Chiseled valleys and stiff peaks of ridged muscle were among the many benefits of wood chopping. I imagined my life with him as an imported wife while he, the father of my children, stood on top of the wood chopping medal podium. Then a friend let slip that the Wood Chopper was also sleeping with a short blonde from New Zealand.

I decided to get even.

Tears fell from his big blue eyes and eventually he offered two hundred pounds for the procedure. He said he couldn’t stay with me. His feelings were stronger for the New Zealander and his social life was finally improving. Within hours word had spread, a development I hadn’t anticipated. Jen Smith told me she was on my side and offered support. We walked to the hospital together and then she hugged me and left after I insisted on going on ahead by myself. I lingered in a ward full of old people in wheelchairs and watched her leave through a large window. Afterwards I walked over to St Andrew’s Square and spent some of the money on a silk scarf that was orange.

I saw the Wood Chopper for the last time in the pub a few nights later. He and the New Zealander were arguing. Rumour was they were having difficulties. I never told him what happened to his baby. In fact, he never asked.

And, of course, we will be selling copies of Town of Fiction. Where else will you find out how to kill your boss in exactly the proper method; where else do the citizens fizz and burr with regret, with lust, with all the darting shadow thoughts we try and keep inside our heads? Nowhere else but here. Forget Sesame Street. I’ll tell you how to get to the Town of Fiction.

Henry fills his mouth with urine and looks across at Jasper. He swirls it slowly around in his cheeks, with a look on his face that conveys the impression that he’s sampling a particularly complex burgundy.

“It’s like pear juice.”

“That’s exactly what it’s like.”

They sit facing each other, nodding agreement. Wind whistles wickedly around the timber cabin, celebrating its triumph over electricity, probing for further weakness.

“Never drank pear juice.”

“Me neither.”

The door rattles on its hinges, and both turn towards the disturbance. Flame hurls shadows into the slipstream of their collective gaze, gifting an almost ethereal quality to their surroundings.

“Just the wind.”

“That’s all.”

Jasper reaches onto the floor, grabs a half-full bottle of beer and takes a hearty swig. He holds the bottle at arms length, subjecting it to intense scrutiny, struggling to focus on the label in the poor light.

“It’s called Bokkøl…not bad either.”

“Does the job”

Henry turns and picks up a log, throwing it onto the fire, sending a galaxy of sparks up through the chimney and into the cold night sky. He stands to reach the iPod station on the mantelpiece, opting for shuffle before slumping backwards into the high-backed armchair, a drunken prince falling onto his throne.

“What’d ya put on?”

“Don’t know.”

The delicate opening strains of Shine on you Crazy Diamond merge with the sounds of nature’s fury, accompanied by the hiss and crackle of fresh log on red-hot embers. Both tilt back heads and close eyes, allowing the soothing sound to shuttle them back through moments played out to this particular soundtrack. Lead guitar licks seductively at their consciousness, providing aural bridges between synapses and neurotransmitters that had lost touch with one another over the years, reintroducing them as long-lost friends.

Jasper is whisked to Goa, to a party in the jungle at Anjuna, lying mangled in the arms of Claire as the sun rises over the mayhem, dispelling the mysteries of the night. He can taste her salty lips, smell the coconut oil on her soft skin, feel the lust, the love, the obsession of a younger man. It’s November ‘96: Another lifetime.

Remember when you were young?

You shone like the sun

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Henry travels back a further ten years, to the West of Ireland, a house party in Furbo. It’s his first trip. They lie listening to Floyd for hours, finally understanding; thrilled by each revelation. They escape the confines of the room for the vast openness of Furbo beach, which sparkles invitingly under a full moon. Twelve run madly in the shallows of the low tide, sucking the salty positive ions deep into their lungs, exhilarated by the re-birth they feel within. Cian, overcome with lust for life, picks up a smooth chunk of granite and hurls it into the air with a scream, challenging God’s supremacy on earth. The clunk of stone on skull ends the euphoria abruptly, and Robbie slumps face down into the ice-cold water, slimy kelp his pillow for the minute it takes them to drag his body from the laughing waves.

Now there’s a look in your eye

like black holes in the sky

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Claire’s married now, with three kids and a body that would have shamed her back in those heady days. She sold her freedom cheaply, to a bald man with a fake tan and a big car. She still loves Jasper. He senses her spirit seek him from Valium dreams, begging him to join her in the Indian jungle, assist her in recapturing those lost moments, the last time she felt alive.

You reached for the secret too soon

You cried for the moon

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Furbo is no more, pillaged by property whores during the good years. Positive ions replaced by the stench of raw sewerage as the new rich gradually sink into the filthy cesspool created by their greed and opulence. Henry hasn’t been back in years. It’s not his home anymore, isn’t anybody’s home really, just a showcase of human vanity. Henry opens his eyes and looks across at Jasper, who’s skinning up on his lap. He rolls the spliff and looks over it at Henry as he licks the skins.

You were caught on the crossfire

Of childhood and stardom

Blown on the steel breeze

C’mon you target for faraway laughter

C’mon you stranger, you legend, you martyr

And shine

“Jesus, that track brings me back.”

“Sure does.”

Jasper sparks up and inhales deeply, closing his eyes as he leans back and lets blue smoke seep from his mouth and curl towards the ceiling, like an ancient dervish escaping its earthly vessel.

“So Henry”

“What?”

“How does it work exactly?”

“It has a rechargeable battery, should knock a few hours out of it.”

Jasper giggles as he leans forward to pass the spliff.

“Not the iPod, the piss. How does the piss work?”

“Oh! As far as I know, this time of year a specific magic mushroom grows, and they feast on the fuckers.”

“Why don’t we just eat the mushrooms?”

“They’re poison. A single mushroom is enough to kill a human. These gifted beasts filter out the toxins and piss out the good bits.”

“I wonder which intrepid explorer first discovered that.”

“Not only that, but when they eat enough of the tiny mushrooms, the toxins make their noses glow red.”

