I

He sat at his desk and felt really great. For the first time in ages: on top of his game. A strong surge of happiness had swept through him all morning; he felt clean, alert, and completely in control.

Good news had arrived in a steady trickle, as it does sometimes in life, and he felt really up for it. He enjoyed fresh starts, physically as well as mentally. They happened so seldom – they were rare and special. Anything was possible.

Today, on a Monday morning in spring, in his room overlooking the town, he studied his computer screen. He’d already changed the background to a shot he’d taken himself – a sheaf of young daffodils in the college grounds. Fresh start, fresh picture. Crisp and clear. It was almost religious the way he went about it; he could have been a hermit sweeping his cell on Christmas Eve, with a sprig of holly above the holy rood, his stone floor sprinkled with a dusting of fresh, windblown snow.

He fetched a hard drive from a low drawer to his right, and after connecting it he filed away every single document and folder on the desktop, clearing the screen. Next he rearranged all the icons in a neat triple line on the left; then he played about with his recycle bin, before deciding to leave it in the bottom left hand corner. The space to the right of the daffs was completely clear; when he leaned back in his chair to study the effect he felt a fresh surge of pleasure. A bright yellow light of optimism cheered the room. And outside, a neon sky. He’d studied it through his classical ogee window – a vast vault of blue, seemingly higher and broader than he’d ever seen it before. Looking out over the landscape he’d seen no movement at all, as if every single human had been transported somewhere else, leaving a virgin landscape. He tried to imagine the scene before modern history: a wide open country full of silence and measureless, limitless time. It was easier to imagine the deep past with a sad wind moaning outside. Using his imagination he could erase all the buildings below and travel swiftly backwards. That’s why history had attracted him as a boy: as the wind saddened in the eaves of their rural cottage he had wondered about those lost, mysterious people toiling in their raw landscapes; he had been intrigued by their forgotten tombs and their uncontrollable myths. Back in the present he toyed with the idea of binning the games folder, but he liked a quick bout of Solitaire or Mahjong Titans before he started, to limber up, so he stayed his hand.

There! He had a pristine desktop, and he went a step further, clearing his large pine desk of everything except for his fruit bowl and his regulation family photo, plus a new notebook and a new biro. He played about with their appearance on the desk, nudging each item in different directions until everything looked just right. Minimalistic and tidy. It was like being a god, rearranging the world. He was Zeus with a half-eaten apple in one hand and a mouse in the other, stooped over his computer, viewing the world within the screen, quietly planning, conniving, pushing his little playthings this way or that. He liked the image; he’d just finished a paper on the old Celtic gods, whose names no one knew, and his head was still full of them.

After storing the hard drive he rubbed his hand dry of apple juice and right-clicked a new folder into existence. It was neat the way he could do that. Sublime, creative. He labelled it Notes and filed away his first document, a memo from his head of department:

From: Professor M. Williams

To: all deans, faculty heads, everyone in the history department

Dr Llwyd McNamara has received a bursary to help him prepare a biography of the great rugby player Big M, and as a consequence he will take a term’s sabbatical to research his project. Dr Fflur Ceiriog will take his lectures pro tem and I will take his seminars. I’m sure we all wish him well, and I look forward to reading more about this Welsh icon. An overview of the Irish tragedy is long overdue.

For years, Llwyd had used his unusual Christian name as a chat-up device during the seduction process, but since it was unpronounceable to most of the students, especially the large Chinese contingent who clogged his local Morrisons every term, he’d been secretly glad when the departmental secretary mutated it, though he felt she might have consulted him first.

So he became Lou to all except the small Welsh community at the college. Even his wife mocked him with it, gently and ironically. The Tibetans, she said, gave each child a new name if it survived a major illness. Was she implying something?

He’d never known why he had a Welsh forename. It was the only hint he’d been given regarding his paternity; his ma had refused steadfastly to tell him any more. He’d been born at a time when the only special relationship had been the bond between all the Celtic countries, and not between a bunch of bent Americo-British politicians and their business cronies.

