The River Capture

AS HE TURNS in the avenue what images, prompted by the licking of hot salty tears, come to mind?

Pillars. Lot’s wife. His brain in disarray. His brain on the verge of a cataplectic fit caused by the autoimmune destruction of neurons as he tries to fathom the concepts of good and evil, virtue and vice, the warp and woof of consciousness and the mercurial nature of Man. More pillars. The glorious drive back from Kinsale with Ruth at his side, coming up over the Vee and down into the Sullane valley with the sun setting and their thoughts coalescing and between them a silent understanding that, having earlier experienced in the act of lovemaking the transmutation of lowly instincts into godly essence and accepting that moment as being so sublimely beautiful it could not be surpassed, death now was the only reply, the only fitting end to such ecstasy. Up ahead loomed a large overhead bridge under which stood a gigantic pillar of stone and, as they approached the bridge, he thought he heard a whispered Yes and that in that Yes she was willing him to turn the steering wheel a fraction of a revolution to the left and accelerate towards the pillar, thus transporting them to an exquisite bliss never before encountered. Such a desire to die in her company was, however, eclipsed by a greater desire to live in it.

The dream of Judgment Day that terrified him in the early hours of 5 February 2006, alone in the bedroom of the first-floor flat of 303 Harold’s Cross Road, Dublin. In the dream he is standing at his bedroom window in Ardboe looking down on the lawn, which is a sea of white: men in white robes as far as the eye can see, men bowing down in prayer at the Hajj in Mecca. And there among them is his father, dressed from head to toe in white Muslim garb. A bell tolls and his mother and Lucy enter the room, pale and frightened. Suddenly it is clear: soon the trumpet will sound and the mountains will fold and the oceans will spill and the sky will split asunder. The hour is drawing near. Frantic with fear – he gives no thought to his mother or his sister nor they to him – he is running out of the city, heading west on the old Galway road. Beyond Kinnegad, Vinnie Molloy from the chicken factory approaches on a bike, then veers suddenly into a field and cycles in a wide arc to avoid Luke. Such a sinner is he, Luke, that Vinnie Molloy – the vilest of men – will not deign to pass him. When Luke woke up, the room was dark and the sky outside had a strange ominous hue. He lay in bed, petrified, certain it was the Last Day and there was no time left to right his wrongs, because Death will not wait. He ran to the window expecting to find the city in chaos and people hysterical. But the traffic crawled by as usual, car drivers staring calmly ahead. He turned on the radio. What was wrong with everyone, had they not heard? He dressed quickly, hands trembling, darting from window to door and back again, like a headless chicken. Frightened, heartsick, he left the house and walked down Harold’s Cross Road, his legs like jelly. Hours later, standing in his classroom in Belvedere as the bell tolled for each new class, he finally accepted that the last ding-dong of doom had not yet sounded.

He drops the plastic bag inside the front door, runs down the hall to the bathroom, evacuates his bowels in an urgent diarrhoeic splurge, then remains – in a weakened state – on the toilet bowl until he is confident that the last dregs are discharged from his bowels. Afterwards, bringing a higher than normal level of consciousness to bear on each task, he cleans himself, flushes the toilet and washes his hands. He exits the bathroom, collects the plastic bag, walks along the back hall to the kitchen and tumbles its contents onto the table.

Two bundles of personal correspondence comprising eighteen letters written by Ellen to Mossie Mulvey and nine photocopied letters written by Mulvey to Ellen, each neatly tied with string. A large brown envelope containing legal correspondence between Ellen’s solicitors, Mahon and Keane, The Mall, Cork, and Mulvey’s solicitors, Arnold & Whelan, South Parade, Waterford; a red document wallet containing legal documents that include a notice of motion, a statement of claim, orders for discovery, pleadings, affidavits, a notice for particulars, etc. In a separate envelope: a newspaper report and miscellaneous items of evidence including doctors’ receipts, airfare receipts, character references, a medical report, and two photocopied letters labelled ‘anonymous texts’.

After examination of the anonymous texts, does Luke concur with Ellen’s belief that they were written by Mossie Mulvey?

As the texts appear to be written in a deliberately shaky hand and, considering the poor grammatical structure, misspellings, similarities of letter formation (e.g. the particular wobble on the upward stroke of the lower case b and the lower case f, the slant on the capital T ) and how closely it resembles the handwriting in Mossie Mulvey’s letters to Ellen should feeble attempts be made to disguise it, it is difficult not to conclude that those letters were written by Mulvey.

The first letter stated that Ellen gave birth to a child in an unnamed New York hospital three years prior – which would have been 1960. The writer supplied the names of two people who could verify (and swear under oath, if necessary) this fact, and claimed that these people could show ‘on a map of America’ where exactly the child was being raised. The second letter urged Mossie Mulvey to stop making a fool of himself and to give up ‘the old girl’. Ellen is later described as ‘an old maid’ who comes running home from America every summer, ‘man-mad’. This letter claims that, prior to Mossie, two other ‘decent men’ from the town gave up Ellen after the letter writer intervened and ‘put them right’ about the kind of woman she was. The decent men are named but are unknown to Luke.

That Mossie Mulvey was in no hurry to get married and would have been happy to stay single for the rest of his life but for the pressure he was under – from whom is not stated. That he accused Ellen of being ‘forceful’ and ‘bossy’. That he consulted a mission priest who advised him not to marry until the woman’s virtue was beyond question. That Ellen regularly sent him gifts – shirts, pants, razors. That Ellen was heartbreakingly earnest, entirely honest, often desperate and occasionally pushy. That Mossie Mulvey was wary, cagey, secretive and was, in all likelihood, whoring around the whole time he knew Ellen.

That among the Clarks’ possessions were a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, a villa in the Bahamas, a ranch in California, a plane, two yachts – one moored at Edgartown, Massachusetts, the other in Nassau. That, though Mr Clark was a blue blood, the wealth originated with Mrs Clark – whose grandfather founded a pharmaceutical company. That Mr Clark was an alcoholic. That Mossie Mulvey was a poor speller. That Ellen watched the TV series Men into Space. That on St Patrick’s night 1962 she attended a concert in Carnegie Hall featuring Joe Feeney and Carmel Quinn. That she was bereft when young Hubie Clark went away to school in Groton, Massachusetts. That the travel itinerary for Mr and Mrs Clark in the spring of 1962 included a cruise in the Caribbean and an overnight stay at the Dalton ranch in Texas before flying up to New York to attend a party at the Governor of Vermont’s residence in Montpelier. That, at all times, Ellen worked behind the scenes, packing Clark bags, ironing Clark linen, rearing Clark children. That the first TV arrived in Ardboe in October 1963.

From the collection of documents and correspondence to hand, can Luke deduce how the legal case proceeded?

Yes. The accusation of defamation brought by the Plaintiff (Ellen) against the Defendant (Mulvey) consisted of ‘making and spreading serious, unwarranted and wrong imputations against Ellen O’Brien’s chastity and good name’. In his defence Mulvey denied falsely or maliciously publishing of the Plaintiff that she was unchaste, but admitted that he refused to marry her because of anonymous writings ‘against her chastity’ which he had received and which left him in ‘insufferable doubt’. Ellen’s senior counsel advised serving a notice of trial, but warned there was a risk of proceeding to trial and beating the lodgement of £780 that Mulvey had already made in the Court – a manoeuvre intended to defeat Ellen’s claim. In a character reference, Mrs Clark praised Ellen’s honesty and trustworthiness, stating she was ‘part of this family’ and ‘one of God’s people’. A medical report from Homer B. Goldin, M.D., a gynaecologist and obstetrician of 2088 Park Avenue, New York, stated that Ellen’s abdomen and breasts were free of striae, her pelvic floor was tight, her fundus was small and her hymen was intact, thus confirming that not only was she a virgin but she had never been delivered of a child. On Tuesday, 9 March 1965 the Irish Times published – between a notice of a point-to-point race meeting at Oldtown, Co. Meath and an article suggesting money may become obsolete – a court report entitled ‘Breach Damages for Nurse’ which described Ellen as an Irish nurse working in America and gave an account of the breach of promise and defamation case mentioned in the High Court the day before. The report revealed that the case had been settled on the terms that, as well as a public apology, Maurice Mulvey would pay Ellen O’Brien £1500 damages, £312 expenses and £480 costs.

For an unknown and unmeasured number of minutes he remains seated at the table, physically arrested and emotionally disconcerted by the contents of the files and letters.

Amid the emotional disconcertment, what pleasing patch of reverie does he stray upon?

He recalls how, as a child, he had felt closely connected to the Clark family and had, for a time, believed they were related to his family and could therefore – and did, vicariously – partake of their glamorous lifestyle. The incidental details recorded in Ellen’s letters now evoke a feeling of nostalgia associated with that time. Tonight we had Mr Clark’s law partners and their wives for dinner so I didn’t get to bed until midnight … Mr and Mrs Clark are flying down to the Caribbean & boarding their boat for a month’s cruise … Hubie had four college friends here for the weekend, they acted like a crowd of schoolboys and then they tell me they’re men … I hope Mr Clark will straighten himself out and we can be a happy house again.

Rising and simultaneously pushing back his chair, he inclines his torso, spreads his arms and, with a sweeping motion, gathers the documents into a pile in the centre of the table. He then makes coffee, lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, lifts his eyes to the clock on the wall and reads the time: five minutes past twelve.

The arrival of the noonday demon: the evagatio mentis, the weariness and loathing of life, the torpidity and lethargy that afflicts the minds, bodies and spiritual lives of its victims, alighting just as the sun reaches the highest point in the sky, bringing waves of sloth and sorrow, tedium, idleness and inertness, a soul sickness that caused, in medieval times, the most religious men and women to grow careless, listless and dejected until they raised their eyes in flight from work and gazed sleepily at walls, falling headlong into the paralysing sin of acedia.

Yes. It descends and enters him regularly and not only at noon and not always in its medieval form.

It announces itself with lethargy, torpidity, a wandering mind, thoughts that swing suddenly from the banal to the grandiose, the inflationary, the fantastical, and are frequently punctuated by a mental cataloguing of his own virtues, talents, aptitudes, abilities – all of which, he adduces, have gone entirely unnoticed and unappreciated by others for years (at least since the death of his mother). Remembrance of his virtues, talents and abilities provokes in him a remembrance of the dearth of virtues, talents and abilities in others and a remembrance of prior grudges and grievances directed at those employed in fields as far ranging as agriculture and the arts, and more specifically at those individuals who differ from him ideologically and whose mediocrity enrages him – precisely because they possess no ideological beliefs or stances. Said grievances ferment until they advance with incremental intensity from seething resentment to malevolence to an insatiable desire to see these mediocrities – who are now mortal enemies – vanquished, but not before he mentally enumerates their faults, failings and sins (ignorance, avarice, corruption, deception, cowardice, treachery, crime, cunning, cruelty, mendacity) while simultaneously listing and cursing the culprits – whose range, by the way, extends from the parochial (the town’s supermarket proprietor, butcher, baker, property developer, two county councillors, two TDs) to the national (four government ministers, two ex-Taoisigh, the top brass of the Garda, the top brass at Hawkins House, the majority of priests, bishops and members of religious orders) to the global (the fathers of Western syphilisation and economic imperialism; the fathers of empire and bureaucratic cant; the pope, his cardinals and their yay-saying minions; the CEOs of giant corporations, big pharma, big oil, big capitalism; bigots, holocaust deniers, climate-change deniers, animal experimenters; Russia, China, the UK, the US, the state of Israel, the FBI, the CIA, MI5, Mossad, the 54 countries that supply extraordinary rendition, the multitudinous countries who supply ordinary rendition, the purveyors of FGM, circumcision and gay-bashing, the Charles Taylors, Baby Doc Duvaliers, Jean-Pierre Bembas and others), and whose number now include one Maurice Mulvey, deceased. In continuing frustration and agitation (but in tentative anticipation of a little antidotal schadenfreude), he begins to concoct fitting punishments to be meted out, where possible, by those who have suffered at the hands of the mediocrities. He occasionally idles hours away in such truncated, trancelike states, roused intermittently by a fresh surge of rancour. Then, mentally exhausted, he reaches a point of arrival that has nothing to offer and no path leading forward or back. It is at this point that, depending on the time of day and his fiscal situation, he either (a) surrenders to sleep or (b) opens another bottle of red wine and advances deeper into the evagatio mentis.

What mental attitude – followed by physical action – does he now adopt to fight the demon?

He suppresses the longing to curl foetally on the plum-coloured velvet sofa in the drawing room, resists even the temptation to cross his arms on the table, lay his head down and succumb to the seductive lure of sleep. Instead, after finishing his coffee and turning his body at an angle of approximately one hundred and twenty degrees to the left, he lifts one leaden foot and places it in front of the other and repeats the action until a fine stride is achieved and with such strides he leaves the kitchen, proceeds along the back hall, crosses the red-carpeted front hall and exits the house by the front door.

He opens his mouth wide, lifts his face to the breeze blowing up from the river, feels the reassuring contact of his feet on the ground and the weight of flesh on his bones. He strides at a brisk pace, hands in pockets, head held high, down the avenue, the urge to light a cigarette thwarted by the realisation that his cigarettes are on the kitchen table. Cool fresh air flushes through his lungs. Then, a realisation, a trepidation: that the world is not as it had been this morning and that all that surrounds him – daylight, sky, green lawn, stone house, avenue, lone sycamore, old oaks and beeches, the distant rumble of a lorry, the pebbles resting at the grass verge, the cats prowling, the dog ambling from the yard, the sun about to glare on the glass of the front landing window as it does most days around noon – is not real. And that, if he permits this glancing thought (or realisation or trepidation) to take hold, his whole organism will intuit his fears and he will balk, like a child learning to cycle, and his feet will fail to ferry him and his body will not uphold him.