“Hence the song.”

“Exactly”

Henry hands Jasper the spliff and both men turn to watch the flames, waiting expectantly for their respective time machines. Jasper’s is first to arrive, whisking him to Kenya, and the coastal town of Malindi. It’s his first night staying at Kenjack, low budget accommodation, which doubles as a brothel. He’s smoking on the balcony when she joins him. Maureen takes the spliff from his hand and they smoke together in the dark, angelic face lit at intervals as she pulls on the joint, dark curls blowing across her forehead in the breath exhaled by the Indian Ocean. She leads Jasper by the hand into her room, careful to slide the heavy bolt across, locking them into a concrete, windowless cell.

You reached for the secret too soon

You cried for the moon

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

Henry can’t settle on any one time or place. Flashbacks flitter furiously around inside his mind like caged budgies on speed. He senses the potential timelessness of experience, how all these events can on some level, happen simultaneously. His whole lifetime condensed into one moment, containing all the smaller moments in a single capsule, the way an atom contains protons and electrons, with consciousness being the nucleus of it all, the control centre for all knowledge. He feels tantalisingly close to the answers, can almost pluck them from the air, if they would just slow down for a moment. Perhaps he can speed up.

Threatened by shadows at night

And exposed in the light

Shine on you Crazy Diamond

“Henry! Henry!”

“What?”

“What do ya call those Northern Lights?”

“It’s Purple Haze.”

“What?”

“It’s Purple Haze.”

“It’s not purple haze, well there’s purple bits in it… it’s the Northern Lights I tell ya.”

“It’s not Northern Lights. I bought the stuff for fuck’s sake. I know what it is.”

“Stuff? What stuff? What did you buy?”

Henry opens his eyes and looks across at Jasper, who’s staring intently at some point behind Henry’s right shoulder.

“The weed you muppet, I bought the weed…and it’s Purple Haze.”

Jasper turns his head to assess Henry, who is leaning forward in the chair, clutching the arms as if he’s suspended two-hundred foot in the air. His face is all scrunched up, like he just bit into a lemon. Jasper can barely make out glinting eyes through tiny slits and bursts out laughing at the intensity pouring from the contortion. His loud laugh shocks Henry, who lurches backwards onto his throne, before sitting bolt upright and looking left and right and left again, like a paranoid meerkat. His eyes finally settle on a guffawing Jasper, firelight glinting off  bared teeth as he howls manically with head thrown back. For a moment Henry fears the worst, fears that his good friend has mutated into a werewolf and is about to devour him.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” He hisses, as the howls continue, eventually fading to sporadic gurgles as Jasper struggles for breath.

“Jasper!”

“Ah that’s brilliant.”

“What?”

“I’m not on about the weed?”

“Weed? What weed? What the fuck are you on about?”

“The lights man, the fucking Northern Lights, out the window…look!”

Henry turns around expectantly towards where Jasper is pointing, hoping all will be revealed. He sees nothing out of the ordinary, apart from two Eskimos standing in a darkened corner.

“How did they get in here?”

“Not there you clown, come over here.”

Jasper pulls him over by the shoulder and points at the window. Henry sees now and settles on the rug at Jasper’s feet, transfixed.

“That’s fucking amazing.”

“Sure is.

Shine on you Crazy Diamond is replaced by Gimmie Shelter. Its smooth sensuality seeps through the men like warm milk as they watch the universe perform through the window, losing themselves in the flickering multi-colour swirls dancing a tango across the night sky, bright tongues licking the darkness. Red and orange and yellow and blue, a temporary gateway to another dimension, luring them in with its obscene beauty. Jasper is twelve years old – Halloween night. Brothers stand in the drizzle as he attempts to curse the bonfire alight. The wood is too wet to ignite. He won’t use petrol, it’s too dangerous, not even a tiny drop to get it started. Their weeks labour wasted, father a failure to two sons, who look longingly at the glow from their neighbour’s garden as they return dejected to their mother in the kitchen, the nearby squeals of delight burning their ears.

“Jasper!”

“What?”

“Did you spot those two Eskimos?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Henry is sitting on the ghats as dawn breaks over the Ganges. Candles float in lotus cradles on canoes of banana leaves, silent lovers lamenting the loss of their dark shroud. He watches as the first corpse arrives, wrapped in white cloth and covered in a bright red blanket with yellow trim. Men hustle and bustle the body down the steps and onto the pyre, women wail as the fire gathers strength and devours their loved one. There’s a herd of black cows in the water below, an Indian boy brushing his teeth between them. When the corpse is burnt they sweep the ashes into the sacred river, the main vein into the heart of the universe.

Jasper is on Koh Tao, eating Tom Ka Gai, drinking cold Singha, listening to the dissection of the days diving from an adjoining table. There were three White-Tips sighted at Chumporn Pinnicle, a turtle at White Rock. Tommy McCarthy interrupts with his news of a mermaid sighting on the beach late last night, not twenty metres from where they now sit, with his own two eyes. He looks at the divers, deadpan. They nod respectfully; momentarily silent, wishing themselves submerged in the safety of the warm sea. The scents of weed, jasmine and green curry mingle seductively in the awkwardness. Geckos observe silently from above.

Three drunken Aussies set off fireworks on the beach, breaking the tension. All watch them shoot into the night sky, exploding into a thousand sparkles that cascade dying down into a wet embrace. An off-course rocket shoots into the restaurant with a piercing whistle, hitting the bamboo ceiling before falling down into the long black hair of an English girl. Tommy is first to react to the instant fireball, drenching it with water before it catches, saving her from disaster.

Cockroaches taste like pears, dry pears. A drunken night in Pattaya: playing pool in a Boy-Bar with Seamus Kelly and his young lover. A lady-boy takes a break from wailing karaoke to offer a bag of deep-fried roaches around. For reasons that Henry will never understand, he’s fearful of losing face in front of his gay companions and eats the vile creature, biting off the legs one by one, then the crunchy head, and taking two bites to finish the two-inch body, just as he had observed the Thai’s doing. There is a leg caught in his throat for hours. No amount of beer will wash it down, and late that night, as he’s dosing off, Henry feels the cockroach crawling drunkenly up from his stomach, hell-bent on revenge.