Llwyd meant pale and suggested a pasty, nerdy type. Even worse, it hinted at a furtive, malicious plotter, an Iago figure.

Lou positioned his new folder in the top right-hand corner and wondered if it looked right there, a small yellow bird in a big blue sky. Maybe he could customise it, and he toyed with the idea of phoning IT, but realised he wasn’t sure what he wanted. A different colour maybe? He’d leave it for now. Perhaps one day there would be a whole department at the uni studying nothing else but computer icono­graphy – a branch of semiotics, presumably. He’d like that, he was intrigued by symbols.

Next, he created another folder and labelled it Ireland. After moving it about with his mouse he finally positioned it directly below Notes. It was so agreeable, the way a folder glided into place when it was released by the mouse.

Finally, before starting on his fresh, daffodil-smelling project, he phoned Catrin to check up on her – because they’d both clicked another folder into being about three months previously; his partner was pregnant, and she was preparing that very day to set off to her parents’ home in the hills to inform them. It was going to be an exciting year, he could feel it in his marrow.

He celebrated with three straight clearances among the Mahjong Titans.

And yet something wasn’t quite right. After winning his games he sat for a while, looking at the flatish bank of cumulus clouds he’d caught with his camera, above the daffodils, now frozen on his screen. He got up and went back to the window, finding another bank of clouds, lighter and longer, rumpled pillows drifting eastwards across the real horizon. In the doll-within-doll world of his computer the clouds had no emotional density; yet over there in the sky, moving very slowly in the far distance, they imparted a sensuous, supernatural otherness, a stratospheric mysticism; high in the blue above him they seemed to drift on the invisible winds of time, a fantastical convoy. He imagined the old deities sitting on their thrones of ether, drifting towards the edge of the world and the fringes of human comprehension. The clouds could also be seen as huge ships, Leviathan trawlers crawling with their engines merely ticking over, dredging the land; their cumulus shadows were long dark nets thrown out to gather the homesteads, animals, spinneys and churches below.

Lou considered the worlds within worlds around him: he himself had been hatched inside his grandmother, as an egg within his embryonic mother; now his genetic future was growing silently within Catrin, as a tiny cloud might form and gather at dawn below the sea’s far horizon.

On his desktop lay a document within a folder within a computer within a room within a college within a nation, and so on ad infinitum – but almost everything he’d created so far had lain within the confines of academia. Confines. If he wanted to research this book properly he would have to leave the safety of his academic atoll, relinquish the beautiful digital shimmer inside the coral depths of his computer. He would have to step out into the real universe. The one with rain and death, not pretty icons and cursory games. Farewell to FreeCell and Mahjong Titans. Most of all he’d miss the pattern of books – a blow-up of scholarship’s dusty butterfly wings – covering the entire wall to his right. Like the cloud-shadows dredging the landscape outside, his books had trapped him between the webbing of their printed lines and hauled him along the scholastic seabed. He’d been caught, hook, line and sinker.

By the end of the day, with Lou’s customary efficiency, all the arrangements had been made. Ireland beckoned again. He hadn’t been there for ages, not since his mother’s funeral. This time he would call on another woman, whom he’d never met. He was slightly nervous about it. Lou had little experience of duplicity, but that’s what he had in mind. Perfectly formed in his brain, like a cluster of anthers in one of his pixellated daffs, lay a series of acts which would bring him recognition and fame.

