare watches her out of the black rectangle embedded within its eyes, shuffling its hooves. Its nostrils quiver like slowly blinking eyes. She wants to lean below its nose and feel its moist breath on the back of her neck, but the horse can smell the drunkenness off this woman; it angles away.

‘You will not protect me?’ Mary says to it.

Colca comes out of a dark doorway. Naked as he is, it seems as though the house is giving birth to him.

‘What are you doing?’ he yells. ‘How are you free, my God?’