“Henry!”

“What?”

“Do ya remember Tommy Mc Carthy?”

“Sure do…mad fucker…sound though. Where is he now?”

“Banged up in the Bangkok Hilton.”

“Fuck off.”

“Yep, got busted with a load of pills in Hat Rin about two years ago at one of the full-moon parties…remember that bunch of Israelis?”

“Who were fighting with the Thais?”

“Exactly, those scumbags ratted him out.”

“Fuckers! Still, at least he has plenty of food.”

“What?”

“Sure that place is full of cockroaches.”

Jasper looks down at the back of his friend’s head, and decides not to pursue conversation any further.  Henry has obviously slipped into another dimension, leaving Jasper a little jealous. They watch together as the Northern Lights eventually fade in the sky, Henry sitting on the rug at Jaspers feet. The iPod ran out of juice while they were away, leaving the storm the sole soundtrack to the scattered fragments of memories blowing around the room. The door of the woodshed is left open. They hear it banging outside. It will stay that way. The cabin is almost in darkness. Henry reaches to the right and throws a log onto the embers, before stretching across the floor to grope for his beer.

“Oh my god, look at that!”

Henry bolts upright, certain that Jasper has caught sight of the Eskimo intruders.

“What?”

“A huge explosion, look…a meteor shower.”

Henry looks and sure enough the sky is filled with speeding orange spheres, shooting up to be enveloped by black. It all looks familiar somehow, like déjà vu. Realisation dawns on him as Jasper whistles in wonderment. His laughter is sudden and violent and takes Jasper by surprise, making him knock his beer off the arm of the chair. He looks down at Henry, who is choking at his feet, rolling around on the mat like a spaniel in from the rain.

“What? What is it?”

Henry lies on his back choking, beer froth splattered on his face, tears streaming from his eyes. He turns onto his side to save himself, manages to catch his breath, then bursts into laughter again. Jasper kicks him in an attempt to distract him long enough to share the cause of such mirth.

“What you fucker? What’s so fucking funny?”

Henry is choked up. He pulls a tissue from his pocket and blows his nose, before throwing the rag onto the fire. They both watch it flare and sizzle momentarily before Henry giggles away to himself again.

“For fuck’s sake, what is it?”

“It’s the Northern Lights…a meteor shower…what are we like?”

Henry breaks up again, infecting Jasper with his mirth, despite Jasper’s position of ignorance.

“What about the Northern Lights?”

“There are no Northern Lights dude…there isn’t even a window.”

Jasper looks down at his dear friend, who is now kneeling before him with an inane grin on his face, gigantic black pupils threatening to suck what little light there is out of the room, a big stoned lemur. Henry senses that he’s not getting through.

“Alright, look out the window there.”

Jasper turns towards the window. A faint glow on the horizon is the only remnant of the spectacle that kept them enthralled for the past hour or so. Henry picks up a log and throws it onto the fire. Jasper immediately perks up in his chair and points.

“Oh my god, look…”

He stops mid-sentence, looks at the fire, back at the window, back at the fire, then into Henry’s eyes. There’s a moment of silence before both explode simultaneously, Jasper falling onto the floor beside Henry. The laughter is violent and unstoppable, the kind of laughter that prevents breathing, and sends piss squirting uncontrollably down the leg. Even the wind joins in the mirth, rattling the front door in jubilation, as if it had been eavesdropping all along; waiting for the punchline. Jasper is first to regain some semblance of control.

“The fucking mirror, the fire in the fucking mirror…fuck’s sake.”

“Sure there was never a window there.”

Both cackle away as they climb into their respective chairs, turning them to face the fire, so the heat can reach their damp crotches. Jasper reaches into the ice-box and pulls out two beers, handing one over to Henry, who cracks it open with his lighter before taking a grateful gulp. They sit looking into the fire, drinking and giggling, both acutely aware that life rarely gets better that this. It’s some time before Henry breaks the silence.

“Jasper!”

“What?”

“They’re called the Aurora Borealis”

“What?”

“Is that not what you asked me?”

“What? Sure I didn’t ask you anything.”

“Ages ago, about the Northern lights…they’re called Aurora Borealis.”

“It was just the fire in the mirror dude.”

“I fucking know that.”

Henry glares across at Jasper, who is sunk into the cushions with head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.

“Jasper”

“What?”

“Should we drink more piss?”

“Definitely”

Lyrics, Shine on You Crazy Diamond copyright of Pink Floyd Music Ltd.

They sat out at noon in a line, Susie beside Eamon, Gary beside Jenny. They uncovered their skin like new ground for the hot sun to shine on.  They drank gold cans from the blue square of a freezer box. The car ticked, its metal doors were open like wings to let the radio play in wrinkles on the still water.

Susie could kiss him right there as they hugged and never go back to work again maybe. The four of them worked nights in a factory making those plastic things for the tops of syringes. They took the job out of school saying ’six months and I’m gone’ but not believing it. They got lost in the nights on the sodium floor. They forgot about the sun, looking out, from the canteen, into the car park marked in lines of streetlights at the frost or rain, or the silence that’s always somehow waiting at the gate.

After all those days without a drop of sunlight on his eyelids, he could kiss her right there for every time he almost did.  Those quiet pockets at the turn of hallways when nobody was watching. He could kiss her right there and take her away to the sea, and she could let him.

They’d been drinking through the afternoon.

‘I’d love to see the sea’, Susie said.

Eamon was rubbing sun cream into her making her white skin whiter.   She sat up and flicked her sunglasses back down onto her nose. There were birds chirp chirping in the green trees. A plane passed over and droned louder than usual with all that blue to sing in. The heat tightened in around their eyes.