The train to Holyhead wasn’t too bad, crowded but merry. Manly rolls of laughter, banter, heavy fried breakfasts still sludging through the pipes. But the ferry was packed, as you’d expect on a six nations weekend, and the close physical foreplay got on his nerves after a while so he went up alone on deck. He was with the usual college crowd, knowledgeable and experienced. They knew all about the game’s mad frottage, its frothing convulsions; each scrum a huge spider silking its golden egg. And the three quarters all strung out, a line of fencing posts, wired in between with the blurred memory of a hundred thousand ancestral passes. Rugby was a war game to them, paintball with a pint in your hand. Up aloft in a nippy little wind he cowered in the lee of a stack and observed the glassy sea. He was having a problem with scale; his mind flickered to and fro. Here was hugeness, but all he could see was a miniature ferry crossing the screen of his computer, crossing a puddle by the daffs. Suddenly, he felt tiny. What did it mean: was he empathising with his embryonic baby, swimming in its own little ocean? Or merely responding to the overpowering bulk of the mob around him? Who cared...

He shrank into his anorak and let his mind rove. He had always loved the sea, always felt completely at home either in it or on it. It was in his blood somewhere; maybe his forebears, his mother’s kin, had been fishermen. Men like Tomas O’Crohan from the Great Blasket Island, who’d started every sentence with yerra or wisha. And didn’t his surname have something to do with the sea? Didn’t it mean son of the hound of the sea? The McNamaras had been warriors, apparently, building over fifty castles in Clare alone. Lou hadn’t acquired the fighting gene but he was a fantastically good non-competitive swimmer, nicknamed Sealboy at school. And surely he was a true Piscean, never knowing whether to swim with the tide or against it.

The sea. Even today, standing above a holdful of semi-drunken urbanites at play, it was easy to imagine the Celtic world of prehistory; a seemingly endless body of water with distant shifts of light, soundless squalls at the furthest limits of seeing. A time when there was no land beyond the horizon, only water stretching to infinity. The world had been packaged and sold in lots since then; to the modern mind it was measured by the number of films you could see on a flight to New York; but once upon a time it was counted out in cubits and oar-lengths, and measured by the number of water-skins aboard a boat full of marauding psychopaths filling in their days between pillage and death. Dots on the faraway sea, the people of the old world were scarce and brave. What silence there must have been. And everyone a pilgrim. Just a few people, but a superabundance of ghosts and demons and spirits. Ship-devouring serpents and the hideous kraken. Mermaids and sirens. Every horizon was a knife edge, the rim of the cosmos.

It was all a matter of scale. But some things had remained the same. Mankind hadn’t changed that much, only his playthings. Religion and superstition still abounded. Lou was a great toucher of wood and chucker of salt himself, he was as superstitious as the next man. Of course, his intellect had overridden all that stuff many years previously, but he still carried on with the rites. His superstition was nominal, he knew that; it was as virtual as the icons on his desktop, representing yet more representations.

Here he was again, alone on the planks of a boat. His ma had told him so many tall stories, he had no idea how many were true; her darling son was unique, she’d told him countless times at bedtime, tickling him and nuzzling her warm laughter into his neck, he was the only boy ever to be made and born on a boat in the middle of the ocean. So said his lovely freckly ma. His dancing-around-the-room ma, zany and boisterous, not the serious one who took him to church, or the ma who looked at his school report for far too long. Made and born at sea? Later, when he understood such things, he’d taken this to mean that he’d been conceived and delivered into the world on the Irish ferry, which wasn’t as bonkers as it sounded, since she’d worked for Sealink as a stewardess. Broom cupboard love? Well, he’d never know now. As for his own love life, it had never been better. Catrin had bloomed during pregnancy and she was extra sexy all the time; he too had felt constantly aroused when he was anywhere near her. Completely normal, said the doctor. Now that Catrin was up the duff, all restraint had gone. You lucky sod, said the doctor’s eyes. Hazel eyes, like his ma.

He was joined on deck for a while by a pretty young thing in a fluffy Welsh dragon hat, armed to the teeth with tits and legs. She stood close to him in the diesel afterbreath of the engines, having a fag, and he felt a tug; his own rampant sexuality, ringing him in confident waves, had obviously reached her. He thought briefly about making a move but then she walked over to the rails and retched into the churning foam below. Charming, thought Lou, though he still unpeeled her banana-skin jeans with his eyes and ran his mind along her thighs.

