scarves around their necks and carrying skimpy Tesco bags, crossed the Fields.
I’d just received a letter. I was going to live in the Southern States in the autumn.
Life changes: the Tarot cards on the mantelpiece are young men pulling a boat out of the sea in Portugal with ropes; a nobleman with his arm around his pageboy, a ball in the nobleman’s hand, his outfit olive-yellow with patterns of girdles in it, a black hat with a silver coin on the front of it on his head; two men in thoabs and turbans conversing by a field of green barley, poppies scattered among the barley.
When you were at university your mother had you incarcerated in digs, so you celebrated your twenty-first birthday four months after the night in the flat of a friend. A woman who’d recently lost her husband and cried a lot came, a Mrs Lawlor. Two urchin boys with plum cheeks from Mountpleasant Buildings. The girl who later attacked you, in a fur coat, a blue and white striped gown like that of a concentration camp inmate, a slouch hat. You brought pictures of Bob Dylan, Carson McCullers, Katherine Mansfield, Anne Frank, the Isle of Capri and Chartres Cathedral, and pinned them on the wall.
‘It’s the happiest night since my husband died,’ Mrs Lawlor said. ‘I spend most nights crying and sobbing with tablets. Now I realize I’ve got to start living again.’
Shortly after that I moved out of the digs into the flat of another friend. He gave me as a gift a white, blue-embroidered Mexican shirt and not satisfied with the gift I took to wearing his clothes, especially a black leather jacket. I would sit in these clothes in Dwyers on Lower Leeson Street. I used to fulminate there – a new identity, a new shirt.
With change in Dublin you always recourse to the sea. I went every day to Sandycove, the sea at its most azure at Monkstown.
One night I went to a party held in the open air by the Forty Foot. Eleanor was singing songs and crying ‘My baby. My baby’, referring to a baby aborted in England, child of a ruffian songster.
In the yellow bracken he laid her down,
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