‘I haven’t seen the sea in years’.

Eamon opened a can with a Tss. A bit of breeze threw the trees of balance and sprinkled the ground with cool squares of almost shade. Blades of grass frayed at their toes.

‘And what about work?’ Eamon said.

Piles of rocks jutted out from the shore where a small harbour had been cleared. A rusty line of barb marked out some farmer’s right to the squelchy ground.

She could kiss him right there and be new and in love like the young couple who were there that afternoon. They pulled up in the hottest part of the day. They might have been eighteen – dressed up for their first day in the sun – brown cheekbones falling from sunglasses. They looked around like they were looking for somewhere quieter.

‘She’s gorgeous’, Susie said.

‘She is’, Eamon said.

‘Eamon’, she said, then to no one in particular.

‘I wish I was that young’

‘You’re only twenty-two’, Gary said.

He could kiss her right there with Eamon watching from the woods, with just enough light thrown up by the fire for him to see. They’d built the fire earlier near where others’d left circles of charred stone and burnt cans on the grass. They were sitting around the fire as the blue night squeezed the red evening onto wisps of cloud and the trails of planes. They’d started into the spirits when Susie stood up.

‘Let’s go to the sea’ she said.

Eamon snorted through his nose and picked at hairs that’d curled into gold on his chest.

‘I wouldn’t mind’ Gary said.

‘Gary…’ Jenny said.

Susie grabbed Eamon by the wrists and started to pull him saying, joking maybe.

‘C’mon’

His skin was humming with browny red.

‘We can watch the sun come up tomorrow’ she said.

‘Will we fuck’ he said.

He flicked her away so she fell on the grass. No one did anything for a second. A swan skidded to a stop on the lake and unzipped its metal surface. She got back up, pressed blades of grass down with her small, white feet and dusted herself down carefully. She plopped into her chair and picked up a glossy magazine and started to flick the pages with her red painted fingers. The pages ripped where she grabbed them and made a noise like chopping.

‘I’m off for a piss’ Eamon said.

She could have kissed him right there for the night when they were younger when they almost did. It was after a youth disco, standing in the car park of St. Peters square.  Someone’d been stabbed in the neck with a screwdriver, blood spraying on the wall as Sweet Caroline played and everything. Everyone had to wait outside and Susie was shivering and he fancied her from seeing her coming out of the girl’s school, so gave her his jacket. They stood there and almost kissed as lads in hoods threw hollow eyes at the lights from squad cars.

She could have kissed him right there as she heard the sound of sticks breaking that could been a fox but was actually Jenny, dropping the sticks she was carrying as she watched their charcoal impressions come together as Gary pulled his jumper down over Susie’s head. Her lifting her arms up straight: him swiping a stray hair from her lips. And Eamon could see them too from among the smell of leaves. Arms tangling and shining with that sheen that night gives, heads hanging at opposite angles and lake behind them licking at the moonlit stones. They could kiss right there and get into the car and keep speeding west without stopping so fast the gear changes sound like the breaths you’d take when you’re kissing.

I was standing outside Fahy’s looking up at the roof and waiting for Angie. It must’ve been three in the morning. You’d always get a few late ones in Fahy’s, specially on nights like that round Christmas. The pub’s on Friary lane. One of the four lanes that run down off Church Street towards the Shannon the way water would. It’s a grand spot or so I used to think anyway, it’s sorta hidden away between the terraces of narrow townhouses that look away from the river. It’s a real drinker’s pub. Before I gave up I’d be the first man inside in Fahy’s and usually the last leaving it too. Nights like that night I’d be in early getting warm inside and glowing with the feeling of being someone new. I’d be thinking this could be a great one. But it wasn’t always like that either. The weeks before what happened it’d been turning on me, sending me the other way – crying and that.

The lads were on to me earlier to come in. I won’t tell them what happened. Won’t tell Angie either. She’s seven months pregnant now. She shouldn’t be drinking and that’s a fact. It was the lads who told me she was in there. She was sposed to be at her sisters. We’d one of our rows the day before what happened happened and she moved out again. They texted me saying, come in, everyone’s here even Angie. It’s not like I’ve been doing much sleeping since what happened anyway so I got up and walked into town. I don’t mind the walking really. Don’t think I could drive now even if I still had the van. When I got to Fahy’s I couldn’t trust myself to go in so I waited. I stood and watched the frost come down and settle on the rooftops.

…The soul is an old graveyard…

I came into this small room, through a door over there. Right here, in the middle, was a table with a page and a typewriter on it. At the right side of the table, stuck, point first into the floor, was a large hunting knife. There was a window open over there. Stuck to it was one of those classic orange vacancy signs blinking on and off. I knew that knife was down there. I reached down to grip it. That fucking knife… Cuts me…every time… I stamped my hand onto the page and the sign went out and when it came back on it said No-Vacancy.

This is reality. The dream is over. I’m awake… The first time I came here was many years ago. I loved it then, and I still do; this is my cinema paradiso.

This is one of the rooms, one of many, in the tenements of writing. We are on about the fifth floor. There are two more floors above me. Just across the way, separated by the canal, is another seven-story tenement building, crammed full with windows looking into small rooms. The canal is one of those that festers the outskirts coming right to the brink on either side. We are at the end of the block.

To the right, out there, stretching out to the horizon lies a vast blue-grey landscape that is cut in half by a canal-lock bridge that spans over a deep gorge. This bridge is the only way to cross to this side. To the left here running up as far away as the eye can see are tenement buildings. I don’t know how far up they go; I am always let off here. On the facing wall, pacing about in dimly lit rooms, there are hundreds of employees. Some are typing…but not many. It looks like a chicken coop of some kind.

Down there, on the canal, there are Gondoleroes, passing back and forth, on gondolas. They stand towering at the back, their huge capes flowing behind them as they work the pole into the water and drive the boats on. Their wide-brimmed hats conceal their faces. They pass there always, day or night.