Still completely and anomalousy sober when they docked at Dun Laoghaire, he detached himself from his group, saying he’d see them later at the pub as arranged. They knew he had business.

The cab driver looked surprised and slightly pissed off when he said Dalkley, please. Too close maybe? How could a man make a daysent penny? So the taximan took his time getting there, giving Lou a lingering view of Joyce’s Martello tower. Soon they’d reached the town and Lou imagined Flann O’Brien’s drunken weave along the pavement, Finbarr the King of Dalkey robed and respendent in Finnegan’s, enjoying the craic with Maeve Binchy, Bono and Enya, talking about fame and pilchards.

Lou had the address, somewhere grand on the Sorrento Heights, in his notepad and he pushed it through the gap between the seats. Christ, how much would a place like that put you back, said the driver when they got there. You want me to wait, surr? His mock-respect was delivered with such panache that Lou replied why not?

His face must have shown surprise when she opened the door, but she didn’t seem to notice. What had he expected? An academic widow in early middle age, slim, intelligent eyes, mouth of a madrigal singer? All the old platitudes? But she wasn’t the wife he’d expected, clearly. She was the mother, as it turned out, a dowager queen from one of the old Irish dynasties, freshly risen from a phantom levee, her mirthless grey eyes stripping him bare in moments. She was tall and straight, in a long black dress with a lace collar and cuffs, so ancient it could have hung in the V&A. She was Queen Medbh of Connacht at the ford, ready to gird Fergus for his bull raid. Or a brogue Miss Havisham maybe, severe and insane, trapped for ever in a huge decaying mansion, her clock stopped at the moment her son died. But far from being cobwebbed and dusty, the room in which they sat at opposite ends of a massive dining table was immaculate and set ready for a banquet: starched linen, gleaming glassware.

We always celebrate when we beat the Welsh, said her silhouette at the other end of the room. She sat bolt upright, shoulders held high, her hands placed magisterially in front of her, framing the fish fork and the soup spoon. A dinner service, hand-painted with the famous trellis shamrock, caught the fire of the sun on an adjacent table. Surely she knew all the old supper party songs: Pale hands I loved, beside the Shalimar; or maybe a John McCormack classic, The harp that once through Tara’s halls...

Behind her lapped the medieval sea which Gerald of Wales had seen, menaced by a giant whirlpool sucking at passing ships; behind them both lay the holy land of Ireland, stalked by Gerald’s talking wolves, women with beards, wandering bells, vindictive saints, creatures which were half ox half man; geese which hatched from barnacles growing on gum trees, and a rude, musical peasantry sustained by miracles and bestiality. The old, primitive shadows were still there, but vestigal now. Outside, framed by the window, he imagined an enormous pair of legs disappearing into the clouds. Huge knees, scarred and raw. He could smell the mossy, earthy leather of the house-sized cordovan boots; and waving slowly in the air, reminding him of seaweed moving with the tide, body hair as thick as jungle vines.

She gave him what he wanted, in the crystaline light of spring, a severe woman without any grief left to show, stripped of it, a bleached bone in a cyst.