What dominant thoughts emerge from the riot of all others as he proceeds down the avenue?

That something not visible to him has set the events of the morning in motion. That he has entered a complex maze, a zone of danger. That he is completely alone now, sans father, sans mother, sans sister, sans aunt, sans lover. That he will forever sleep in his own arms.

A morning when he was about three, observing his mother writing a letter at the kitchen table. Sunlight was streaming in the tall window. As she wrote a tear rolled down her face. Then she paused and shook her hand and blue ink fell onto the page and he thought the ink originated in her body and that it possessed some secret precious knowledge concerning his mother. The notion formed in him that any knowledge that is secret or precious or worth having passes through us in this fashion. A short time afterwards he learned to read and write and for some time after that he would sit at the kitchen table on the chair his mother had sat on and imagine the words in size and shape he supposed his mother had written that morning and strive to recreate them on his own page. He would look out and see the sycamore tree on the lawn and his father’s Hereford cows in the field beyond the lawn, and though he did not look beyond the field at the line of trees on the river bank or at the stepped roofs of the town or the church steeple or the river itself, he was aware of them there in the periphery of his vision as they had been in the periphery of his mother’s vision, and he had the sense that they – and the light coming in the window and the table and chairs and dresser and the air and atmosphere around her in the kitchen, and even his own presence – had flowed into his mother and mingled inside her and were constituent parts in the creation of her words. He cannot remember what, if anything, he produced, but when he sat there and strove to recreate her words, he felt, for a few moments, intense happiness, that he was in the glowing presence of his mother, a far warmer and more glowing presence than was ever afforded him in her actual presence. With only the vaguest sense of what he was after all his life, he now realises it is those mysterious words that came out of his mother’s body onto the page and the ensuing feeling that the image of her that morning engendered that he has always hankered after, and he thinks this image of his mother in the window light has always existed in his mind as an enduring image of absence.

His life rewound, run backwards. This existence now a subset of a larger hypothetical existence containing a house with an avenue and painted gates and a farm with tilled fields. A teeming house – an abode of bliss, a hypothetical marriage now unwound, hypothetical children running backwards/upwards/downwards on non-hypothetical stairs, going in and out of non-hypothetical rooms and cars and cots and beds, shrinking in size and retreating to toddlerhood, then infancy, then being packed back inside their hypothetical mother’s womb, then said mother retreating down the avenue, back along the marriage years to the wedding, to her first appearance behind the windscreen of a little yellow car bouncing up the avenue. Other hypotheticals rewound, undone: the baby names Lara (originating in Larissa, daughter of Pelasgus, mortal princess of Argos, a moon orbiting Neptune) and Clara (from D.H. Lawrence), and Andrew and David (conveying refinement and culture); the dog’s name Athos, loyal pet of Rudolph Bloom, Queens Hotel, Ennis; the family holidays, the people-carrier, the social life, the PT meetings, the teenage angst, the career choices – it is surely environmentalists, civil rights lawyers, MSF doctors he would engender. They would be tall. One might be gay … But, alas, all hope is gone now. This is the end of hope.

Innocent, yes, but the good is gone now. The damage is done. It was done fifty years ago and lay there waiting for them, like a snare. All that remains now is nostalgia for a lost future.

He tries to calculate his exact age in days. With the primary operation (365 × 34) demanding more concentration than he is willing to muster up, he rounds the three-hundred-and-sixty-five upwards and the thirty-four downwards, and instantly arrives at a figure of twelve thousand. He knows Ellen for approximately twelve thousand days.

Knowing Ruth for thirty days. During which they spent three overnights together (approximately 18 hours × 3), also parts of two Fridays (approximately 4 hours × 2), parts of three Saturdays (approximately 7 hours × 3), parts of four Sundays (approximately 6 hours × 4), which, in addition to talking on average 1.5 hours on the phone per night Mon–Thurs for four weeks, amounts to 131 hours, approximately, spent in each other’s company.

He has to hunt Paddy back up the avenue. After waving his arms and shouting, the dog, alarmed, turns and trots back towards the house. Quickening his pace Luke passes between the piers and strides along the road towards the bridge.

The sound of a horse pissing. A bay of approximately fourteen hands high stands inside the ditch, the tail held gracefully aloft as the hot stream falls heavily on the ground, hard after the dry summer to date. The rest of the horse – the head, the long pale face – remains motionless, in the manner of a sleeping horse. He thinks of the horses that served the farm before his time, then makes a mental list of the horse categories that have served man since time immemorial: farm horses, transport horses, war horses, ranch horses, race horses, wagon horses, circus horses, police horses, therapy horses, meat horses. He thinks of the horse latitudes, the equine graveyard somewhere in the calm, subtropical Pacific where, on long voyages to the colonies, horses were thrown overboard to lighten the load and save on water.

The glassy light of the river beyond the horse. The dark woods beyond the river. The grey rooftops beyond the woods. The blue-grey sky beyond the rooftops.

Bioacoustics. The sound world of living things, the song of trees and leaves, the syllables of rain. The vibrations he felt in the air on the riverbank one morning when he was ten, different from the vibrations on the lawn or in the yard or in the fields, different from those among humans or animals or buildings. Notes, softly rolling emanations, faintly whispering and falling from the branches and drifting over the water towards him, containing the measure and memory of trees and river, inseparable from each other for eons. Invisible spores, particles and vapours coalescing and swelling and rising in mist above the forest canopy and tumbling and rolling and frolicking in a joyousness invisible to all but him as he dissolved into the pulse of time and space and trees and river that morning.

On certain late nights, alone, with the assistance of smooth jazz and approximately three glasses of red wine, a similar spiritual communion and exultation of the soul is experienced. On certain mornings, noons and nights, watching from the landing window as tricks of light and perspective conjure rainbows, fogbows, dawn spectres, white-outs, irradiated illusions brought on by snow, mist, cloud, distance, the blue hills of childhood, the imagined eyes of creatures looking out from the dark of woodlands. Transfixed, alert to every sound and movement, he is convinced in those moments that everything is connected and everything – every birdsong, every cloud scud, every movement of leaf or twig or branch – carries within it a cosmic message.

The day when he’ll be gone from here. The house and land and river will still exist. Ivy will snarl over the front door, over gutters and downpipes, creeping across windowpanes. Slates will be missing, chimney pots collapsed. Musty old clothes in wardrobes, old sweet papers under beds. His Aussie niece or nephew or some hired hand will enter the rooms, dismantle beds and chandeliers, pack up the detritus of his life and of those that went before him and all the things he values and enjoys and are meaningful to him will be disposed of, and his time spent with them will be of no avail to him or to them. Objects will be wrenched from each other – cups separated from dressers, cutlery from drawers, pillows from mattresses, his boots parted from his knitted socks.

At approximately three-quarters of the way up the avenue, under a beech tree, he stops, opens his fly and, letting out a low moan of relief, he urinates in a hot steady stream.

The male Muslim practice of sitting down while peeing as extolled to him by Rachid, the twenty-eight-year-old Libyan IT engineer he met in the Front Lounge bar one Saturday night in June 2007, and who, on three occasions, he kissed and fondled (and only kissed and fondled) in his (Rachid’s) apartment in Monkstown, Rachid being a semi-celibate, fully conflicted gay man. Luke had assumed the sitting-while-pissing was practised out of consideration for women but learned that the practice is intended to safeguard men from urine soiling, the smallest trace of urine on the person or clothing of a Muslim being, according to the hadith of the prophet Muhammad, one of the greatest impediments to entering Heaven. No more hygienic a man than Rachid has Luke ever known.

Yes. Rachid’s shyness and body modesty combined with (a) Luke’s reluctance to cause embarrassment and (b) the mental image of the infant Rachid’s genital mutilation prevented him from further enquiry or comment. In a light-hearted discussion on the topic weeks later he informed Rachid that the divine prepuce, aka the carnal bridal ring of the holy Catholic apostolic church, which was preserved in the village of Calcata near Rome for centuries, went missing in 1983.

Yes. From the moment, in Rachid’s apartment, he caught a glimpse of him through a half-open door, praying. With his pure heart, simple truths and naïve beliefs he reminded Luke of no one more than Josie. I could convert to Islam, he offered, if it helps? He meant: if it helped Rachid to love him. Dear Luke, he replied, in your heart you are already Muslim, insha’Allah. Anyway, he said, you would be reverting, not converting – reverting to the original state to which your soul was destined. Luke was a little in love with Islam too. For some time after he ceased seeing Rachid he continued the practice of sitting while urinating.

The practice of Zakat, the obligation to give ten per cent of one’s wealth to the poor. The practice of eating only with the right hand, and using the left only to clean oneself in the toilet (this too he practised until he didn’t). The belief that there are a hundred names for God; that if you loan to Allah a beautiful loan He will return it tenfold; that the reason birds sing is to praise Allah. The story concerning Muhammad’s kindness to animals as relayed by Leopold Bloom when he sees a tabby on a windowsill on Cumberland Street: the prophet, on finding a cat asleep on his mantle, cut a piece off the garment so as not to disturb the sleeping cat. The story concerning Muhammad’s kindness to his fellow man as relayed to Luke by Rachid: every day, for years, Muhammad’s neighbours dumped their rubbish outside his door, and every day Muhammad disposed of it without complaint. Then one day, finding no rubbish outside his door, Muhammad ran, worried, to the neighbours’ door, thinking they must be ill. Rachid told a story about himself, too: whenever he received sweets from his father as a small boy, he ate half of them and put the other half aside for Allah.

To the cracks and fissures on the east-facing wall of the house. To the sprigs of wild rocket sprouting at intervals from these new cracks and fissures.

Concern that the appearance of these new cracks is evidence that the foundation of the house has been compromised as a result of his own actions six summers ago.

Josie died. In the days following her funeral Luke investigated the enigma of the partly concealed Georgian windows at the lower-ground level of the house. With no other evidence of the existence of a basement – no door or stairway or other customary means of access to a basement – these windows had always baffled him. His hunch was that during construction of the house in the 1830s, the basement area was never fully dug out and cleared of earth, but was left as it was, incomplete.

Yes. The day after Josie’s funeral he descended the stone steps that led from the back door down to garden level and with a pick-axe and sledgehammer he broke open a hole in the wall under one of the mysterious windows, then gouged at the wall around the window, loosened the frame and, as night fell, removed the sash window in two sections. Inside, he found a high bank of earth. On the second day he dug like a madman. With shovel, spade and wheelbarrow, blood, sweat and tears, and Josie always on his mind, he carved a path into the bank of earth and dug through the dark centre of the house until he could go no further. On the third day he hired a mini-digger and a driver and two local lads from the town and they brought out earth and dislodged stones that were packed hard to almost ceiling height, and for the first time in one hundred and seventy years, daylight, fresh air and human activity entered those dark musty chambers. Every day they dug and filled wheelbarrows and brought out earth and, slowly, three large cave-like rooms with flagstone floors and load-bearing walls revealed themselves. In the evenings, dirty, sweaty and with aching bones, Luke and the men sat out on the front lawn drinking beer and eating supermarket pizza dickied up with extra cheese and onions by his mother and served on a wooden chopping board. On Saturdays and Sundays he toiled alone, stripped to the waist, maniacal in his grief. At night, his mind raced with plans and high hopes for this newly discovered space – the hosting of weddings, literary festivals, yoga weekends, retreats. Occasionally, niggling worries that he had not engaged an engineer to verify the safety of the structure surfaced. One night, when the work was complete and the space cleaned, he brought down a kitchen chair and a power cable and strung up lights and sat in the underground cave watching his shadow dance on the walls.

The image of his child-aunt Una in a white dress and veil on the occasion of her First Holy Communion in 1938, the photograph of which he found in an envelope in the furthest corner of the dark, angled, low-ceiling space under the stairs on the morning he commenced work on the basement. Unsmiling, with full lips and an intense determined gaze (of what? – holiness or defiance or knowledge?), her pale wide face still haunts him.

What other remnants of this child-aunt did he find under the stairs on that morning six years ago?

Her school satchel, which, after seventy years in the dark, he brought out into the hall light. Fashioned from recycled leather, as evidenced by the awl-bored holes of previous stitching, it had a rudimentary metal buckle and a crude leather tab sewn on with crooked stitches. Old mould stains had accumulated on the stiff unforgiving leather. He had an image of her father, perhaps, late at night under candlelight, working on the satchel, or the local cobbler, surgeon to old shoes and satchels, pushing a needle through the tough leather, pricking and prodding his fingertips, going to the bone. There, waiting for her on the kitchen table the next morning, all hers. When he opened the rusting buckle that day, minute ferrous flakes fell on the carpet. A silence of pity fell on him. He lifted out the contents – books, copybooks, a pink pencil stump, the point roughly pared with a knife or blade. He read the titles. Léightheoirí Proinnias Naomhtha, An Dreoilín; Drámaí Scol, Íosogán, Pádraig Mac Piarrais; Plain Song for Schools, Part Two; Grammar; Stair na hÉireann; Tír-eolas na hÉireann; Brown & Nolan’s No. B School Jotter; The ‘Eclipse’ Exercise Book with the name ‘Una O’Brien’ and a date, 24.10.40, on the perforated line at the bottom. A scrapbook covered in embossed wallpaper contained pieces of fabric, sewing samples displaying the hemming stitch, top-stitch, buttonholes, each sample labelled and dated from 13 June 1940 to 11 December 1940.

At the realisation that hers – his child-aunt’s – were probably the last hands that touched those pages. That she had probably arrived home from school on the day of the Christmas holidays in December 1940, and flung the satchel under the stairs, not needing it again until a few weeks later. Molecules of her sweat, her touch DNA, still detectable on the strap.