I remember the first time I was taken here after what seemed like an endless journey, along the canal-ways that wind through the blue-grey reaches, from the other side of the gorge, over the bridge, through the cerebral marshes. I was down there in one of the Gondolas, the boat-man towering over me, as he worked into the pole, the vast landscape, was spread out behind us and there in front, on either side of the canal, right from the brink, were the tenements of writing. Many other boat-men joined us there, from adjacent canals, some empty, some carrying employees. There were many gondolas in front of us driving ahead.

As we passed along the tenements, the windows began to open high up, and suddenly, the whole air was filled with pages. They were fluttering down all around me. The whole sky overhead was blocked out by blueprints, their pages opened out like confetti, like doves, wings spread, fluttering, coming in to roost. None of them hit the water.

The rower let me off at a door that opened onto the lip of the canal and he told me to go in. I walked up the stairwell and went in the first door that was open – for me it is always on the fifth or sixth floor. And always on this side…I don’t know why. I went in. The window was open.

It said “vacancy” then just like this time, always the same. One single page on the table and the hunting knife stuck into the floor. The very first time I tried to pull that knife out of the floor I cut myself. Every time I take that knife out of the floor, by accident, I cut myself. On the page was written my job, my blueprint, and that if I decided to undertake it I should sign below on the dotted line. I did not hesitate a second. I never hesitate. To be in the brotherhood, I thought to myself, was worth anything…I signed that line and, just like this time, the “NO VACANCY”“ appeared and it stopped blinking.  Suddenly I realised that I could not really leave this room until the blueprint was completed. It is a contract, a contract that you cannot annul. Everything was different, irrevocable. Like how criminals must feel after the deed. The world is different. The past had been some form of sleep. The white sheet with my signature on it, right there on the dotted line, snug under its wing, shot into its breast. I would never escape it; it would always be there like a ghost when the light was turned off. I could never leave anyway. How? I could steal out and haunt the marshes like one of the phantoms that we saw on the long odyssian journey that eventually brought me here. We passed every manner of creature.

There are horse-like beasts out there that appeared at the canal banks, stubborned against crags, braying and hoofing the yells of unperfected burdens into the water. The moon is more like a surgeon’s optical nerve, a fibre optic, pushed in through the firmament, working around, gawking at the mystery out here… When it appears, the seminal dogs of the outskirts gather on outcrops and bark-out as yet unlived desires. Like the ravenous bird shadowing Hansel I was rowed here under a luminous though unlit skyline.

Finally we come to the front two gable walls of the tenements of writing, one on each side of the canal. It is a long journey’s end through a land both beautiful and terrible. There, on these two gable walls, is written, what the Rower said is our code: Hover above the troubles of the world. Have faith in your strength. Be compassionate and open. You have come down through the generations and generations of mankind. You belong to no nation. You belong to the brotherhood.

It went dark. I could see nothing. Time passed. I was awakened by the sound of a trumpet. There was a thin pile of pages on the table. I heard yells of triumph coming from out there.

Just out the window and there they are, hundreds of them… The brotherhood is always there…pacing to and fro. They come from everywhere to be here. Some lights are flicking off, others flashing on.

Confetti from all sides, ever fluttering down to the gondolas. The air is filled with pages, with finished blueprints. The Gondoleros swooping over the pole, driving the Gondolas on. Where to, who knows. The brotherhood doesn’t know. I’m sure of that. They look different on that side of the canal. There is no way for us to cross the canal, and no way for them to get over here. They look like office workers. I’ve even heard that they try to smuggle themselves over here dressed up in rags and scuffed shoes.  Nothing annoys me more than a rich kid in purposefully scuffed shoes. You can’t pay off a gondolero. I don’t know why they would want to get over here. Maybe it’s the arabesque hypnogogic seaport, where captains name their ships after drowned women, riddled with polyglot-hustlers, always twilight… The black-dome sky spins like a prostitute’s skirt and the stars flash like lice and flit around a swollen gonorrhoea-moon that always hangs above the old city walls. It is full of toothless painters, actors that never get to act, writers trying to salvage ripped-up pages from among the nets – past the harbour walls is an ink-dead sea.

It’s not like that over there; they are all marked out by time. They start the same time every day and they finish the same time every day. There is one guy over there and he is always there as I arrive, at his desk, groomed, clean, efficient. He never leaves that desk. He is always smiling; he is always typing. He finishes, throws his blueprint out and he watches it, every time, as it opens up, like a quilt on the air, as it goes down and closes into the gondola. And then he is gone. He is usually back again, in the same room, before I even get out of here. writing away, smiling… And then the day comes, as it always does, when he finishes! He opens his window. And down it goes, the blueprint…opening up like a quilt, watching it…all the way down…to the gondolas. The rowers never look up.

I pace the room. I think too much. My heart has an axe in it. I leave, I return, others leave and return, some don’t return. The ones that cannot return have all returned to the one word, and all the years of their gone lives, all those words, those explanations, those hopes, promises, all forged back again into the one word that they started with – their name. I repeat the names of those I love that cannot return, again and again – words that will always be a mystery to me, they fall on me like trees in the forest.

There is a riddle: Only dead fish go with the flow yet struggle against the current and you will eventually drown.

This is the paradox we are all in. Only dead fish go with the flow, only dead fish go with the flow, yet struggle against the current…and you will drown.

I came to the point where there are no more signposts – I don’t know if I can do this.

The brotherhood? The muse is the whore of Babylon. The whore for all the babbling poets of the world – mistress to all, deceiver to all! I am Ajax, mad and deluded, slaughtering the sheep; I am Heracles bludgeoning his family; I am Oedipus, the last riddle solved, blinded, walking with three legs, into exile; I am Aristotle’s dramatic alcoholic poets searching the Illiad for what was unsaid; blinded like Homer, like O’Carolan hearing your voice like a distance -either far or near; I am Owen Roe O’Sullivan, after the Geraldines were crushed, added to the Bolg, In the dew of morning, weak indeed, as a Poet, as the pen fell from his hand; I am Rimbaud, abused and spoilt – deranged at the end of Verlain’s nozzle; I am Mahon squinting through the key hole at the disused darkness; I am Heaney of the bog corpses remembering memories that don’t remember themselves; I am the butler’s swan-twilight diminishing, unclamourously, year by year;

I am Keats when with dying burning eyes,

He stared across the Spanish steps -the tongue

Of his twenty six years in wild surmise-

Distraught, cloyed, among cloudy trophies hung.