Her son had collapsed suddenly during a lecture, clutching his left shoulder. Not yet fifty, her brilliant offspring had gone to the otherworld. Dr Dermot Feeney, who had risen from being a clerk in a shipping office, who had worked himself up from nowhere, had been too busy in his stone-lined study to beget a family, despite his mother’s pleas. So Dermot Feeney, launched from this woman’s thighs less than fifty years ago, had died intestate and without issue; his sole bequest a thick wad of paper containing his life’s work, accompanied by a slender memory stick, also containing his life’s work. A pencilled note had said: In the event of my death, please deliver this to Dr Llwyd McNamara, requesting him to complete my book. Taking the package from a drawer, she deposited it on the corner of the table near his right hand and went back to her seat. Feeney’s magnum opus was now in Lou’s sole possession; the note was still there on the cover, in a forward-slanting script; the man had been in a mighty hurry. Lou already imagined its scholarly pages drifting on the mid-channel breeze, heading one by one towards a soggy funeral in the Irish Sea. Poor silly pup, thought Lou, to entrust his work to a rival – his biggest rival. The memory stick, lizard green and semi-opaque, reminded him of his childhood swatch. It was rather beautiful, nicely proportioned, slightly sad. No manufacturer’s name, merely a symbol showing radiating waves and the letters 4GB. The snap lid was pleasantly coved rather than straight, and the other end had an eyelet. Lou took it in the palm of his hand and admired it, a coffin of memories lying there. Someone else’s memories; someone else’s lifeblood in a fragment of plastic. Dimly, he could see its inner workings; rows of tiny components glinting like a canteen of silvery fish in a milky green sea. This was what he’d come for; another man’s genius, so that he could destroy it. Dr Feeney had been his main rival in their chosen arena, the history of Celtic sport; Dr Feeney had also beaten him to it with a much-discussed but as-yet unpublished history of the Irish tragedy. It was vaunted as the definitive work on Big M, or Your Man as he was known in Ireland, the Man being a convenient shorthand for his perplexing middle name, Manawydan, passed on from father to son for countless generations before it lodged latterly between Dylan and Jones in a South Wales valley. The little lad had made a lot of noise as he came down the tunnel, but right from the start he’d looked every inch the famous second row forward he became. He’d come out with a headband and cauliflower ears, said the wags at the Miners Arms. The broken nose came later, on his first day at nursery school. So said the hairy little giants who propped up the bar at the Miners Arms. But they didn’t know, back then, about the mouse tattoo; that titbit of news was still down a hole, waiting to be caught...

Lou backed out of this palace from the past as soon as decency allowed and escaped to Dublin, thrusting the package into his backpack, a washed-out old Karrimor inherited from his ma. He zipped the memory stick into his anorak’s inner pocket. When they reached Doheny and Nesbitt’s in Lower Baggot Street he was stung for a rake of cash by the taximan, and he started to haggle on the pavement, but gave up immediately when the man got out and stretched to his full length, leaning towards him with his huge elbows on the roof of the car. Lou was a sensible man or a coward; he’d not decided which yet.

The pub was packed, already stir crazy, and most of his colleagues were steaming. He tried to catch up with them by downing a few double whiskeys along with his Guinness, and by half time an early numbness had set in. With three converted penalties apiece, the sides were level. Lou enjoyed rugby as much as the next baboon, but not under these conditions; his mob had arrived early enough to get seats, but when he got crushed up against a panelled wall, Lou abandoned hope and went outside to get some air. There was nowhere to sit there either, so leaving the roar of the second half behind him he broke one of his golden rules and entered a nearby burger joint, where he sat alone with a carton of chips. Deciding to stay for a while, he fished Feeney’s masterpiece from his bag and took a quick decco. It seemed to start with some utter nonsense, an introduction comparing rugby to the great mythological cycles of Celtic prehistory. Whereas Ireland and Wales, and to a lesser extent Scotland, had a rich mythological base, England had no native tradition. Beowulf and the other texts had come from the continent. As a result, England had colonised and pillaged other cultures for their myths.

Was the man bonkers? Had Lou crossed the Irish Sea to read this?

Feeney hadn’t finished: because the English were great collectors and annotators, they’d given all they’d acquired abroad a clear structure, pedantic but highly organised, and this was reflected in the way they played rugby: the English side was always efficient and persistent in a well-drilled way, whereas the Celts were prone to disorder, like their myth cycles, relying on brilliant passages of swift movement and extemporised personal genius.