He leafed through a mix of essays, sums, grammar exercises and a night-time prayer in the jotter. Neatly written joined handwriting, the capital letters extending to the top line, the ticks and corrections marked up in a teacher’s red pen, now faded to pink. Essay titles, in chronological order: The Wood in Winter, St Rita, Sun Down, Lourdes and Bernadette, History of the Danes, Oíche Shamhna, Rubber, Eight Sentences on Diarmuid. In the copybook, a mix of English, Irish and geography exercises: Meaning of the poem ‘Adare’; Counties of Ireland, Lessons We Learned, Ports of Ireland, Pattern Day; an Irish grammar exercise on the Tuiseal Ginideach; a letter to a friend dated 5 December 1940; a second essay on Winter.

That she was a child of earnestness, innocence, sincerity, obedience, compliance, adherence to religious practice; one who possessed an average intelligence and a certain formality; a neat handwriter.

19 December: Winter is the saddest season of the year because its birds are gone to distant countries at the most time we want them. The woods in Clonduff look very dreary because their beautiful clothes are withered and they are cold and bear and always shivering.

20 December: Mary Mother, fold me tight, In your arms throughout the night. Guide me on my shadowed way; Shield me till the dawn of day. Guide me till the dark is past. Bring me to God’s home at last. Amen.

The startling coincidence that his child-aunt Una and his beloved James Joyce both departed this world in January 1941, Una at approximately 11 a.m. GMT (assuming death occurred on impact) on the first day of the month, James at 2.15 a.m. CET on the thirteenth day of the month; Una in west Waterford, James in the Schwesternhaus vom Roten Kreuz in Zurich; their departures separated by eleven days, fifteen hours and fifteen minutes and by a distance of 1289 kilometres over land and sea. The further realisation – accompanied by a racing heart – that at the approximate time his child-aunt was penning those final exercises in her jotter Joyce had recently arrived in Zurich and installed his little family in the Hôtel Pension Delphin, sick and broken and preoccupied with Lucia, spending the days before Christmas wandering in the snow along the Zurichsee or watching the water at the confluence of the Sihl and Limmat rivers. Both man and child oblivious to the disaster that was floating close. Luke is confounded that, despite the innumerable occasions that the words ‘January 1941’ crossed his mind and tongue throughout his life, he had, until this very moment, failed to notice this coincidence.

Two souls alighting from two recently rendered unconscious temporal abodes, one situated at the bottom of a brick-walled well, the other on a bed in a dimly lit hospital ward, one prone, the other supine. Each soul then ascending the stratospheres, moving through dark space, in and out among the cold stars, passing each other at intervals until Joyce’s soul, moved by curiosity and a vague memory of other small souls, reaches out to the little girl and, hand in hand, they roam the heavens, in among the Moons of Jupiter, over the Rings of Saturn and when they orbit planet Earth he points at the dot that is Dublin and tells her of its beauty and eccentricities and he dances a little jig and sings a little ditty and she laughs till she cries at his quirks and his quarks and his puns.

The grave at Fluntern. The white skin. The darkness within. The military blood. The spirochete still at last.

Brian Lynch, stepping up into the cab of the John Deere in the adjoining field, his hand in descent following a salute.

He moves his head and body ninety degrees to the left and raises his hand in a reciprocal gesture, the glimpse of Brian Lynch reminding him of his attractiveness and causing him to surmise that if he, Luke, were a woman, he would surely give thought to the handsome babies Brian would sire, and with this thought he then recalls the occasion, years ago, when Brian and his father brought a maiden heifer over to their yard to be serviced by their bull, aka the Master, and the two young boys stood watching as the Master was led into the pen and sniffed around the heifer for several minutes until finally he mounted her, at which point Luke’s father reached in and with his bare hand guided the Master’s pizzle into the heifer. Baculum baculorum!

No, the call goes to her mailbox. He listens to her voice, then hangs up, his heart pounding, his hand trembling, a thousand thoughts and feelings swarming his mind.

Confused, conflicting, oscillating thoughts. He wants to see her. He does not want to see her. He wants to talk to her. He does not want to talk to her. He wants to tell her everything. He wants to tell her nothing. He loves her. He doesn’t know her. He knows her thirty days. He knows her one hundred and thirty-one hours.

He puts the phone in his pocket, sits on the green velvet chaise longue, removes his shoes, reclines his back and stares at the framed picture on the opposite wall above the fireplace, judging – not for the first time – the frame too narrow for the picture.

In a dark, gloomy, navy-blue watery underworld a frogman is suspended in a diagonally descending diving position.

Luke bought the etching, entitled Diving for Pearls, at a charity art exhibition in the hospice in Harold’s Cross on his way home from work on 5 December 2004. Cost, remembered: €170. Artist’s name forgotten, but handwritten on a label stuck to the back of the picture.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife that he once came upon in a book on (mostly lesbian) Shunga in Watkins Books on Cecil Court in London. The image was of a woman in a sexual pose with two octopuses, a daddy octopus and a son octopus, the daddy performing cunnilingus on the woman and the son fondling her mouth and nipple. Tentacles all over her body, the mollusc sucker’s mouth buried in her furry vulva, the woman apparently in raptures. Intelligent creatures, octopuses, they can think for themselves. Tentacle touch must be delicious for a woman. All touch is delicious.

He rises, walks along the back hall into the kitchen, begins to pack the letters and files into the plastic bag. He pauses mid-task, glances across the room at the empty fireplace, then completes the task and leaves the bag of files on the floor, propped against the wall. He empties the coffee pot, refills it and puts it on the hob to brew.

It is a Bialetti Rainbow 3-cup in light blue (with an accumulation of coffee stains running vertically from the lid downwards), a gift from Ruth Mulvey after the glass beaker of his previous cafetiere broke, purchased on Thursday, 28 June in TK Maxx, Cornmarket Street, Cork.

In a town with a population of 759, of unknown male/female ratio, what were the chances that he and she would meet and, worse, be unknown to each other up to then and, worse still, fall in love? What were the chances? But the thing about chance that he has always known – chance or risk or probability – is its absolute truth. Truth is told clearly in probability and the beauty of that truth is that it is logical. Why, given all the possibilities, only one outcome actually happens? But a thing only needs to happen once to prove probability. In the very long run, everything happens, everything is inevitable. Why are we surprised by this?

He lifts the plastic bag containing the files onto the table, selects four items (the notice of motion, one anonymous letter, the gynaecologist’s report and the newspaper clipping) and photographs them with his phone camera. He brings his phone to his study down the hall, uploads the photographs to his laptop, opens his Gmail and composes an email to Ruth Mulvey:

I tried to call you earlier. I discovered today that your father was once engaged to Ellen. He broke off the engagement and humiliated her by making false accusations against her and spreading lies. He said he had received anonymous letters claiming she had a child in America. She had no option but to take him to court to clear her name.

I didn’t believe Ellen at first. It seemed too far-fetched. But she showed me the legal files – the letters, the court documents, the newspaper reports from March 1965. Ellen O’Brien, Ardboe House, Clonduff is the Plaintiff, and your father, Maurice Mulvey, Curraboy, Clonduff is the named Defendant. I have them here. I’ll photograph and attach some for you. There’s no doubting the truth of all this.

Needless to say, I knew nothing, and I’m assuming you didn’t either and this will floor you as much as it has me.

Ellen is very distressed. My heart is breaking thinking of all she has suffered. Her whole life was blighted as a result of what happened. There are probably still people around who believe the lies he told about her.

She wants me to stop seeing you. Please do not think I am doing this lightly. This is an awful mess. My heart is doubly breaking. But I have to think about Ellen. She’s old and she has only me. I’m sorry. I cannot abandon her. I hope you understand.

A doubt that has assailed him almost every day in recent weeks: that, despite her best intentions and earnest efforts, Ruth has had great difficulty understanding and accepting his sexuality, and this problem would, he fears, eventually come between them.

That, even if he wanted to continue with Ruth, and even if Ellen gave the relationship her blessing, this revelation of her father’s mistreatment of Ellen would always cast a shadow on the union; it would always be the elephant in the room.

It does not. If, in his core, he believed that remaining with Ruth was the right thing to do, nothing would dissuade him otherwise – certainly not the promise of money or property. He is doing what his conscience can tolerate. The prospect of inflicting further pain on his aunt is unconscionable.

He checks it for mistakes, attaches the four photographs, hits ‘Send’, logs out of his Gmail account, closes his laptop and returns to the kitchen and his coffee.

The night she knelt on his bed and held his head in her hands like a globe, like Eliot’s doctor, and announced she would unkink the brain waves and cure his sadness. Listen, listen, she pleaded, you see yourself as a victim, a tragic victim, glittering even … He clung to her, crying, and then made love to her and went far inside her and she begged him to go deeper and, no longer afraid of injuring her, he went deep in mind and body, among crowded organ cavities, past the contours of her lungs and liver, and, shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection. The next morning at dawn they walked on the riverbank in silence. Moving under low branches in the peace of the river, they were joined in perfect captivity. No needs or wants or musts, the feeling that within those moments, in the drift of that silence, was held all of eternity. Afterwards when the other world returned and birds came out and he was stirred out of the trance, vapour rose from the surface of the water and small waves lolled at his feet and without ever saying a word they knew they had been party to something that neither could name.

Awake at night tormented by the suffering of laboratory animals. Walking into the inner yard of a flats complex in the north inner city, past boarded-up windows with graffiti, climbing a stairwell strewn with litter and used syringes and stinking of urine. Standing, at dawn, at a window high up in the penthouse suite of the Coombe Hospital looking out over the city’s rooftops to the Dublin mountains with the sun rising into a clear blue sky, thinking of her husband driving home through the quiet streets, stopping at the lights, entering their empty house, as the little corpse she gave birth to the night before lay in a fridge somewhere in the hospital. At her desk now, this minute, a slight worry starting to form, a vague intuition that something is wrong.

All his life until her death he and Josie picked up the tiny vibrations of each other’s mind. A streaming across, mutual phase locking, beautiful economic laziness, entrainment. The synchronisation of an organism (Josie to Luke) to an external rhythm (Luke to Josie). Biomusicology. Chronobiology. He knows that if you mount two clock pendulums side by side on a wall, they’ll pick up the tiny vibrations of each other transmitted through the wall and their swings will gradually synchronize because matter is lazy and it takes less energy to pulse in synch than in opposition. He and Josie pulsed in synch, oscillated inside each other’s psychic sphere, vibrated rhythmically until their neural pathways and circadian systems aligned and their cellular, sub-cellular, molecular, atomic and sub-atomic frequencies were synchronised. If he had been a woman he’s certain their menstrual cycles would have aligned.

That on 1 January 1941, at the age of two years and three months, having in all likelihood witnessed the fall of her older sister down the well, she suffered a catastrophic rupture to her tender psyche which rendered her mute for the following two years until one day, when her mother ordered her to take off her wet clothes and dry them by the fire, an emphatic No sprang from her tongue. The rupture, exacerbated by the sudden departure of her father six months later on 16 June 1941, is proof positive to Luke how malleable human nature is during those sensitive moments that ethnologists call ‘points of imprint vulnerability’ and may have occasioned the acquisition of, or reversion to, primitive senses or pre-natal faculties (akin to those of animals) that compensated for the damage to the normal faculties and enabled her, Josie, to commune with birds.

Alive, she had been his mainstay. Now he imagines her delicate spirit adrift around him, beyond his view, in an alternative parallel universe suffused with subtle bodies. At unguarded moments he longs for her proximity, tries to tune into her frequency or into whatever of her has endured beyond physical death.

Though he has a liking for Catholic doxology and is fond of Stephen Dedalus’s assertion that God is a shout in the street and the cheer of a goal scored, he is averse to the teachings and doctrines of all organised religions. However, there was never a time when he was not conscious of eternity, of something on-going – not so much a corporeal as a psychic continuation in some afterlife or aftermath of this existence. He thinks some archetypal image of eternity is present in him – in all souls – and has been from the beginning of time and that at death he will shrug off this physical form but leave something behind: his entelechia.

He was only ever present at one passing: Josie’s. She expired quietly, each breath growing slower and shallower than the previous until they petered out and she was gone, this memory of her gentle death a comfort always, especially in light of the teachings of Islam – the credo which declaims the boldest dogma and offers the most graphic description of dying (and which, having been described in great awe and detail by Rachid, is the easiest to recall). In Islam the angel of death arrives and draws the soul out of the mouth, dragging it up through the body from the soles of the feet. Depending on the life lived and the deeds done by that individual, the evacuation of the soul will either be smooth and painless or a terrible sight to behold (gagging, retching, heaving, choking). Luke suspects the hour of our death is foreknown, inscribed on our timeline and waiting for us in everything connected to us – like a death notice or a pre-prepared obit embedded in every moment and object of our lives: in our tears, in the clothes we wear, in the rooms we sleep in, on the food set before us, in the ovaries, even, of our foremothers. And everything, with the exception of our own rational minds, implicitly ‘knows’ this. But by some merciful mechanism, the hour of our extinction – or extension – is unknown to us.

It is not a theory but a belief, one he finds imaginatively and figuratively compelling but regrets that (a) it is attached to a plethora of primitive religious beliefs and practices which – like all religions – have more social, cultural and historical bases than spiritual ones and (b) it is interpreted by earnest devout Muslims in a literal rather than in a symbolic sense, thus causing great anticipatory fear and unnecessary distress around death beds.

An image of his aunt as he left her this morning. The image of her sitting in the room all day, slowly passing each hour. The thought of all the hours and all the days and all the years that he was unaware of her suffering.

A New York street on a May morning, a woman clutching a piece of paper on which is scribbled an address, a Park Avenue doorman directing her to the elevator and the fifth-floor suite of rooms. A tall, grey-haired patrician in a white coat. Her hush-dark fallopian tubes, her tender-pink womb in eternal waiting. The word intact.

