Joe was the needle, Ireland was the haystack. When Matty had spread the map out and seen how much blue patchworked the paper, it looked like something else entirely. A land to swim through. If he couldn’t be found, at least there would be that.

23/11/99

LOUGH ______, Air 8°C, Water 9°C, 750m

Matty had come over on the ferry with Shifty, eight hours of rocky lurching, land legs not coming back for a few hours afterwards. There’d been a couple of nights in a Dublin hostel, getting bearings, surrounded by voices that all sounded like Joe’s. It had taken a while not to look for him in every face. Not to want to stop and ask if they knew him.

Instead, Matty had gone to the city’s biggest library, and sat with the directory for every area, a finger sliding down a page or two in each one. The business directories, too. Three J. Ronans. The plan was to start in the Wicklow Mountains, zigzag up through the centre. A child’s strange dot-to-dot, and each lough swum would be coloured in with black biro.

Galway looked to be full of water. Fresh water, and the Atlantic fingering into it all over. If Joe wasn’t found, Matty could head there.

It was grimmer here, in the belly of the country, with nothing of the moorland colours. Shifty lurched down an uneven, unmarked track. Matty swam towards the mist in between two hills, the wind drawing the water into spines. A pair of swans, pristinely white among the grey, served as a guide for the return. They parted on the approach, gatekeepers to the slipway. The water was very clear.

Heather had said to ring the numbers, of course. ‘You’ll be done in fifteen minutes. None of this gallivanting around the Emerald Isle like a bloody leprechaun.’ Matty couldn’t do it. What could you say, if it was him? Remember me? I’m the kid you abandoned. Mum’s dead. No. Each J. Ronan had to be scoped out from a slight distance, appraised, like water was. The danger areas, the depth. Courage needed time.

Limerick. Houses were being put up everywhere on the outskirts. PARTY LIKE ITS 1999 posters on the windows in the high street. Leaping reindeer strung up overhead, unlit.

One hour.

A little outside the centre, there was a flat above an animal welfare charity shop. Matty had nosed Shifty down a side street, put on the Beastie Boys and watched the doorway, steadily biting each fingernail down to the skin. Imagined Joe pushing aside those curtains, leaning out of a window to have a fag. If nothing else, he would still smoke.

Two hours.

Yeah, it’s me. Yeah, I’ve grown.

‘Proactive, Matty,’ Heather had said, her girlfriend Val nodding on sympathetically. ‘You gotta be big. Be all up in his face. That man deserves a slap-down.’

‘And a conversation,’ said Val, more pragmatically. ‘Don’t assume anything.’