What? Lou laughed out loud, causing the staff to fall silent and stare at him bovinely before their corporate manners returned to them. He shuffled through the manuscript, took in some of the tone, then bagged it again and returned to the pub. The Welsh crowd was even drunker now, less than ten still able to talk and the rest gaga with drink after a ferocious drinking match against the locals. Wales had won the game in the dying seconds, apparently, though Lou cared nothing about that now; he just wanted to get out of there. Eventually they left the fallen and headed for Hotel Oblivion.

Next day they left Ireland, only a small group by now; no one knew what had happened to the others, no one cared much either. Someone was passing a bottle round, Bushmills Red, and they were catching up again. As they left harbour the country disappeared into mist, but that could have been the drink. Lou went up on deck and saw his mother’s homeland ebb away from him; shrinking slowly, he became a boy again. His ma was tickling him and blowing in his ear and he was beginning to cry, he was shouting stop ma or I’ll wet meself and she was doing raspberries in his ear; and then he felt sad and lonely and a bit sick, the Bushmills an oilslick on the strand of his tongue. When the girl with the red dragon hat came up on deck again for a fag he tried it on but she turned on him.

He moved away from her and stood at the rail, his ears absorbing the murmur of the sea, swash and spindrift spraying the ship’s sides, and into his mind came a few words from ‘The Seafarer’...

how I wandered for a wretched winter on the ice-cold sea, exiled, bereft of friends, harnessed in frost, showered in hail...

He retched over the side and watched the girl waddle away in the shimmer of his own spew-tears. What a mess. Heave. What a hopeless shit he was. Heave.

He made paper planes with a dozen or so sheets from Dermot Feeney’s famous book, watched them plunge down to the water; a few fluttered on deck. After a while he lost patience, tossed the rest over the rail and watched them scatter away, a flock of A4 seagulls. They made a pattern of shrouds on the water. Some of the sheets wrapped themselves around funnels and spars; he watched them dispassionately, waiting for them to slip away. Grasping the rails, he observed the cosmos of the sea again, and its faraway dots passing slowly from port to starboard, towards the horizon. Ships in the night. Noah a distant fleck, a mote in the eye of history. The Fir Bolg arriving, or maybe Tuatha De Danann. Saint Brendan the Navigator, on his seven-year voyage to the Isle of the Blessed with his cargo of fourteen pilgrims and three unbelievers. Over there, moving ever so slowly beneath a vast blue-grey dome. All dead now. Lou felt the memory stick through the fabric of his anorak and considered its fate. Over the side? But no, it was so pretty and mystical. A man’s mind in a morsel. Great mind, nano technology. And as for Lou... nano mind, great technology?

It took forever to get home, it felt like years. For a while they sat in a pub on Holy Island, waiting for Holyhead to arrive in the new world, but that never looked likely so they caught a train and went to sleep. Lou woke up in Chester, caught another train back home. Some of them, apparently, went all the way to London, asleep like flamingoes with crooked necks, waking up with enormous, head-banging hangovers in Euston. Bloody chaos.

Catrin was surprisingly good about it. Just a touch of sarcasm when she opened the door.

Home is the hero, she said softly.

He observed the newly apparent swell of her belly and smiled a foolish, boyish smile.

Did that happen while I was away, he asked, for the bump seemed more obvious.

She kissed him on the cheek, almost mumsily, in the hallway, then ordered him upstairs for a shower. He woke the next morning on a large bean cushion in the new nursery, fresh paint trickling through his nostrils. He must have gone there after the shower, feeling emotional still. He lay on his side, looking at his handiwork, his commitment to biology. A big man in a baby’s room. The tsunami of biology, a huge pheremonal wave crossing the universe. Each procreation was only a small piece of flotsam, really. What had he done? Lou noticed that his eyes were damp. His life was out of control and he was having a problem with scale again. Now he was inside the memory stick, in a small boat with a man, fishing. Long ago. And he wondered who that man was.