He tries, but is unable to form a picture of the physical man. A dark shadowy figure, like a character in a noir film, flits in and out of his consciousness, sometimes with Ellen close by. Then, remembering her suffering, he is usurped by a flood of rage. It is, he thinks, the epitome of evil to do what Mulvey did. He is baffled at how any man could do such a thing – what could drive a man to behave like that? Pure innate evil? Or the imp of the perverse? No, pure evil.

Because he is a sinner, and it was the sinner, the psychology of sinners and the spread of darkness in the human soul that interested Dostoevsky. That interests Luke too, nothing human being alien.

Does this mean Luke is attempting to understand or even forgive Maurice Mulvey – wasn’t Raskolnikov driven by the imp?

There is no comparison. Raskolnikov committed murder. But Raskolnikov was driven by hunger and poverty and his guilt sent him into a tormented state, and eventually he confessed his crime. Mulvey was never in such dire circumstances, nor did he ever confess his crime. If he had doubts or misgivings about the impending marriage he could simply have called it off and walked away. And, judging by the short time it took him to find a replacement bride, he wasn’t too troubled or guilt-ridden. No agenbite of inwit. As for the imp … This is the only mitigating circumstance Luke might allow: that Mulvey’s behaviour might have been the result of a deterioration of the cognitive control network in the lateral prefrontal cortex – the imp resides in the orbitofrontal cortex. But Luke doubts this was the case – there appears to be no evidence, either before or after his crime, of the usual display of disinhibited behaviours typically associated with the imp. As for forgiveness, it is not for Luke to forgive.

The sins of the father. The stain in the biology, in the blood. She herself may be entirely good and pure of heart – he thinks she is. But what of her inheritance? What if a genetic predisposition for cruelty exists in mankind – some as yet unidentified genetic variant in a particular enzyme, that, combined with certain environmental factors, could trigger the cruelty? She might be a carrier. It might skip a generation, like red hair and twins, or it might remain latent for ever. But he would always be afraid. In the furthest, darkest corner of his mind he would be waiting for the streak of cruelty to rear its head – if not in her, then in their offspring. He might be a carrier himself, the flawed pedigree inherited from the grandfather of unknown provenance who came over the mountains from Tipperary, a man who might have been as great – or greater – a liar and deceiver as Mossie Mulvey. What then? Her cruel gene in connunctio with his cruel gene. He might engender liars and thieves and frauds. He might bear a daughter who, one day, would turn on him and accuse him of the most heinous crimes against her.

The preparation of the evening meal, the drawing out of a cork from the neck of a bottle, the light fading, the cat at his feet, the evening his own as he cooks, eats, drinks and reads in the all-consuming, immersive manner of his youth.

He extinguishes his cigarette in the ashtray, crosses the kitchen to the fridge, audits its contents: the remains of a 254g block of Kerrygold butter in its ragged wrapper; a block of Dubliner white cheddar, unopened; three lamb chops in a white plastic bag; three Portobello mushrooms; two cooked potatoes; a large tub of out-of-date Greek yogurt; five slices of granary bread; half a loaf of McCambridge’s wholemeal bread; in the salad box: a half bag of withered rocket leaves, three carrots, seven Piccolo tomatoes, half a cucumber, three wilted scallions, one red pepper, scraps of blackened leaves and sprigs, several spots of mould; on the door shelves: one unopened litre of milk, three eggs, a half-empty jar of Bonne Maman strawberry jam, an assortment of plastic bottles and glass jars containing salad dressings, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard; a bottle of Coca-Cola, three-quarters full. He closes the fridge, opens the lower-right press of the waxed pine dresser, audits the alcohol: a bottle of Tempranillo, a bottle of Merlot, a half bottle of Jameson whiskey, a small bottle of Southern Comfort, two-thirds full.

A gentler sensory experience on the palate, a more fitting and sublime accompaniment to food, a wider and more varied availability of product, a more affordable cost, the aesthetic superiority of the receptacle – stemmed glass versus tumbler; a preference, on his part, for the refracted glow of purple over the refracted glow of amber through glass, the olfactory delights of aromatic oak, berry, cinnamon; the interesting and imminently more readable bottle labels; the voluminous quantity that can be consumed relative to its intoxicating effects thereby increasing the pleasure ratio; the gentler and more gradual slide towards intoxication, the lower alcoholic strength accounting for a lower gradation of hangover and thenceforth a lower level and intensity of hallucinatory and paranoiac thoughts in the days following a binge.

At 3.05 p.m., carrying a mug of sweet milky tea and two slices of toasted McCambridge’s wholemeal bread topped with Dubliner cheddar, a sliced tomato and a pinch of salt, he re-enters the study, and, with no particular task or strategy in mind and with minimum awareness of the passage of time, a total of two hours and forty-four minutes pass before he exits the room again.

Thirteen by twenty-one feet long, height unknown, but adhering to the Golden Ratio; walls painted in Farrow & Ball’s Dix Blue, an area of damp visible on the top left corner under the cornice; directly opposite the door one twelve-paned Georgian window faces east; under the window a white double radiator; a Persian rug, predominantly red in colour but now faded and threadbare in patches, covers two-thirds of the floor, the remaining sixteen-inch-wide exposed border at the edge is painted in black; from the ceiling rose hangs a twelve-candle Waterford Crystal chandelier with eight candle bulbs inserted, purchased along with four other chandeliers as ‘seconds’ from the liquidation sale at the Waterford Crystal factory following the closure of the plant in May 2005 (the imperfections caused by the entrapment of air bubbles during the blowing process are barely visible); on the right wall, centred: a black cast-iron fireplace surrounded by hand-painted tiles depicting the god Apollo driving a herd of cows backwards; covering almost the entire left wall: four tightly stocked floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves bought from a salvage yard in Cork city; positioned directly in front of the window: a large oak office desk with a small brass plate stamped with the manufacturer’s name, location and date attached to the desk’s underside, purchased at the liquidation sale of the Waterford Crystal factory; to the left of the desk a grey, metal, four-drawer filing cabinet with a small key inserted in the lock of the topmost drawer; to the right of the desk two further wooden bookshelves, set into the alcove to the left of the fireplace. On the desk a black Toshiba laptop, a brown glass ashtray full to the brim with cigarette butts and ash, a black mug emblazoned with two Joshua trees and the words ‘Mazatlan, Mexico’ – a gift from a Belvedere pupil and now a receptacle for pens, pencils, coloured markers, a scissor, ruler and elastic bands; a spiral-bound notebook on whose first page is handwritten a To Do list (bank, accounts balancing, vet, ideas of making money); at the centre of the desk, propped open on a wooden bookstand: a Penguin edition (1992) of Ulysses with an introduction by Declan Kiberd and the cover showing a photograph of the Martello Tower at Sandycove overlaid with two excerpts – the novel’s opening lines presenting stately, plump Buck Mulligan and the closing from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and in the air surrounding it the ineluctable modality of the invisible.

From the rug underfoot: a memory from childhood of entering this room after his Saturday evening bath wearing only his underpants, then lying belly-down on the rug and reading The Red Balloon. From the sight of the filing cabinet: the occasion of the reading of his father’s will (a copy of which now lies, along with a copy of Ellen’s will, in the second drawer of the filing cabinet) the day after his burial, in the presence of his mother, Lucy, Josie, Ellen and the family solicitor Anthony J. Flynn. From the wall of books: a mild, gentle breeze of recognition, an easeful presence, the comfort of knowing that the characters who once provided rare fellowship and evoked in him deep sorrow, soaring raptures and some of the sublimest moments of his life to date, are still there where he left them and, for an instant, he still finds it hard to conceive that these characters are without individual agency.

In the two uppermost drawers: suspension files holding bank statements, utility bills, receipts, miscellaneous legal documents, tax returns, land leasing contracts with Jim Lynch stretching back over fourteen years, copies of forestry contracts, correspondence and grant applications relating to Coillte and Coillte information booklets on forestry. In the third drawer: further miscellaneous legal documents and solicitors’ letters pertaining to his father’s will, the sale of the milk quota in 2001, two bank loans; the deeds of the house, various family members’ birth and death certs, two pages, stapled, downloaded from Griffith’s Valuation 1868, Boundary and Land Valuation of Ireland; a black velvet case containing his father’s gold pocket-watch; four stapled pages of an article entitled ‘The Biological Evidence of River Capture’ downloaded from JSTOR and originally published in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society Vol. 37, No. 3 (1905). In the fourth and bottom drawer: a large lever-arch file subdivided with orange, green and blue card dividers titled Fiction, Poetry, Drama, each section containing handwritten lecture notes from his English degree courses at University College Dublin; three orange card folders containing lesson plans devised during his first year of teaching at Belvedere College: miscellaneous notes on miscellaneous writers and poets including Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Kavanagh, Plath, Bishop.

They contain the records of the previous proprietors of Ardboe House and lands which the O’Brien family has now occupied for three generations.

At the time of valuation in the 1860s a Mr Matthew Wheeler was leasing this property from Sir Philip Chearnley of the nearby Saltertown House when it was valued at £28. Previously the site of Ardboe Castle (the ruins of which lie in the south-western corner of Luke’s land), this land formerly belonged to the Knights Templar, who had an outpost a few miles downriver at Templemichael and were stationed at Rhincrew. There is no mention of Luke’s grandfather and namesake, Luke O’Brien, who bought – or, at any rate, came into possession of – the land and house in 1928, having relocated from the larger property and lands a mile downriver at Coole Quay (a wedding gift from his in-laws), the site of the original old ford where St Fachtna crossed the river on his pilgrimage to Doonbeg.

Before sitting at the desk he makes room for the plate and the mug by sliding the laptop to the right and moving the bookstand to the top left corner. He sits and eats the laden bread, oblivious to the crumbs and the corner of brittle crust that drop to the plate. He drinks the tea until there remains approximately three teaspoons in the bottom of the mug, a habit he inherited from his father who believed that dust, dirt, sand, sediment and particles of other unknown matter sank and accumulated at the bottom of liquid receptacles such as buckets, milk jugs, tea cups, drinking glasses, etc., an opinion with which Luke the son concurs. The son consubstantial with the father.

List the books as they are arranged, left to right, on the two shelves immediately to the right of his desk.

The sex scenes in Atomised. The soap ingredients listed on the soap-wrapper in Elizabeth Costello: ‘Treblinka – 100% human stearate’. The say, say, say scene in Housekeeping where the long-submerged train leaps back up out of Lake Fingerbone and the resurrected passengers disembark at the station and walk home, calm and serene, to their lunch. The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn in ‘The Broken Tower’. The trapped rats in their death throes gnashing their teeth and staring into the abyss in The Lord Chandos Letter. The discovery in The Illustrated Guide to the Sullane and Ardglass that the cherry was first domesticated less than a mile away in Norristown Castle. That said castle was home to the aristocratic healer of scrofula, Valentine Greatrakes, born on 14 February 1628, grandson of Sir Edward Harris, the 2nd Justice of the King’s Bench in Ireland. That said scrofula healer (and now he recalls that a slut in Nighttown combs the tats from the hair of a scrofulous child) spent a year in contemplation in Ardboe Castle, and was a lieutenant in Cromwell’s army before giving everything up – not unlike the Buddha – to roam the countryside laying hands on the sick and curing the afflicted. That the pile of stones comprising the remains of Norristown Castle (why Hyman described them as ‘a curious ruin’ is a mystery to Luke) lies in a field equidistant from the south-eastern boundary of Luke’s land and Coole Quay. And tucked in among the details of the landed gentry and their family marriages, the coincidental discovery that the author of the guide, Rev. Samuel Hyman, was himself a grandson of Valentine Greatrakes. And the further coincidental discovery that Richie Musgrove, the flash Harry with the sports car who had once dated Luke’s Dublin cousin Alva O’Leary, is descended from the ancient knightly family of Musgrove whose seat was three miles away at Coolderry and who is, most likely, the grandson of Sir Richard Musgrove, High Commissioner to the Kingdom of Iraq from 1923 to 1929.

From a seated position and looking through the pane of glass at the intersection of the second horizontal row from the base of the window and the third vertical row from the left, his view is of the front lawn, the complete branch-span of the sycamore tree to the left, a rectangular grid of sky and Paddy the dog chasing a bird across the lawn in a run-jump-bark pattern. From a standing position he has a view of the far bank of the river, the oak trees on the town side, the east gable of the derelict building that was St Joseph’s Industrial School, the spire of the Catholic church, the bell tower of the Protestant church, four or five rooftops on the main street petering out towards the sky as the street rises. To the west, on the wooded hill above the town, Clonduff House, its chimneys, roof apex and the top panes of the third-storey Georgian windows just visible above the tree line. Currently the seat of Sir Richard Blake, nephew of Sir John Blake who famously, along with his wife Alice, possessed two motors cars in 1921, one of which, replete with cocktail cabinet, was commandeered by the IRA during the War of Independence and never returned. Closer, beyond the lawn and the adjoining field, Luke has a view of the river surface, the copious oak foliage, the full afternoon sun giving the water a gold-green glow and a glimmery shimmery movement that puts him in mind of a phenomenon he once witnessed at evening time from a kayak at Castlehaven Bay in West Cork.

Bioluminescence. The chemical reaction of luciferin and luciferase that results in light-illuminated water. When daylight dimmed and a stroke of his paddle broke the surface and roused the plankton, a beautiful phosphorescent glow sparked into life. The darker it got, the brighter the glow, the liquid phosphorous sparking green and then lifting and shifting from unnameable shades of green to unnameable shades of blue, and back, like the multitudinous colours on the necks of wild water ducks. His heart lit up, his soul soared as he remembered the etymology of Lucifer as elucidated by Father Leo Moran, SJ, Latin teacher, in the corridor at Belvedere College one Friday morning during Lent – light-bringer, morning star, bringer of dawn, the devil before his fall – and then the downdraft as he contemplated the Luciferean glow in the cells of fish, fireflies and worms, in the tip of a match, on the skins of Hiroshimoans.