The great whore of Babylon… It is not love that is evergreen amongst the deciduous but acceptance.

No bank accounts are signed over here. No new bibles to read, no new techniques, no new schools – the cutting edge is a very old blade.

Winter is coming. Flocks of desire, in the geometry of arrowheads, are migrating to the south. The seminal dogs of the outskirts are barking…gondoleros on the canal…in the cerebral-wind flutter the newspaper headlines of old dreams…

Look at them. Hundreds of them… The enchanted children of Hamlen. Here they are. This is where the piper brought them. This is where the melody led. That magic enchanting melody…

The magic mountain…The brotherhood is always there…pacing to and fro. They follow the melody from everywhere to be here. Some lights are flicking off, others flashing on. Blueprints, confetti from all sides, ever fluttering down. Bent over the pole, the Gondelero, drives the gondola on, in a long cape and a wide-brimmed hat that conceals his face. He has gone past the outer gable walls. The tenements of writing are now at his back, getting smaller and smaller, as he drives the boat further out. He is taking the blueprint to the line of demarcation, to the border… He passes over this point as he rows into your minds, rowing through the canals of your brains, rowing outwards, outwards from the tenements of writing, rowing into the blue-grey reaches, to some other point where the blueprint can be fitted-out from the wardrobe of your imaginations, in the disguise that will take it over the line of demarcation, over the border, materialised, with you, when you go into the world, into life, into time.

I will finish the blueprint, eventually – even if it kills me. I will get out of here.

The last time I finished, I picked it up and went to the window. That amount of words, I thought to myself, just to get back to the first word that I thought of when I agreed to sign. When I thought about the length of time that had passed I told myself how true it is that in here the flames in the fire of time do not burn. I tossed it out the window without watching it spread out, without watching the Gondolero, without looking out over the landscape, the sky, the brotherhood. I looked at the table again and there was another page sitting on it. The dotted line is here – just listen and follow the melody.

The answer to the riddle, the paradox – only dead fish go with the flow, yet struggle against the current and you will drown: there are two rivers. The one out there they call life, and the one in here. The road in…is the only road out. Knife to the floor, man to the door – I lifted the hunting knife and threw it point first into the floor. The No Vacancy went off and then Vacancy blinked on. Just like when the rower told me there was a vacancy – he’s now telling someone else that there is a vacancy and to get into the Gondola. The last time I walked out that door, out of the tenements of writing and back into life, out of here, into time, the last thought I had was: from the venom comes the serum…from the venom comes the serum.

Within a week of moving in, I saved his life. We had gone for a walk by the harbour. He fell in off the top end where the fishing boats moored and fishermen cast away ripped nets beside the wall. He couldn’t swim. His head was under the water but his two hands were sticking out like they were waiting to catch a ball. I could still see his face under the lapping surface like I was looking into a dream-mirror. Then it felt like he was the one looking into the mirror and I was the reflection and it was me that was drowning. I didn’t like the feeling – that’s why I threw him the life buoy. It all felt like a dream.

For the following two years I had a recurring nightmare of his submerged face, looking at me through the glazed up mirror of the surface of the sea. I read that when the head of something goes under the water it then belongs to the sea and that it was bad luck to take back from the sea what belonged to it. I loved the sea but never went near the sea after that, never. Two years after I saved him, as he was sleeping, I pulled the duvet over his face like the waves going back over him, and shot him in the head. He didn’t even gasp for air.

There was a high wall at the bottom of the garden and on the other side of the wall was the graveyard. I could see it from his bedroom window, through the dirty yellow curtains with red flowers on them. There was a mist over the graves and the crosses looked like they were protruding up through clouds from a steepled, holy city. I’ve never been to Prague but that’s how I imagined it to look. I always wanted to go there. In the movies, after the actors kill someone they never know where to put the body – I thought it was obvious: bury him in the graveyard. No one looks for the dead amongst the dead. Nobody really wants to see the dead again. They only search for them in fields and along the beach when they have a faint glimmer of hope that they may still be alive – that’s why they are looking amongst the living.

I must have subliminally planned it all because my wife was away with visiting their mother. As she was going to be gone for a week, I stuck Ten-To-Two-Blue in the deep freeze with his knees hunched up like he was pretending to be a bomb, jumping into a lake.

I walked out onto the street and went past the front doors of our neighbour’s houses. I stopped at the gates of the graveyard and, as I entered, I looked overhead to the grey horseshoe column of stone that made up the gateway. The cemetery looked like a town hit by a bomb or a starved village drowned to the eaves. It was early morning; the sun was rising over the frosty grass. Two gravediggers were digging a fresh grave. I stood watching them digging until they had disappeared below the ground and only their shovels cut up into the air as they tossed the new-born soil on top of the pile at the side and the white clouds of their breath floated up, hung there, dumb like ghosts, and dissipated.

I went into the church and sat down in the warm bath of vacant silence. Fake gold and the amateur paintings adorned the walls and the altar. I closed my eyes and laid my head back. I heard a granny shuffling in – once you hear that sound, you never forget it. She halted at the side of my pew and edged in beside me. “The burial,” she whispered, “will be later today, at two. At two tonight,” she went on, after a short pause, “’cause that’s just it, some come and some go.”

