exquisite,’ Seamus Ferris said.
‘You will get the scabs on your mouth for lies,’ she said.
‘I have a dreadful fucken jawline,’ he said. ‘Weak, a weak jaw. Gives me an unreliable look. A chancer.’
‘But I like this little beard you have going on,’ she said.
*
She spoke hardly at all of home or family. Her name was really Katarzyna, she said, but since childhood she had preferred the English version – Poland was crawling with Katarzynas. The small extent of her belongings was sorrowful. They didn’t take up a quarter of the space in the back of his van. He thought the heart was going to explode in his chest as he watched her shyly fold away her underwear in the drawer he had cleared for her. He came in close behind and kissed her neck. She sighed at his kiss as though in sadness but turned and held him and told him that she loved him, and Seamie Ferris was sucked through a hole in the universe.
*
One night, soon after she had moved in, he lay beside her in the darkness and watched her sleeping. She turned towards him in her sleep and she began to speak in Polish – a slow, anxious muttering, with the same words repeated over and over again, a phrase, almost musical, and eerie, a kind of narcotic intonation. Was it some old love that she pined for? Was there something more than her nature behind the air of distraction? How much had she not told him of her past?
The next night she rolled and turned again and repeated again in her sleep the same words and this time he took his phone up from the floor and recorded them.
He spent the best part of the next day roaming the wind-swayed fields of Google, searching out voice- recognition apps with translation modes, and eventually he found what was needed, uploaded his recording, and he had her night words got, or at least he had them got in a loose rendition.
*
A feeling occurred within Seamie Ferris sometimes as if a brim had been reached and now his own words must cascade and fountain. He confronted her in the kitchen. He was aware that he had a face on him like his father’s. Untrusting and cold.
‘You’ve been talking in your sleep,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve been saying things, and it seemed to me it was the same thing, over and over, and I couldn’t help but . . .’
‘If only you could sleep,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t help but record it.’
‘You . . .’
‘With the phone. I know, yeah. And I had it translated.’
‘By who?’
‘By an app.’
‘What have I been saying?’
‘That you’ll die if ever I leave you.’
‘Oh Jesus God.’ She held her face in embarrassment.
‘At least I think you’re talking about me,’ he said.
‘Who else would I be talking about?’ she said.
*
Seamus Ferris could bear a lot. In fact, already in his life he had borne plenty. He could handle just about anything, he felt, shy of a happy outcome. As the summer aged he became unseated by her trust of him and by her apparent want for him. What kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me, he wondered. The question was unanswerable and terrifying. When she lay in his arms after they had made love, his breath caught jaggedly in his throat and he felt as if he might choke. To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only the spectre of losing it. As she lay sleeping in the night his mind now began to work up new scenarios. These played out variations around a single narrative line – the way that it would all cave in, the way that it would end, the way that he would be crushed beneath the rubble of his broken heart. Katherine coughing blood in the sink one morning, and then the quick raging of her demise – an illness like a wild animal tearing through her – and the way she would die a bag of bones in his arms. Jesus Christ. Or . . . Katherine leaving without a word, absconding on the Dublin train from Carrick station, returning to Poland and the lumpen embrace of some previous, unnamed love, some steelworker fucker with a head on him like a thirty-kilo kettlebell. Or . . . Katherine stumbled upon in a dark corner of a late-autumn field, at evening, blowing a young farmer. Or . . . an old farmer. So rancid did his night scenarios become that Seamie Ferris stumbled from the bed to the bathroom and gargled with Listerine. In the morning, still sleepless, he watched her carefully over their yogurt and fruit.
‘They say you can tell by the chin,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know full well, I’d say. The way a liar can be made out by the set of the chin.’
‘Seamus?’
‘Shay-moos,’ he mimicked. ‘Who were you with before me?’
‘This is ridiculous. Why are you so jealous?’
‘Because you have me fucken destroyed,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry, Katherine. I just don’t know that I’m fit for you.’
‘Ah, please,’ she said.
‘Or for anybody,’ he said, and he stood up and walked out of the house.
*
The summer gave way without complaint. The light was thickening over the river now before eight. The long draw was well advanced. On Dromord Hill the colours of heartbreak came through. She had left him at the end of August. She moved back to the same apartment complex on the Cortober side. For almost the whole month of September Seamie Ferris slept like the dead. He would be up out of the bed for no more than an hour at a time, often much less. He had refused happiness when it was presented to him in the haughty form that he had always craved. What kind of a fucken fool was he? He drank milk from the carton by the light of the fridge in the middle of the night – never before in his life had he drunk from the lip of the carton. His skin itched and he had a whistling pain out the left lung. He believed that he might die. The two of them together could have made a small aloof republic on Dromord Hill – they could have written the rules for it. October. November. He hardly saw the town. He shopped at the Lidl on the Cortober side when he knew she’d be at work. On a dank winter morning he was trying to retrieve his coin from the trolley when a mullocker from the café came by, her face softening at the sorrowful sight of him.
‘Did you hear at all?’ she said, twisting the knife. ‘Did you hear Katherine went back?’
*
But now out of the winter-grey sky the soft magic again descended and he knew that the extent of his feeling was beyond the ordinary realm. He came to believe again that they were in telepathic contact with each other. Distance was no object to it. He sent mental messages down Dromord Hill and across the midland plain and across all the seas and the cities until at last the city of Stalowa Wola presented itself. The message he received back was that he must come to her and quickly.
He flew on a Ryanair to Wrocław and took a bus, a train, and then