What two words each conferred with a pair of identical phonemes now escape his mouth in a whisper?

He crosses the room, opens the door and the cat dives past his legs across the floor towards the desk, pauses uncertainly, then jumps up on his chair.

The dilemma of whether to keep one or some or all of Lily’s issue or find homes for one, some, or all troubles him.

The last birth but one (under the bed in the blue room) when Lily signalled her imminent labour by loud meowing and a tail-lift display of a cylindrical-shaped plug of gelatinous mucous protruding from her vagina. Her second birth, two years ago, when he had five male friends down from Dublin for a weekend of partying and he woke at dawn on the Sunday morning, still drunk, to a warm wet sensation in his crotch. Believing he had urinated in his sleep, he made to rise. Then, feeling a slight movement and a weighted sensation, he reached down and touched something wet and live and crawling and he sprang upright in terror, convinced that his entrails had somehow exited his body. He pulled off the duvet and there sat a silent mass of moving fur and tiny limbs in black and white and faces with closed eyelids, and further down, Lily lodged in a v-shaped gap between his thighs, panting, her tiny tongue out, her terrified eyes fixed on him, in the throes of another delivery. He edged his legs further apart and remained there in a barely-breathing, pseudo-panting trance until her ordeal was over.

Because, despite his repeated resolve (repeated now again), he has neglected to have Lily spayed.

With what compensatory thought does he (a) comfort himself and (b) exonerate himself?

That the short memory of the pangs of birth almost universally avowed by human mothers might also apply to Lily and the joys of motherhood – nursing her kittens, witnessing their playful frolics – compensate for the hardships of pregnancy and birth.

What extra concession did he briefly grant Lily, following the birth of her second-last litter?

For a period of three weeks and two days he supplemented her tinned food with tasty morsels of roast chicken purchased at the hot food counter in SuperValu.

What disquieting feature did he discover as he removed the flesh from the carcasses of each cooked chicken?

Why did this discovery distress him and compel him to cease for ever (to date) the purchase of chickens for consumption by his Lily or any other Lily, human or non-human?

He firstly surmised that the wing-bones were broken in the processing stage to facilitate easy packaging and/or to save space during storage, transportation or distribution. This initial supposition was swiftly replaced by his conviction that, at some point in their short miserable lives, in order to restrict movement and thwart flight in their confined cages, the chickens’ wings were broken manually or mechanically.

The insider knowledge of standard production practices in chicken factories as relayed to him by Colin Doyle, Conor Mahon and Tom Carragher over the summer months in 1995 and 1996 when they worked on the production line at Clonduff Chickens; the account of the imagined life of a chick in a hatchery as relayed by a Nobel prize-winning author known for his compassion for animals in a lecture that Luke watched on YouTube approximately six months ago.

Shredded, crushed, pulped, ground, grated, milled, mulled, pulverised. In the lecture the author gave an account of what happens after a batch of chicks are hatched out. Let us imagine a camera following them, the author said. On day two of their lives they are placed on a conveyor belt, on each side of which stand human minions who lift the chicks and turn them over to check the sex. Sexing the chicks, it’s called. The female chicks are transferred to another conveyor belt behind the workers and sent on up the line. The camera homes in on one chick from the moment it is placed on the first belt, chirping happily among its peers like any baby species, the author tells us, moving along without a care in the world, and then hey, what’s this, he’s grabbed, picked up and turned over as human fingers part the yellow fluff between his legs. Instantly he’s placed back on the belt, and the camera watches as he rights himself, gives himself a little shake, relieved after his first big adventure in the world, and then along he goes, happy and chirpy again until the belt suddenly plunges south and the chick is tipped over the edge and out of sight, like a canoeist going over a rapid. Except that our little friend is dropped into a motorized shredder and instantly shredded and ground into a paste, to be used later as an ingredient in animal feed.

The Book of Infamy, as expounded upon by another author (female, Polish, name forgotten) interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book a few years ago, a book which, to the best of Luke’s knowledge, does not yet exist. The author was travelling the world on a mission: taking photographs, collecting evidence, compiling reports, gathering excerpts from modern and ancient texts alike for inclusion in her work-in-progress which will be an exhaustive account of the crimes of man from the dawn of history to the present day. Nothing will be omitted, she said. It will be man’s confessions.

He whooshes Lily off his chair, pours the milky-tea dregs from his mug onto the plate whereupon the liquid is instantly absorbed by the bread crust to the point of saturation. He places the plate on the floorboards beyond the perimeter of the rug, and watches Lily lapping up the milky-tea mush. When she is finished she sits back and washes her paws, jaws, neck, head, belly and backside, then moves to a sunny spot on the rug and basks in the flood of sunshine.

With a pen, paper and a concerted effort to neutralise distressing thoughts that are starting to surface, what list does Luke now compile?

– Let the house and grounds as a venue for weddings, conferences, yoga retreats, rock festivals, literary festivals.

– Write articles on topics such as the move from the city to the country, the rural–urban divide, the paucity of public services in rural Ireland, the paucity of romance in rural Ireland, the poverty of small-town Ireland, the lives of men and boys in small-town Ireland, the fluidity of sexuality.

What does the sight of Ulysses, or the mere thought of it, always provoke in him?

Evocations of home. Metaphorical home, repose of the soul. A longing for Bloom, for filial love, fellow feeling.

He has circled back and forth in a haphazard but sometimes chronological pattern. Since his first reading (haphazardly) in the second term of First Year English at UCD in 1997, during which he failed to complete the Cyclops, Oxen of the Sun and Circe episodes, he has, on many occasions, read random episodes in their entirety and certain (favoured) episodes repeatedly, chronologically, obsessively (Emmaus, Ithaca and Penelope).

What pie-in-the-sky, moneymaking notion (listed above) related to Ulysses which he frequently entertains is he again reminded of?

The Ardboe Academy for Excellence aka The Ulysses Academy for Excellence at Ardboe. The idea of founding a private school with its own distinct curriculum and vision, whose student body would be drawn from the sons and daughters of forward-thinking parents unconcerned with CAO points, SAT scores, Baccalaureate results or arid, orthodox methodologies and whose curriculum would be devised using one source, Ulysses, a work of genius, as the base text from which myriad other texts will follow … has long been fermenting. (It has always galled him that the tepid little souls at the Department of Education have never seen fit to put Joyce on the secondary school English curriculum – a tepid little adaptation of ‘The Dead’ hardly counts – and, in his opinion, ninety per cent of Ulysses is perfectly suitable for young minds.) When all the leads, references, riddles and allusions of the novel are followed and all the texts containing those leads, references, allusions etc. are explored – through the fields of literature, mythology, music, maths, science, history, theology, philosophy, art, ethics, aesthetics, astronomy, biology, embryology, physics, psychology, the earth sciences, languages, politics, law, etc. – the waterfront is covered. Initially, a thorough, in-depth study of Ulysses would be required (he has commenced this task on many occasions), after which he would compile an index of all the topics and texts cited in the novel, subdivided into the classics, the humanities, the sciences, etc.; from this he would construct a diagram with branches and sub-branches and sub-sub-branches of topics before devising the course outlines and syllabus and writing the specifics of each area of study. One text would lead naturally to another in an ever-increasing ripple and everything – from Plato to pop art – would be accessed to ensure the finest, broadest, pupil-directed education is provided. As headmaster he would select his staff from the ranks of the brilliant, the brave and the eccentric (if John Kidd, the Joycean scholar who disappeared into thin air years ago, ever resurfaces Luke will do his damnedest to coax him to Ardboe). He would attract the brightest and the best students and would offer scholarships to the poor and the talented. His would be a vocation in the truest, oldest sense of the word and his school a centre for excellence of the kind about which enlightened people rhapsodise and dullards mock. He has the perfect premises – a fine country house on a hundred and fifty acres – for the endeavour. The Ardboe Academy for Excellence. Give me the boy and I will so I will.

It comes to him with the force of an undoubtable and certifiable truth: that his Joyce project is not the much-dreamed-of but hopelessly unachievable book he has longed to write, but this – the Ardboe Academy for Excellence. Or the Ardboe Academy for Excellence Featuring Ulysses. What better way to pay homage to Joyce than to found a school in his honour and use his work and his brain to nourish the minds of future generations? And how had he not thought of this before?

His nature: the sight of him feeding the gulls, his compassion for Mina Purefoy in her long labour, his concern for the starving Dedalus children and for Dante Riordan in her bath-chair, his memory of his dead son Rudy, his worry that when he eats a steak the eyes of the cow will pursue him through all eternity.

The years on earth, similar but not the same (Bloom’s thirty-eight to Luke’s thirty-four), the delight in the sensual life, the love of water, the weave of the mind, the ruminations, the pity of love, the jealousy of love, the downward slides into self-doubt and self-pity interspersed with moments of pride, indignation, illumination. The temperamental assonance: the ranking of kindness above all virtues, the abhorrence of cruelty. The loss of sons they never knew (most miscarried foetuses are male). Both have walked the corridors of the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street. Both are aware they may be the last male in the family line. Both have fond memories of their fathers. Both are linked to the agricultural economy (Bloom was once a clerk at the Dublin cattle market at Hanlon’s Corner). Both are protective of young men and boys as evidenced by Bloom’s concern for Stephen in Nighttown and by Luke’s heartsickness for the thin, pale, hungry, fatherless youths who hang around the town and the used, abused, surplus-to-requirement boys in tracksuits who drift around city shopping centres and whose hurt eyes may pursue him through all eternity.

Both are womanly men, unafraid of their feminine side, unafraid of women’s bodies or minds or emissions – taking delight in women’s bodies, minds and emissions. Molly claims that Bloom – whose middle name is Paula – feels what a woman is. He even contemplates sewing the one-and a-half-inch fissure in Stephen’s jacket after the Nighttown adventure. (A black mark against Bloom, however, is his view of women’s ‘deficient mental development’ and his disdain towards Molly for her reluctance to read literature, but this, Luke thinks, should be interpreted as a symptom of a long marriage – which requires ‘the mutual toleration of personal defects’, as Bloom says – and its accompanying frustrations, such as Bloom’s valiant attempts to get Molly to take up some intellectually challenging pursuits, rather than as evidence of misogyny.) Bloom thinks disparagingly of those men who think themselves ‘wits’ when they spout belittling and sexist remarks about women. He asserts the need for state-inspected and medically controlled male brothels for the clandestine satisfaction of women’s erotic irritation. Both Bloom and Luke have gone so far as to fantasise about being a woman and being pregnant; they have celebrated female desire, seminal warmth, the preordained frangibility of the hymen; both have worshipped at that altar where the back changes name. In the realm of the everyday, both relish their food and despite giving much thought to and having great sympatico with the suffering of animals remain, to date, carnivorous. Both have a fondness for cats and water and the taking of baths (or showers). Both fantasise about the ideal life and ways to become financially independent. Once, driving through the Burren, Luke came upon what appeared to be the exact replica of the cottage Bloom envisioned as his dream home, causing him such mental arrest that he almost crashed. Both are idealists, visionaries, dedicated to rectitude, social justice, utopian dreams – evidenced in Bloom’s desire to rid the world of poverty, avarice, international animosity, and in Luke’s almost filial affection and protectiveness towards the lost youth of the town, his dream of starting a school, his campaigns against the construction of pylons and wind farms, his occasional thoughts of entering politics in order to effect change. Luke is certain that if he and Poldy were to write their manifestos for life – on politics, religion, art, music, literature, birth, death, sex, love, pleasure, fantasy, the sacred and the profane – their beliefs, ideas and strategies would be almost identical. On the issue of sexuality too there are intimations of overlap: was not Bloom’s masculinity questioned, and did he not possess a surfeit of feminine plasms in the brain, and was he not suspected by the men of Dublin of being a repressed homosexual? And in the realm of science, does not Luke’s interest in and fascination with the multiverse, quantum mechanics, the Higgs Boson, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, his own nascent theories and notions as to the existence of a compound that makes up the code of everything – the nucleus of the nebula – neatly parallel Bloom’s interest in involutions increasingly vast, in microbes and cells and infinitely divisible particles until nought nowhere is ever reached and the whatness of our whoness is never known, in his theory of alien possibility, his meditation on the stars, the ramifications of number and his elaborate calculations of 9⁹x9⁹x9⁹ which might bring man to the divine? Indeed such are the similarities of the soarings and rhapsodic episodes that lead both men to frequent illuminations that, in certain moments at the height of his own flights, Luke could swear that Bloom is his brother from another mother.

To a specific but unknown spot in the folds of his cerebral cortex where the numerical faculties nestle; to long hours spent in solitude, to certain moments in childhood spent observing his mother, inspecting specks of dust, rays of slanting sun, the grain of wood, the variations of emerald in various cats’ eyes; to the moment he discovered, at age twelve, that time travel is consistent with the laws of physics and the consequent realisation that past events and past lives are not really past but can be revisited over and over; to his infatuation with the lives of great artists, musicians, physicists who, in moments of transcendence, enter an eternal realm of abstract forms, a Platonic heaven far from the ordinary reality we inhabit, from which they bring back their knowledge and insights.

