He smiled angrily.

Garbage, psychological garbage. We get it hurled at us from every direction – newspapers, airwaves, TV. Have you got a problem? Do you hurt? Are you alienated from society? Incapable of functioning on a normal level? Suicidal? Have you been mugged, or lost a loved one? Call your local health board or Dr Anthony Clare. Counselling is close at hand. The Seventh Cavalry is on the way. Tara tara.

‘Woof,’ said Pansy, full now of dog nuts.

The hotel was an ugly building, perched on the edge of the sea; a small island was just off the shore, lashed at this moment by wintry little waves. He remembered a sunny afternoon when he and Caitlin had gone over there and wandered round. The hillside had been covered with goats and they had found the smell quite disagreeable and they hadn’t stayed long. Now rain danced in the puddles of the car park and the clouds seemed low enough to touch. Pansy sniffed around among the few cars until she found one that pleased her, then she squatted almost daintily beside it and shat.

Laurence opened the back of his car and called her. He put the two bowls inside and she jumped in after them. He closed the back.

‘Seeya, doll,’ he said, and flicked the car window with a fingernail.

His room did not look out over the grey flickering sea and the island of goats; nor the little harbour where the small boats clanked and clattered and where, from time to time, dispirited-looking men sold fish. It looked instead towards the road and the gently sloping hill with its scattering of houses, neatly clipped hedges and palm trees.

‘Who do they think they are,’ he had asked Caitlin, ‘these people with their palm trees and their geraniums? You couldn’t grow a palm tree in Ballycastle or Glenarm.’

She giggled.

‘Are we underprivileged in the northern part of this island because we can’t grow palm trees? My mother would love to have geraniums ramping up the walls of her house.’

‘Maybe there’s a few people here who would rather have the ocean on their doorstep,’ she said. ‘Puffins, guillemots, cormorants. All that limitless fresh air.’

‘Pretty unlikely.’ He had become suddenly anxious. ‘Would you like to live here? Prefer to …?’

She had taken his hand and held it gently to her cheek. ‘I prefer the ocean to the Irish Sea. I prefer the cormorants to the geraniums.’

He took off his damp clothes and threw them into the corner of the room. Then he turned on the shower and stood under it as hot as he could bear it, scalding spears pricking into his skin. Wrapping himself in a towel, he lay down on the bed, a double bed of moderate comfort. The telephone was dose to his right hand.

For a long time he lay there, his skin prickling from the heat of the shower, then he heaved himself up onto an elbow and picked up the receiver.