the bridge in glittery cowboy hats and stretch-nylon skirts, with bottles of Skinny prosecco to hand and in their eyes the dissolute, the haunted look of a three-day hen at its fag end and emblazoned on their tight-fitting t-shirts the legend ‘MOHILL PUSSY POSSE’, and with something already close to love he turned to see the tip of Katherine’s nose rise to match his own disdain.
‘Why would they do this to themselves?’ Katherine said.
‘There’s a sickness around the place,’ Seamus said.
A rare thing occurred then in the van as it hoovered up the N4 – a companionable silence. To his awe he found that they were perfectly comfortable with each other and they didn’t even have to try.
*
The coast of Leitrim sat under a low rim of Atlantic cloud. The breeze made the cables above the bungalows whisper of the Sunday afternoon’s melancholy. The waves made polite applause when they broke on the shingle beach. She told him that she came from Stalowa Wola, a small city in the south, and that she could not see herself going back there. His heart soared.
‘Is there no work?’ he said.
‘Not much but it’s not that. It’s more that my family is there and that makes everything too . . .’
She struggled for the word.
‘Close?’ she tried.
‘Clammy,’ Seamus said. ‘Families can be like that. Give a clammy feeling.’
‘Clammy?’
‘Like a warm feeling but not in a good way,’ he said. ‘Sweat on your palms and at the base of your back. A nervous-type feeling.’
‘You’re funny,’ she said.
‘Thanks be to fuck for that,’ he said.
‘But yes,’ she said. ‘Clammy.’
They walked the shingle beach. He told her as much as was bearable to tell about himself. He had gone to college in Galway to study French and business, but he had not finished his degree. He was not by his nature a finisher of things, he said. He had never said this before or really even thought it and it was a surprise to him. It was all coming out before the soft lashes, the stare. He had worked for years in a factory, he said, and lived at home. (The way an eternity of cold dread could be packed into a single line.) Somehow he had not had the impulse to travel. He had not known what he was looking for, if anything at all, he said, until he turned from the bog road into the clearing on the wooded slope of Dromord Hill and found there the pebbledash cottage of the old uncle he had barely known, and he had recognised the place at once as his home.
‘I would have been brought there as a child,’ he said. ‘I remember being taken up there after I made my Holy Communion. He gave me two sausage rolls for it.’
‘This is a custom?’
‘No, usually people give you money, a tenner.’
Their talk came in odd spurts and the trudge of their feet went slowly across the shingle but the ease they found outside and around the talk was soft magic. Here she is for me, he thought. Here is the woman at last that I can be alone with.
‘I’d like to see it,’ she said.
‘The which?’ he said.
‘The cottage,’ she said.
*
No doubt it was national stereotyping to think so but she seemed to know her way around a head of cabbage. From his spice rack’s broad selection she took some caraway seeds and softened them in hot, foaming butter and stir-fried shreds of the cabbage in the fat, and these were delicious with thick slices of bacon and the sourdough bread he had brought from the market. They ate in silence as the sun broke through to heat the last of the day and its warm light was lavish in the room. They kissed for a long while on the sofa and then went to bed and even that worked out well enough.
*
He felt himself falling. In the native way he was tormented now by his own happiness. He could not imagine a future day without Katherine. That would be hell. To be able to stand back from and recognise his obsession as exactly that did not lessen its extent nor remove its danger. He waited for her outside the café each day. He kept step with her across the bridge to the Cortober side and together they slowed to look out over the water. Tears welled up in his eyes and he had to make out it was the breeze off the river was the cause of them.
‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘I didn’t realise I was so on my own,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to be brutally fucken honest about things.’
Typically in the evenings they drove up to the cottage. Its solitude in summer was bliss. His future plans spewed as they sat over a few glasses of wine. There was pale light until eleven o’clock still, the summer at its high pitch. They could back away from the town and the world altogether, he said. They could be next to self-sufficient on the mountain. The madness of what he was saying to a woman he’d been seeing for three weeks was evident even to himself and even as he said it, but she did not seem in any way put out. In fact, she asked serious questions about the land and the cottage, the drainage, and she did so with an air of owlish inquiry. Sniffily together they watched films by the Dardenne brothers (Belgians were allowed) and Julia Ducournau. On a clear night in mid-July, he went outside very late – stepped softly so as not to wake her – to see the starlight fall on the mountain as she slept, and he made a ritual vow to remain true if not exactly to the reality of the small woman sleeping in his bed in the cottage then to the perfected version of her he had worked out in his scenarios, for he believed that this version could incorporate and sustain – that we must each of us dream our lovers into their existence.
And now the torment of his happiness was on his brow like bad fever.
And now the nights were not long enough.
*
But when they sat together on the sofa in the evenings he was inclined to reach across and drag the hem of her skirt back down over her knees. Prim, it must have seemed, and it became something like a nervous tic, something he had no control over. They were perfectly normal and functional knees, but somehow their slight thickness made them seem foreign to her otherwise slender legs. Protuberances, he came to think of them as. Those unfortunate protuberances. They started to play on Seamie Ferris’s mind a bit. When he should have been thinking about other parts of her, he was thinking about her thickset fucken knees.
*
In the sorrow and remorse that mingled madly with his animal passion he spent a long time in the bed kissing her knees. He could not keep away from them in the dark. He cupped and whispered to them. He licked and stroked them. He spent serious time with them.
‘Please,’ she said on a humid night in late July.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Leave them,’ she said. ‘My knees.’
‘Why?’
‘I fucking hate my knees,’ she said.
‘Oh, my darling,’ he said.
‘They’re