Physically, Luke is taller and proportionately slenderer, carrying 11 stone 3 pounds on his 6 feet 1 inch frame as opposed to Bloom’s 11 stone 4 pounds on his 5 feet 9½ inch frame; Bloom’s greater girth of neck is evidenced in his collar size of 17 against Luke’s 15½. Sartorially, Bloom is smarter and better groomed and while there hangs in Luke’s wardrobe a Paul Smith suit, several designer shirts, ties, shoes, the Hubie Clark apparel from the US, a brown slim-fitting Vivienne Westwood suit he especially loves, and though, during his life in the city – most notably during his gay period – he revelled in a well-coiffed, well-groomed appearance, he acknowledges there is little call for self-grooming these days and he has, consequently, grown increasingly rakish. Temperamentally, Bloom is more disciplined, more measured, less prone to excess of impulse or appetite, less likely to rant about injustice or fantasise about violent revenge. Philosophically, Bloom believes the universe is infinite and fathomless, and while Luke also believes it is infinite, he thinks man is edging towards fathoming it. Educationally, Luke, a graduate, is better schooled, but Bloom, with his knowledge of maths and science, astrology and astronomy and enormous quantities of general knowledge of innumerable subjects – including saints’ feast days, the cubic area of Roundwood reservoir, the precise times of sunrise and sunset five days in advance – is more learned. Epicurally, Luke has never relished the inner organs of either beast or fowl.

Does Luke suspect Bloom is a repressed homosexual? Or a bisexual? What about Stephen? Or Joyce himself?

When younger, Luke harboured such or similar suspicions and doubts about all three men. Now he views Stephen as accepting of homosexual desire and attraction as part of his own and every man’s nature, as is Bloom, though not explicitly. As was Joyce himself: nothing that was human was alien to him. Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. Joyce showed no signs of homosexual panic or, indeed, practice. The love between men is implicit and is everywhere evident in his work.

What character traits or attributes of Stephen’s – in either Portrait or Ulysses – does Luke, to a greater or lesser extent, admire or find moving?

He admires to a greater extent Stephen’s genius, his erudition, his exhaustive and enviable knowledge of literature, history, languages, theology, philosophy, psychology, philology, astrology, esoteric teachings, the Gospels and the finer points of Church doctrine and dogma; his longing to understand life and love in an intellectual sense; his full and fully-fledged renunciation of the Church after the full and fully-fledged devotion to the Church of his early youth; his continuous worship at the altar of female flesh, drawn to the swoon of sin and suffering; his intense personality. The life of his mind. His mystical elements, his thoughtful meditations, his creative impulse, his ability to read the divine signature in the snotgreen sea. Rare moments of self-deprecation too, remembering the books he was going to write containing his deeply deep epiphanies on green oval leaves, to be sent in the event of his death to the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria. Luke admires to a (far) lesser extent Stephen’s immaturity, his (mostly) selfish disregard for his hungry sisters, his enormous ego, his precocious, brittle self, his bumptious, arrogant self, his pompous, sore-loser style of argument. Luke is moved by Stephen’s fretful heart, his sensitive, shame-wounded soul, his agenbite of inwit, his susceptibility to the word foetus. His fear of thunder, his fragile self. His memory of his mother. His fears for his sister – She is drowning. His tears for himself, alone in the rain on the top of the Howth tram.

His mother. The cat that got the cream. The Queen of Sheba. Joyce, the womanly man. Himself, the womanly Luke.

He often ponders on the activities of the residents of No. 7 Eccles Street on the morning of 17 June 1904 and wonders whether Poldy’s uncharacteristic request for breakfast in bed the previous night might indicate a new accretion of authority, of potency even. Poldy might, on waking, find the sole of Molly’s foot beat up against his face. He might sniff her toes, finger her instep, her fallen arch. Run a hand up her plump calf, around the back of her knee, up her thigh to her plumpen rumpen lumpen backside. And behold, a new dawn might herald at No. 7 Eccles Street.

What errors, issues or inconsistencies in Ulysses perplex or indeed irritate Luke?

Why does Bloom, at thirty-eight, seem so old – old enough for Stephen to pronounce him ‘a profound ancient male’? Why is Moses Dlugacz, a Jewish butcher, selling pork kidneys? How long can a man carry a potato in his pocket before it rots? Why is Deasy, the headmaster of a Dalkey boys’ school, writing an article on foot and mouth disease in cattle? Why does Joyce say that the priest kneels when he means genuflects? Why does he write sweat-pea for sweet-pea and call a tap a faucet? Why does he call the Ascot Gold Cup a handicap race when even the dogs in the street know it’s not? Why does it take four minutes for Bloom to climb the back stairs from his basement kitchen in 7 Eccles Street to the hall-door level? How can Stephen recline against the area railings of 7 Eccles Street and simultaneously have a view into the kitchen? What possessed Joyce to situate a bunch of rowdy men in a room in the National Maternity Hospital at ten o’clock at night drinking beer, eating sardine sandwiches and spouting lewd remarks while down the corridor several Dublin women are in the throes of labour? But by far the most baffling question is how, at the end of the night, on the walk from Beresford Place to Eccles Street (via Gardiner Street, Mountjoy Square, Temple Street North), a route that Luke knows well and estimates at fifteen to twenty minutes at normal pace and which Google Maps put at twenty minutes (and which would surely take no more than thirty to forty minutes at a slow and dawdling pace), can Bloom and Stephen, even allowing for ‘interruptions of halt’, possibly discuss – no, deliberate on – at least twenty subjects of substantial conversational heft, i.e. music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, women, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight on the growth of paraheliotropic trees, corporation bins, the Roman Catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, Jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the influence of the pre-Sabbath, Stephen’s collapse? Average per topic time: one minute. And, concurrent with these subjects, Bloom also privately recalls similar subjects discussed with other friends on previous nocturnal perambulations. Impossible!

Because ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.’

No. Bloom is a sensualist, as Joyce himself was. As Luke is. In any case, he was there primarily to look after Stephen.

At the age of seventeen, during a free two-hour period on a school trip to Amsterdam in March 1995, he lost his virginity to a prostitute in a brothel on Bloedstraat. Debbie. Mixed race. Old enough to be his mother. Come for mamma. Wait wait good boy. Afterwards he felt a surge of what he thought was love for her. He told no one, ever. He occasionally thinks of her. She might be retired by now, providing a phone or online sex service. He wonders why they do it. No, he knows: money, rent, mouths to feed. Poor women and girls. Riddled with the pox in the old days. The way they’re mentioned in the biographies of famous men, as if they were sub-human, as if they weren’t daughters or sisters or mothers. Graham Greene’s list of prostitutes. Treated as vermin, as if they were the cause of the pox. Poor girls. Biddy the Clap and Cunty Kate. No word of their suffering. Joyce himself, from the age of fourteen, a regular frequenter of the kips. Metaphysics in Mecklenburg Street.

With devastation. It altered everything: how he saw Bloom (with greater understanding), how he saw Joyce (with greater compassion), how he read Ulysses (with greater sorrow). He is haunted by two images of Joyce: the beautiful, innocent, half-past-six boy entering Clongowes Wood in 1888, and the frail old man groping around a dark room in 7 rue Valentin in 1939. He spent hours online reading about syphilis, studying the grotesque images of the disease – the penile chancres and discharge, the scabrous fissures in unwashed crotches, the rashes, the incontinence, the impotence. Limp father of thousands, languid floating flower. The more he read the more convinced he was of the evidence for Joyce’s infection, and the deeper his sorrow grew for the man.

The daily afflictions: the failing eyes, the abdominal cramps, the joint pain, the bad teeth. Then later, the creative euphoria, electrocution by divine fire, the breeze of madness. Other symptoms too: Beckett the bastard told Ellmann that Joyce wore two newspapers inside his trousers. He was treated with Galyl, an arsenic and phosphorous compound patented by Dr A. Mouneyrat and commonly prescribed for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin. And the books are crawling with the disease – it’s embedded and encoded in labyrinthine references in Ulysses. Bloom in all likelihood had it too – he also visited prostitutes in his youth – and there are indications that he too is ill. And Bloom and Joyce are both obsessed with the body, with morbus germs and contamination. So many geniuses, all male, infected … Van Gogh, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde, Baudelaire. He wonders if the pox unleashed the brilliance or if the brilliant flocked to the pox, more than half in love with easeful death.

How, in Luke’s opinion, did the knowledge of his syphilitic condition affect Joyce?

It was, Luke is certain, the single greatest presence, the gravest event, the biggest grief, in Joyce’s mature adult life; the shaper and signifier of everything – his thoughts, his work, his outer life, his secret inner life. It preoccupied and consumed him, spreading its tentacles into every corner of his psyche. Riddled with shame and guilt, constantly awaiting the re-emergence of the sinister signs and symptoms of the illness, constantly fearing madness, always guarding the secret. Worst of all he believed it to be the cause of Lucia’s madness. I have syphilis, Pappy, she said to him one day, the inexplicable access of the mad to the truth. As if in compensation – or atonement – for the sins of his youth he lived a quiet, reserved life in Zurich and Paris, never countenancing bad language or vulgarity, dining nightly with his little family in Fouquet’s and shunning the lifestyle the avant-garde expected of him. Despite his avowed rejection of the Church he went to the annual Holy Week services – he the eternal penitent and the Catholic guilt impossible to expunge. He ate blackberry jam because Christ’s crown of thorns was made from blackberry briars. From what he has read about Finnegans Wake, Luke suspects syphilis was the driving force of that novel, suffused and threaded as it is with oblique references, messages and admissions of the disease, the writing of it an act of sublimation, a straining for a cure, a metaphorical fix, as if he was trying to confess and right his wrongs, purge his soul, seek forgiveness for the damage done.

The thought of some PhD student presenting to his or her professor a thesis proposal entitled ‘Thank Syphilis for Ulysses’.

Because it’s on the rise again and he, Luke, an MSM, could’ve been riddled. Maeve had a dose of thrush once; he had to anoint his member with ointment. No cup overfloweth.

He straightens up, flexes his facial muscles by opening wide his mouth, first vertically, then horizontally, closes his left eye and holds that position, then reopens it and closes his right eye. The purpose: to check for slack or paralytic flesh in his face; to check the status of the vision in his left eye whose sight he is certain is deteriorating. A word, parallax, comes to mind. He opens his laptop and Googles the word.

Out of a total of over 32 million results, and after trawling through several pages, he chooses – owing to the attractive and vaguely familiar title – a link to an excerpt from ‘The Story of the Heavens’ by Sir Robert Ball:

We must first explain clearly the conception which is known to astronomers by the name of parallax; for it is by parallax that the distance of the sun, or, indeed, the distance of any other celestial body, must be determined. Let us take a simple illustration. Stand near a window from whence you can look at buildings, or the trees, the clouds, or any distant objects. Place on the glass a thin strip of paper vertically in the middle of one of the panes. Close the right eye, and note with the left eye the position of the strip of paper relatively to the objects in the background. Then, while still remaining in the same position, close the left eye and again observe the position of the strip of paper with the right eye. You will find that the position of the paper on the background has changed. As I sit in my study and look out of the window I see a strip of paper, with my right eye, in front of a certain bough on a tree a couple of hundred yards away; with my left eye the paper is no longer in front of that bough, it has moved to a position near the outline of the tree. This apparent displacement of the strip of paper, relatively to the distant background, is what is called parallax.

That this definition of parallax is not now the one he wants; that what he wants is a more symbolic or metaphoric, or even simpler definition. That he can consult an online dictionary or trawl through the other results to find a more favoured definition. That he can find the same word with a thousand different faces. That this surfeit of instant online information feeds a certain need, a hunger, but such instant gratification leaves him unsatisfied, like eating fast food or wearing cheap clothes, because such easy acquisition of knowledge lacks the awe, the pleasure of serendipity, the sense of award that real learning brings. He could learn Latin and Greek online, become proficient at astronomy but he knows something would be missing: the connection, the immersion, the thoroughness and warmth and civilising effect that real-life interaction with learned teachers brings. This thought similar, he thinks, to the belief he once held that babies born using IVF – humans incubated in test tubes – were missing out on something essential, the soul maybe, in the act of creation.

He lights a cigarette, takes two drags, leaves it on the ashtray and then types the words ‘world news March 1965’ into Google. From millions of results he reads two articles, the first on the slaughter in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, 7 March, the second on the civil rights’ march led by Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery on Tuesday, 9 March. He searches again, typing the words ‘Ireland news March 1965’. There is no mention of a breach of promise court case. Among the more interesting results is the report that, under the new Vatican II rules, Masses were said in the vernacular for the first time in Ireland that month.

In order to occupy his mind and so desist from scouring the internet for material related to Ellen and Mulvey’s court case, what does he do?

For an unspecified number of minutes or hours-and-minutes he reads three segments – pages 776 to 789, pages 818 to 846, pages 862 to 867 – in the penultimate episode of Ulysses.

Bloom’s account of the journey of Dublin’s municipal water as it flows down from Roundwood reservoir through subterranean aqueducts and pipeage to Stillorgan reservoir and onwards through a system of relieving tanks, weirs and street pipes into the tap in the kitchen of 7 Eccles Street; his meditation on the constellation of stars, the likelihood of the inhabitability of planets other than Earth by an anatomically different race of beings to human, and the possibility of the moral redemption of said race by a redeemer; the description of his fantasy home – a thatched two-storey dwellinghouse of southerly aspect with an orchard, tennis court, shrubbery, rockery, summer glasshouse etc. (the replica of which Luke spotted in the Burren); proof that Bloom advocated, instigated and supported programmes of rectitude since his earliest youth; the reason for his smile if he had smiled as he entered the matrimonial bed; the justification for the retribution he would hypothetically mete out to the matrimonial violator who had earlier occupied the matrimonial bed.