We are all conspirators at the end of it all, I thought to myself, as I walked outside into the sunlight. The grave diggers were standing beside the barrow of fresh earth, smoking, laughing – only one was talking, but both were laughing. They both wore hats now, like farmer hats. The one who was listening wasn’t smoking much. He was holding the cigarette between his first and second fingers, flicking it steadily from behind with his thumb. He was also looking around, scanning across the rooftops of grey crosses taking in me at the cave-door of the church, though not with his head, just with his eyes. He wasn’t listening at all.

The day passed as days pass. I watched it darken from Ten-To-Two-Blue’s window, beside the yellow curtains, looking out as the mist covered the graves and the crosses, like church spires pointing out over cloud.

At 2am I took Ten-To-Two-Blue out of the freezer then slid him easily down the hallway, eyes locked on him him, dragged him out the back door and down the garden and managed, after standing on the bench, to get him over the wall and dropped him onto the grass at the side of the graveyard. He landed the same way that a table would, on its back, legs upward. Then he toppled over slowly onto his side. I got the spade and the ladder from the shed and climbed over, hauled the ladder up and climbed down into the graveyard.

I didn’t want to bury him anymore. I was sick of him. I wanted to go back in time and unsave him. The grass, in the torchlight, looked like it was sprinkled with sugar. He lay on the grass, frozen into the shape of a question-mark. The bullet hole looked like a third eye, a mark of clairvoyance; a black hole that held no future – a doomed onwards to which his twisted face gave testament to. I turned the torch off and dragged him across the gravel but he jarred against the loose stone. It was nearly impossible as I was trying to hold the spade as well. I gripped him at his crooked knees and heaved him over my shoulder, against my face, a double coldness of death and ice; a question-mark-cross. I was thinking about the futility of flesh, the broken absurdity of free will. A night-bird shrieked out as it flew, its shrill call echoing through the icy silence.

I found the freshly dug grave, lidded over again and began digging. I breathed heavily and stopped listening then; I set myself to hear nothing further, thinking of the gravedigger that wasn’t listening either, that just stood there scanning the tops of the crosses like he was overlooking the spires of an old city that used to be holy, somewhere like Prague. A giant with bent leg up on the shoulder of the spade like it was a rooftop looking out over the crosses that rose up into the sky, from a hundred churches; church towers, like the hilted handles of knives with the blade driven in between the ribs of streets; holy streets where enlightened ones wonder how it ever happened, how this city conceived its own idea of life and death and the great universe washing over everything like a hidden tide.

I dug and I dug, till the walls rose over me, deeper and deeper, yet all the while I stood with the gravedigger that didn’t listen, our heels on the shoulders of roofs looking over the crosses that rose into the sky from a steepled city. I told jokes and we both laughed, though he wasn’t listening. He held his cigarette between his first finger and his middle finger and flicked it with his thumb from behind. I was the talker beside him, and me laughing too with the digging done. Then I was back at the church, back in the pew with my eyes closed and my head back in the warm bath of vacant silence, back hearing the granny shuffling up the aisle and edging in beside me and saying again, the burial will be tonight, at two tonight. The thud of wood brought me back to where I really was, in darkness, hemmed in by the root-walls. I looked up. It was like looking up from an alleyway – a thin canal of sky.

I used the spade as a ledge for my foot, to get myself out, away from the bone-carpet – a capsuled, wood and ivory network of unlived dreams under the skyline of crosses. I lowered Ten-To-Two-Blue in on top of the coffin. In the torchlight, he was the colour of red wine. A stolen question mark that belonged to the sea, whose bones the sea would never get. When I stood at the side of the grave, he looked like a young lady, head turned and looking away, her exposed soft neck dreaming of a tender hand.

I filled it in and went back to the wall at the bottom of the garden. I climbed back up the ladder, threw the spade over and sat on the ridge and looked back over God’s steepled acre. The mist covered the frosty grass like a filter that could sift through the severed earth and net whatever was spectral about Ten-To-Two-Blue to drag his submerged phantom back to the sea. And with him all that was holy.

In grey light, mist moved over the grave-tops. The dawn was edging to the side of the world as though breathing heat into the double coldness of darkness and night; as though holding the earth close to its face, as though carrying it over its shoulder in the rising waters of the engulfing universe and even though drowning itself and always belonging to the sea thereafter, holding it up with outstretched arms, like a caught ball, over the ruthlessness of the waves, knowing also that it was alone, that it had no dream-double standing in safety on the pier, where sailors cast their ripped nets beside the wall; and no reflection standing  there dumbly willing to throw the life buoy even though its madrugada’s head has gone under and now belonged to the sea.

Fintan has just turned forty.  He has an athletic build, and a boyish face with sombre brown eyes that lend him a certain gravitas.  The bar of his new glasses runs horizontally covering the line of his eyebrows and giving him a blank expression.  As he flicks through the charts he wonders what the nature of these interactions will be.   Many consultations are purely about the body part.  Others have little or nothing to do with it. People use many levers to control each other.  Sometimes they like to recruit a professional in that game.  Husband and wife or parent and child, sometimes bring in their illness or injury as a toy to share, for you to witness, as they coyly play out their like or dislike of each other.

A movement in the car park catches his eye.  A woman in a nurse’s uniform gets out of her car slowly.  His uncle used to swear that he could diagnose patients by observing them walk to the surgery door.  Fintan sees the first two patients. Next up is Chris Lyons, with her son Peadar’s chart attached.  He pictures her, a sprightly no-nonsense paediatric nurse, married to an army man.  He presses the green button to indicate that he is free and looks at the wet sycamore leaves pressing against the window like children’s faces peering in.  It’s so strange to share a bed with Aoife and not touch.  The woman he married has become a stranger.  When did that happen?

A soft knock on the door and Chris walks in.  She has put on weight since he last saw her.

‘Hello, Dr Fintan,’

‘Hello, Chris, take a seat.  So what can I do for you?’

‘I saw Caroline for my well-woman check and she asked me to see you about my blood pressure.’

Fintan flicks through her chart.

‘I see.  It’s up despite the medication.  Let me just check it again.’

Chris rolls up her sleeve and he wraps the cuff around her arm.  She reads the result before he does.

‘150 over 100.  That’s higher than with the practice nurse.’

Fintan makes a note and reads the previous entries then sits back in his chair and looks at her.

‘How are things at home?’

Chris smiles the uncomfortable smile of those who hate to show weakness.

‘Not great really.  But that’s the nature of it.’

Fintan resists the urge to speak.  He knows his eyes show more compassion than any words.  He waits.

‘Well, you know Cathal and I split up last June.  He moved back to the barracks and Peadar is with me.  It’s for the best but it’s still awful.  Awful no matter what way you manage it.’

Fintan lets the silence sit again and then speaks when it is clear she isn’t going to.

‘How are you sleeping?’

‘Oh, not bad really.  I’m grand until a few minutes after waking up when I realise the kind of day I have ahead of me.’

‘You’re working?’

‘Yes, thank God, work is therapy.  I can lose myself in it, distract myself with the sick babies and their families.  It should make me feel lucky.  But it doesn’t.’

‘Are you getting any time to yourself?’

‘Yeah, I decided to take Fridays off.  I’m back painting in the tech every week, so that’s good.’

‘How is Peader coping?’

Chris’s eyes fill with tears and she looks at the ceiling and out the window waiting to collect herself before she speaks.

‘He’s so angry it breaks my heart.  I can’t win with him.’

‘What year is he in now?’

‘Transition year.  I can’t get him out of bed in the mornings.  Can’t get him to do anything for me.’

‘How is he with Cathal?’

Chris’s face hardens.

‘Worse,’ she says.

Silence resumes again.

‘Is he seeing the school counsellor or anyone else?’

‘No.  He refuses.’

Something has been lost.  He doesn’t know what.  He back-peddles.

‘How about sports?  What’s he into?   Is he hurling?’

Chris flushes and her eyes scan the walls as if for an escape. She stares at him with an inscrutable look then speaks in a deadpan voice.

‘Peadar’s problem isn’t just the separation.  Would that it were, we could find a way through it.  You’ve heard the rumours I’m sure about Packy, the hurling coach?’

Fintan feels the hair lift on the back of his neck.  He wants to throw up.  He says nothing and concentrates on not changing his facial expression.

‘Well, they’re true, it seems.  God help us all, they’re true.  He was only nine.  I trusted him.  You don’t expect anything like this will ever happen to you or anyone belonging to you.  That slime ball brother-in-law.  He dropped him home after training.  No big deal.  I can’t describe the things he did to him and what he had him do.  I can’t.’  Chris puts her hands over her mouth and starts crying.

Fintan sits rigid in his seat, staring.   He smells that mixture of earth and sweat and remembers the raindrops coalescing on the steamed up windscreen.

‘How long?’  he says.

‘What?’ she says looking surprised.

‘How long did he abuse him?’

‘All that summer.  Peadar wouldn’t go back hurling after that.  Remember his back pain?’

Fintan opens Peadar’s chart and reads “2001, non-specific back pain, normal examination, normal x-rays, mother anxious, boy being bullied at school? Note given to stay off sports.”

‘How did you find out?’

‘Cathal brought Peadar camping last year.   Part of cubs, with a group of lads.  They had a fight.  Something about undressing in front of others.  Cathal, tough guy, teased Peadar in front of the others about being shy about his body.  Peadar lost the head.  “At least I’m not a fucking pervert like your sick bastard brother!” he said.   They wouldn’t speak to each other afterwards, haven’t since.  Peadar told me the whole thing.  It just poured out of him like pus from an abscess. He cried and cried.  How could anyone do such things to a child?  And he kept it in for 6 years, festering away.  I’ll never forgive myself for letting this happen.’

Fintan needs to wrap this up. The feeling of wet polyester cold against his chest.  The callused hand on the back of his neck.

‘Cathal didn’t believe him.’

‘That’s right,’ says Chris, looking surprised. ‘Imagine. He sided with his brother over his own child.  Can you believe that?  Well, that was it for me.  I could put up with a lot I shouldn’t have but not that.  The shutters came down.  But of course just our luck, Packy is two years dead now.  So no confrontation or admission of guilt is possible.’

The telephone rings, the receptionist reminds him that the next three patients are waiting.   Fintan’s chest remembers the feel of the held-back hug Aoife gave him that morning as she left with the baby.

‘Dr Fintan, I’ve taken up too much of your time.  I’m sorry.  You’ve been so understanding.’

‘Come back next month Chris, take this script for your medication and we’ll see how you’re doing then.  Mind yourself.’

At lunchtime Fintan leaves the surgery, buys a sandwich and a coffee and sits  on a bench at the docks.  A crane is loading a mountain of rusting metal from the dockside onto a ship. A few milliseconds of time delay occurs between the release of the scrap metal onto the pile by the giant claw and the clunking sound it makes as it lands and settles.   His hand shakes as he brings the Styrofoam cup to his lips.

He puts his 9-year-old self in the patient seat to quiz him.  Why didn’t he, an intelligent boy with educated parents, tell anyone?  Because grown-ups are strange people.  They say one thing and mean another .  Packy was nice in his words and encouraging on the pitch.  He was a famous hurler and popular with the grown-ups.  There was no match between his words, his hands and his thing.  He got cross if you moved or didn’t do what his hands showed you.  He got mean and scary.  Who would believe a small boy if he tried to describe those things?  He had tried to talk about it once with his mother when he was fifteen.

‘Ah, Packy’d never do anything like that.  Sure you never saw him doing anything out of the way now, did you?’

Just 47% of the anonymous responders who disclosed being victims of sexual violence to researchers by telephone had never told anyone before.  That was low.  He would have expected 90% to have kept their secret safe.

Fintan finishes his coffee and throws his uneaten sandwich to a bunch of seagulls.  The largest gull, the size of a cat, beats away the others and rips the sandwich apart, shaking its head from side to side, spilling ham, coleslaw and beetroot all over the limestone pier.