By a heavy thud on the window, the sound of an object unexpectedly colliding with the glass. Judging it a soft-bodied living creature by the sound of the impact and the instant painful sensation (which he now concludes must be mirror-touch synaesthesia) gripping his own body, he stands, leans over the desk, peers out. Lying on the gravel about thirty inches from the wall and at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees from the windowsill, is the body of a bird, a baby tit lying on its side, its legs horizontal to the ground, the pale down of its underbelly ruffling lightly in the breeze. He watches and waits, his fingers a-tremble, hoping it has just knocked itself out briefly. Sighing audibly in an effort to trick his body into shedding its sympathetic pain and his mind into asserting a robust masculine nonchalance, he draws back from the window, crosses the room, walks to the front hall and exits the front door. He bends to the bird. The eyes are open but the bird is dead. As he considers various means of removing it (the shovel from the fireside companion set in the drawing room being the first and favoured option), its eyelids blink. A wing twitches. A foot stirs. The bird is trying to die. Or trying to rise. He strokes its fur, lifts it gently, propping it upright on its belly-body. The bird sways, then the whole body shivers almightily. From the corner of his eye Luke registers Paddy’s approach. Another shiver, a wing twitch, an eye blink. The head turns twenty to thirty degrees to the left, eyes blinking urgently. Luke stands, turns, grabs Paddy by the collar and hauls him roughly across the gravel, around the corner to the old kitchen, then pushes him inside and bolts the door.

On his return the tit is still propped on its belly, head turning right and left, more alert. As he watches, it rises shakily on thin legs and turns until the tail is where the head was and vice versa, and it turns again and seems to be looking at him. He steps away. Another movement – so swift that he barely catches it – and an upward motion and a diagonal flight across his sight path and the tit is gone, out over the lawn.

At 6.20 p.m. he switches on the hot water immersion. He brings a bowl of dry dog food soaked in water out to the old kitchen for Paddy, refills his water bowl at the tap in the yard, and spends a few minutes rolling a tennis ball across the floor towards him. He returns to the house, re-emerges with a tin of cat food and spoons out the contents onto the ground in three little mounds as the cats swarm around his legs. He fills two old fertiliser bags with logs, places them on the wheelbarrow and wheels them to the front door. From the flowerbeds, right of the front door, he breaks off four stems of Salvia and pulls five Shasta daisies. He carries the flowers inside, arranges them in a glass vase with water and leaves them on the hall table.

Yes. She, in a state of distress, tells him she knew nothing of her father’s engagement to Ellen until she read his email. She then called her mother, who confirmed her knowledge of her father’s engagement, that her father had not loved ‘the woman’ and that ‘the woman’ had sued him for breach of promise. Her mother knew nothing about anonymous letters or rumours of a child and is now very upset. She finds it hard to believe Ruth’s father would behave like that – as indeed Ruth does. My father was a kind man, she says. There must be more to this than meets the eye. She pauses, and then twice says his name urgently, Luke, Luke, and asks if he is there.

His hand grips the phone tighter. He takes a deep breath and asks if she read the documents he emailed her.

She did. She says her father must have believed what was written in the anonymous letters. He must have had reason to believe they were genuine and their contents true.

No. Instead he reminds Ruth that none of the contents of the letters were true, they were all fabricated, that Ellen begged her father to believe her and trust her and not some anonymous letter-writer. Ruth says this happened almost fifty years ago, these were other people’s lives, other people’s mistakes. He counters – not other people, your father. What he did to Ellen marked her life for ever. Your father, he says, went on to have a life, he went on to marry and have a family.

‘Why do I feel like I’m being judged,’ she says, ‘and punished for something I didn’t do? I’m being punished for the supposed sins of my father.’

‘You’re not being punished. This is hard for me too. But I have to think of Ellen now. I cannot desert her. I cannot betray her.’

‘Betray her? What about me? Is this it? You always talk about being open and honest with each other and now I’m shocked at how final you sound, how unfair and judgmental!’

‘And I’m shocked at how little compassion – how little mercy – you have for an old woman who was put through hell by your father! Put yourself in her shoes for a minute, Ruth. Then put yourself in mine.’

He hangs up, switches off his phone and tosses it on the chaise longue. Angry, shocked, rattled, he sits looking from him for an unmeasured period of time.

On the word ‘mercy’. On Ruth. On the supposed sins of her father. On the loss of her. On the image of her at the other end of the phone. On her suffering. On her mother’s suffering. On the balance sheet of love. On the charge sheet of feeling. On what makes one kind of love more worthy than another. On what places romantic love, in the eyes of society, above the love of an elderly relative. On how the hands of fate can reach across fifty years and stick a knife in him and her and her and her. On the countless difficulties of relationships. On the merits of a solitary life. On the greater possibility of living a good life alone. On the greater possibility of living a spiritual life alone. On how best to occupy himself for the evening and banish from his mind all thoughts of a single, solitary fateful future.

At 7.35 p.m. he enters the drawing room, removes the ashes from the ash pan, arranges wood on the grate, switches on the lamp over the piano, stands at the mahogany cabinet for several minutes considering the purple velvet case containing his grandmother’s set of apostle spoons, the master and the twelve, sitting snugly inside. He goes upstairs and, in the bathroom, shaves, showers, shampoos his hair. After drying himself, he flosses and brushes his teeth, trims his nose hair, clips his toenails. He enters the bedroom and dresses in pale blue boxer shorts, a brown silk shirt, jeans and brown leather moccasins.

On the pleasures of the night ahead. On the probability that Paddy will object to his early lock-in by barking. On the glow of the evening sun on his skin as he dresses and on the foresight of the nineteenth-century architect to situate dual-aspect windows in this room. On the heredity law that states it takes three generations to make a gentleman. On the myth that it takes three generations to lose a fortune. On the ruthless forces that drive the universe. On the swampy nature of the human mind. On the river capture. On the tsunami that knocked the earth six and a half inches off its axis and moved Japan four metres closer to the United States. On the realisation that Ulysses is probably the only book, Bloom the only character, and Joyce the only author whose company he would never willingly relinquish. On the likelihood that Joyce named his daughter for St Lucy, the patron saint of eyesight, and not Lucia di Lammermoor, who went mad. On the prevalence of syphilis among geniuses and the likelihood that the rogue bacterium gnawed at their brains and lured them into deeper and darker recesses of the unconscious from where they unearthed deeper and darker contents than they would ever have unearthed sans spirochete. On the surprising drop in temperature in the drawing room for this time of year as night falls. On his failed attempt to read even the first chapter of the Quran. On the imp of the perverse. On the unwelcome coincidence and provenance of the Mulvey name with the other Mulvey and his lingual penetration under the Moorish wall. On the different tempos of time and how gravity warps time – how, for instance, if one lives on a ground-floor apartment one ages slightly less rapidly than the neighbour in the penthouse; and why it is estimated that by the age of eight we have, subjectively, lived two-thirds of our lives. On the predilection for and the preponderance of American catchphrases, coined words and acronyms such as 24/7, my bad, natch, OMG, FYI, ATM, LMAO. On the phonetic, syllabic and rhythmic assonance between the acronyms for his personality type according to the Myers-Briggs typology test (INFJ) and the Latin abbreviation for King of the Jews (INRI). On the period some years ago when, after reading all the novels of John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, he was convinced the two writers had conducted a clandestine love affair and the evidence of the affair was embedded in cryptic passages and codes in their novels. On his youthful intimations that he possessed within him, among other gifts, the germ of a great scientific truth – a sign or formula or compound containing the key of life, the code to everything – and that this formula was ordinary and simple – simpler than Pi or E=mc² or the Fibonacci sequence – and close at hand, already existing in nature, something right under our noses – carbon or iron or zinc, a nutrient in clay or some common fungus. On the moments when he was convinced he was approaching this scientific breakthrough, and it was only a matter of time before the answer was dropped down to him or arrived in sleep and he would wake up, and reveal the code of everything to everyone.

He has a hunch it is in water. That the simple hydrogen-oxygen compound in its purest, uncontaminated state contains the nucleus within which lies the quantum code for everything – the key to life and matter. For a time he became briefly enthralled with the experiments of Masaru Emotu, who claimed that water molecules are affected by human words, thoughts and intentions, and that, when frozen, water forms beautiful or ugly crystals depending on whether beautiful or ugly, positive or negative words, thoughts and intentions are focused on it. These claims were subsequently discredited for lacking scientific publication, peer review and scientific provability.

No. However, according to New Scientist, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany, have since discovered that the structural memory of water persists on a picosecond timescale, a picosecond being one thousandth of one billionth of a second. If water retains traces or memories or records or resonances – or whatever water’s equivalents to traces, memories, records and resonances are – of what it has passed through or of what has passed through it, then who knows what else it retains, or what else may yet be discovered about water and its properties.

What, in his opinion, caused his youthful intimations to dim and pass and what attendant emotions did their passing give rise to?

The dimming is due partly to the speed with which theoretical physics, experimental physics, biophysics, particle physics, astrophysics, quantum physics, molecular physics and all the biologies have advanced in the second half of his life to date, his copious reading of theories of the multiverse, string theory, supersymmetry, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement and quantum spin, the search for the god particle in a suburb outside Geneva, and the fact that what once was science fiction has now become science – all of which sate his curiosity and provide answers to questions which previously triggered the intimations. Due partly too to his own circumstances, the course of his own life and his familial responsibilities. The attendant emotions: disappointment and occasional resentment that he has not been part of the scientific community and such scientific investigations; relief, because of a niggling concern about his mental health due to the fact that those soarings – of which the intimations and illuminations were part thereof – came perilously close to the deranging altitudes to which manias ascend; a humbling admission that the unravelling of nature’s secrets will take place in minds far superior to his own; feelings of conflict due to the belief that, as the scientific world moves ever closer to explaining everything, mankind may be slipping closer to extinction, that man is nearly done in this existence and the dissolution of the self is at hand; the belief that there will be nothing left for him to reveal, and no place left where he can soar or shine, has led him to feel or possess or become, in recent years, a flattened spirit, a loss of self-esteem, a growing bitterness, a private resentment, a fragile ego, an approximate man.

By the report of a not-too-distant chainsaw while he dresses in the bedroom. By the sight of the open latches on the wooden trunk at the end of the bed. By a palate salivating and a tongue blue mouldy for the want of red wine.

Into what further ruminations or actions do these latter interruptions propel him?

The report of the chainsaw causes him momentary sorrow for the grief of the surviving trees. The sight of the open latches of the wooden trunk provoke in him the urge to view the wedding gown in its transparent protector inside the trunk.

He does not. He opens the trunk, lifts out the white silk brocade gown, removes the protector, drapes the gown across the bed, sniffs the fabric and opens the pearl buttons at the back. He considers trying to convert the cost of the gown ($450 in 1962) to today’s money but realises that such an attempt would, without the use of a calculator to compound the interest, be futile. He removes his shirt and jeans, lifts the heavy gown over his head and shoulders, pushes his arms into the sleeves and pulls and tugs until the ample skirt and tulle underskirt flow from a point approximately three inches above his waist and the hem is approximately four inches off the floor. He then turns and views himself in the mirror of the wardrobe door. As he adjusts the wardrobe door to get a better view he catches his reflection in the mirror over the fireplace and, in the motion, his own image is doubled, tripled, quadrupled – multiple, infinite Lukes in a wedding gown caught in the act of adjusting infinite doors in one fluid flowing infinite motion. Light-headed and a little dizzy, he puts a hand out to steady himself and the hand comes towards him as if to greet himself. The mathematics of turbulence, he thinks. No, the mathematics of quantum mechanics, where all possible outcomes do happen, each in its own universe, and every road is travelled and a particle can be both here or there precisely because it is here in one universe and there in another. A profusion of parallel universes and in each universe, right now, there is a copy of him in his wedding gown. For an instant he is trapped in the mirrors, falling towards the man in the white gown as the man in the white gown falls towards him. Vertiginous in mind and body he pauses, stands very still. He puts his hand to the wardrobe door and slowly, carefully, moves it back so that the fireplace mirror is out of view and the multiple Lukes are out of view and he can return to his singular self. He sighs deeply, smiles at himself, then joins his hands in a bridal pose. He twirls, pouts, preens, then runs his hands over his chest and his make-believe breasts. Do you Lukey-Luke-Luke … Tippy two, tippy tea, tippy ta-ta too … till death do you part?

By hastily casting off the wedding gown, throwing on his own clothes, hurrying along the landing, down the stairs, along the back hall into the kitchen. By uncorking a bottle of Campo Viejo Tempranillo Reserva, filling three-quarters of a large glass, taking a slug of it, and feeling immediately his own return, his palate soothed and his equilibrium restored.

What meditations occupy Luke during the preparation of his evening meal and with what edible, audible and olfactory pleasures does he accompany these meditations?

Meditations: on the taste of altar wine as first experienced from the Holy Communion chalice at Sunday Mass in St Anne’s Church, Clonduff, circa June 1986; on his childhood fascination with the grotesquery of transubstantiation and, at age nine, his re-enactment with Lucy, aged eleven, of the Last Supper (preceded by the wedding feast at Cana) using, as props, a Waterford Crystal wine glass, diluted Ribena, discs of Barron’s sliced white pan and a yellow plastic bucket half full of water; on whether he should immediately uncork another bottle of wine so that it has ample time to breathe before being imbibed, or better still – because uncorking does nothing to aerate the wine – decant or double decant; on the pleasure of altar wine for an alcoholic priest; on the problem of altar wine for a recovering alcoholic priest; on Bloom’s reluctance to elaborate on the futility of calculating the trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules on a single pinhead and progressing to the nought nowhere that is never reached. Accompaniments: three handfuls of Manhattan salted peanuts intermittently scooped from the packet and shot from the palm of his hand into his open mouth. Two additional glasses (large) of wine. The first (and most favoured) movement of Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. The aroma of sautéed onions and garlic, golden fried, sea-salt-sprinkled potatoes; the sound of three small lamb chops being seared on a hot pan.

What informational titbit regarding the application of heat to protein first conveyed to him in biology class in his first year at St Mary’s Secondary School does he now recall?

The application of heat to protein causes the protein to coagulate as evidenced when a raw egg or raw meat meets a hot surface.

How does he eat the lamb chops, the sautéed onions and garlic, the sea-salted, golden-fried potatoes?

The Sunday lunches of his childhood years, comprising roast beef with homemade gravy, or leg of lamb with shop-bought mint sauce whose sharp acidic tang made him shudder. That the misery of man escapes when he drinks. That Kafka’s grandfather was a butcher. The image of the first ever blooding of man, the first hominoid or Homo erectus or Homo sapiens that ingested, digested and assimilated the first morsel of flesh – animal, fish, fowl, insect or worm; the weight of it, raw, on the tongue, the ferrous tang, the texture of tissue and sinew taut in the teeth. The journey of the masticated meat down the hominoidinal gullet, the action of hominoidinal enzymes in the hominoidinal intestines on the meat, the digestion and incorporation of one creature into another, flesh into flesh, the laying down of one set of DNA on another, the commencement of new epigenetic signalling as animal impressions mingle with early human instincts. Millennia of incorporation. He belches, sighs, pours more wine. Incorporate. He says the word aloud. Corp. Irish, French, Latin, all the same. With the fingers of his right hand he pinches the plumpest part of his left forearm and watches the released flesh spring back into place. Tissue, sinew. Sin-you. Decades of meat consumption. Well-blooded by now, the animal residue amassed in his cells. He bends his head and smells his left armpit. Policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts – funny old Poldy! He sits back and attempts to calculate the ratio of human-to-animal molecules extant in his body, or, easier, the Luke-to-bovineovineporcineavine ratio.

With a current body weight of 11 stone 7 pounds (73kg) and assuming that he supped solely on milk for the first year of life and, notwithstanding the fact that he probably comes from one of the greatest meat-eating families in the Sullane valley if not in the entire province, consumption of meat in his infancy was negligible, so he commences the FCC (Flesh Consumption Count) from the age of four years and takes the daily recommended meat allowance of four ounces (100g) of meat (bovine, ovine, porcine or avine) as his benchmark unit and uses this unit as a (modest) measure of his daily meat consumption over the course of thirty years, and allowing that between 40 to 60 per cent of food (herbivoric, carnavoric and omnivoric) is assimilated (depending on genetic factors, physical activity, individual variable basal metabolic, thermogenetic and excretory rates) and remembering that the higher the carnivoric content the greater the assimilation rate, and acknowledging that the majority of food is either converted to fuel to run the metabolic and physiological activities that sustain life, tissue building and maintenance, or stored as fat, and that the tenth rule of trophic assimilation states that only 10 per cent of organic matter is stored as flesh, and not forgetting that the body mass of an average healthy man comprises approximately 62 per cent water, 16 per cent protein, 16 per cent fat, 6 per cent minerals, >1 per cent carbohydrates and other nutrients … he attempts to hold these rapidly accumulating facts, figures and variables in mental pyramidic arrangement while simultaneously attempting a mental pyramidic tally … and soon concludes that such mind-boggling holding, arranging and tallying (while also feeling the seductive lull of the Tempranillo) is next to nigh impossible, at which point he reaches across the table for a pen and a sheet of paper and, taking a calculator out of the table drawer, proceeds to calculate as follows:

Consumption: One (100g) unit of meat daily × 30 years = 1,095,000 g = 1,095kg

Assimilation: 50% (at an aver. of 40–60% assimilation rate) of 1,095kg = 547.5kg

Stored as flesh: 10% = 54.75kg

Divided by 30 years = 1.825kg assimilated

Body weight: 73kg

Assimilated meat as % of body weight = 1.825 ÷ 73 × 100 = 2.5

He concludes that the Luke-to-bovineovineporcineavine ratio is 40:1. He is 2.5 per cent animal.

Because his calculation does not take into account (his ignorance of) the complexities of chemical digestion and the anabolic, catabolic, deaminatory and myriad other functions of protein and amino acids; because of his scant knowledge of the coupling of intercellular water and active metabolic processes or the coupling of mammalian stress systems and human gut biomes, or his limited knowledge of intestinal enzymes, intestinal flora, the functions and processes of nutrient absorption, human metabolic rates and the factors affecting these (such as physical activity, health of the organs, emotional state, body toxins, body temperature and food temperature at times of consumption); because of his failure to apply deferential calculus to the calculation; because of his inability to adhere to the scientific method of calculation; because the figure arrived at (or a more accurate figure that might be arrived at using deferential calculus) takes no account of lateral gene transfer, epigenetic inheritance, epimutations (particularly meat-related epigenetic changes), or of the marriage of flesh unto flesh and instinct unto instinct and the thirty years’ accumulation of animal essence in his essence and animal soul in his soul; because the first time Gandhi ate meat he heard the lamb he had eaten bleating in his belly.

Has he ever abstained from eating meat or considered the benefits of routine fasting?

In his early childhood, as a result of his parents’ feeble attempt to respect the last vestiges of Catholicism still extant in them, the family half-heartedly abstained from meat on Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays. In 2004 he observed the twenty-four-hour Lenten fast with the Belvedere boys, during which he developed an acute headache that rendered him half blind and fully mute. At the end of the fast he experienced a brief feeling of elation followed by a profound – and again brief – sense of peace. While he retains a great admiration for those who lead disciplined ascetic lives, he suspects his own innate nature veers towards the gluttonous, the conger eel, making him an unlikely candidate for ascetic practices. Rachid, who fasted Ramadan annually, ardently advocated the benefits of fasting for the body, mind, and soul – and to ensure a place in Heaven. Luke watched the film Hunger three times. After one viewing he read about the process of ketosis and though the thought of his body eating itself from the inside out repulsed him, the knowledge that fasting helps repair hair follicles temporarily interested him.

What theories concerning mankind’s evolution interest Luke and what separate theories has he himself hatched?

Bio-techies and Astronomers Royal alike agree that (a) Darwinian evolution is drawing to a close; (b) Man is on the precipice of a great anthropogenic catastrophe; and (c) the post-human era is fast approaching, when computers will augment our brains and out-think and out-do mankind so that the shackles of body and blood are finally loosed, allowing the human species to diverge into artificially enhanced, intelligent cybernetic organisms. However, as we await our fleshless progeny and if, in the interim, man hasn’t already boiled himself to death through global warming or exterminated himself in a major environmental perturbation or so psychically damaged himself by intolerable stress, pervasive surveillance and inhuman violence that his soul is corroded beyond redemption and his very humanity is compromised beyond repair, Luke theorises that he – we – will either (a) eat ourselves into extinction by reason of obesity-induced immobility, infertility, sperm immotility and sterility or (b) epigenetically mutate – after reaching a tipping point of consciousness – into an enlightened, ungendered, asexual hermaphroditic species existing on a plane (and among a new biota on the planet) so spiritually elevated that the base instincts and appetites we are currently encumbered with will be sublimated into mystical states of bliss. In other words, Man will be either too fat to fuck or too blissed out to bother. Either way, Elijah is coming.

The consistent rise in childhood and adult obesity, diseases of the affluent and the growth in the fat industry – gastric reduction surgery, fat clinics, etc.; the preponderance of motorised buggies operated by gargantuan persons in supermarket aisles, airports and public spaces; the demand for oversized seats on passenger aeroplanes, the widening of aisles on said aeroplanes and the notable increase in width, girth and weight of flight attendants; the demand for the introduction of a sugar tax and other fat-reducing measures; the 50 per cent drop in human sperm count in the last forty years; the growth and widespread availability of online porn thus abrogating the need for sexual congress with another human being, thus-thus eliminating the possibility of reproduction; the growth and success rates of IVF and surrogacy; the no-longer-impossible-to-imagine scenario of The Handmaid’s Tale; the evolutionary queering of humanity encompassing the rise in non-binary sexual orientation, the broadening of the sexual continuum, the shifting and fluidifying of gender reaching its possible culmination in a median gender akin to the hermaphrodite, where we will all be both male and female or neither, but very content; the human impulse for enlightenment, the human urge for the expansion of consciousness and/or altered states of consciousness; the contingent growth in consciousness programmes, self-awareness courses and the popularity of spirituality gurus and mentors. The proximity of Sisyphus’s hour of descent as theorised by Albert Camus. The idea of the epiphany. The concept of the tipping point. The hypothetical phenomenon of the hundredth monkey effect. Luke’s own susceptibility to revelations.

Because the natural order of every living thing is that it ends. Because it will be time for a new era and the turn of a new species to inhabit whatever survives of this planet. Because when the time comes, it will be the right thing to happen. Because man is not the centre of the universe. Because the universe has undergone previous cataclysmic changes and survived and there is no reason to suspect it will not continue to exist. Because man will return to the great consciousness of the universe and get a well-earned rest after all his travails.

If we accept that the day is not far off when scientists will confirm that all sentient beings are conscious and indeed – and notwithstanding – that some degree of consciousness will be attributed to what we now regard as non-sentients (single-cell organisms, plants, organic matter), it is possible to imagine the universe as a great and continuous flow of consciousness, in the form of all matter, sentient and non-sentient, constantly in flux, moving and changing, forever dying and being reborn and transforming. In other words: the universe itself striving for greater consciousness. Luke is attracted to the ideas that philosopher David Chalmers postulates: first, that consciousness might be a fundamental feature or property of the universe, like space-time or energy or mass. And second, that consciousness might be universal: pan-psychism (pan meaning all and psyche meaning mind) – the idea that every system has some degree of consciousness. Not just humans and apes and dogs but also sea anemones and microbes and even sub-atomic particles. That microbes and photons might have some primitive element of subjective feeling, some precursor to consciousness, the first brief flickering of mind. And the further you advance along the continuum – from photon to sea-floor creature to mouse to man – the greater the consciousness. (And if we consider that 400 million years ago we swam in the same gene pool as creatures that later evolved into fish and birds (are not our hands converted fins?) then it’s not such a stretch to imagine we might share consciousness with these and other distant kin.) So, all across the planet, trillions of minds are constantly generating vivid subjective experiences not unlike our own. Such ideas, while odd to the Western mind, are not inconsistent with Eastern philosophies where the human mind is seen as continuous with Nature.

When he stands, prompted by the need to relieve himself, the wall to his fore and the two walls to his sides tilt to the right and he tilts with them before dropping back down on the chair and reconsidering whether the walk to the bathroom is absolutely necessary. He stands again, touches the spot above his pubic bone, which, being sensitive, indicates a full bladder. Lily meows. He turns, walks, slips and falls.

After undetermined hours and/or minutes, he finds himself prostrate not prone, semi-laterally inclined in a semi-foetal position, cold, stiff of neck, shoulder and back, with a pain in the thigh and the face. With a view of: the narrow leg of a chair, stout leg of the table. He chuckles. Stout. Mammy hated that. Used it on her enemies. That Bridget Kelly is getting very stout. Itchy face. Damp. Bloodied. Lily-clawed face.

Raising his upper body and placing his open right hand on the seat of a chair, he hoists himself upright, and stands still. Test of steadiness. The walls are tilting. Bursting to pee. Next stop, Kidney Junction. He puts one foot forward, then crosses the kitchen slowly to the sink. He pushes cups and cutlery aside. No harm, piss is sterile. He stands on his tippy toes and urinates. Such relief. The way ordinary things are undervalued. Why has he never read a good account of urination in a book?

He takes a glass from the draining board, rinses it, fills it from the cold-water tap and drinks it in large glugs to the sound of the running water. Then he splashes water on his face.

The reservoir at Roundwood. That he loves Leopold Bloom more than anyone else and he remembers well his first fall to the thrall.

When Poldy fed the gulls. No, when Poldy said, ‘Be kind to Athos.’ No, that wasn’t … When he saw Rudy’s ghost in an Eton suit and glass shoes and a little lambkin peeping out of his pocket.

With glass in hand, he crosses the kitchen, opens the lower-right press of the dresser and pours himself half a glass of Jameson whiskey. The first sip burns his tongue, his palate, then flows down his gullet. He emits a deep luxurious sigh. He steps towards the window, weaving a little. He rubs his chest. A touch of heartburn. The whiskey-blood swilling through his veins, rushing to the organs, the brain, the shrivelling corpuscles. Scorching the nerve endings. The cry of nerves, the worst cries in the world … Something to do with the Israelites, or Doomsday. He lifts his eyes to the clock: 1.25 … a.m. He drags a chair to the window, stands up on it and looks out at the full moon and the spilled down stars and experiences a moment of great clarity, expansion, increase. An inkling of revelation. On the cusp of something, maybe everything. He raises his face, opens his heart. He is high on the brow of the world now, in the universe’s glow. On the moon’s surface, his fellow-face. On the moon’s surface, the marsh of dreams, the sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the river of fecundity.

The glancing light of the moon on the dark Sullane. Previous moons on previous water. The mind of the river winking into being. The first ever rain on Lougher, the soaking of ground, the splitting of earth at Meenganine, the spring-water rising, the pure, clean gathering stream; water trickling over stones, stream becoming river. The descent from Mullaghareirk; the dark of Duhallow; the silence of bogs; the changing of light; the rounding of bends, the turning of tides, the telluric vigour, the sublunary snow. Solitary wolves at Caoille tuned to the pitch of the earth; the caves at Duneevin; the artefacts at Lefanta; the first human settlements with men sheltering in trees; scavenging dogs and rats, harvesters with sickles and stones. St Carthage sailing upriver, his band of monks silenced by the vision of God’s green beauty on the banks; plundering Vikings sailing upriver, silenced by the abundant possibilities. The monastic settlement, the Episcopal city, the glorious university when Oxford was still a cow-path. The massacre at Molana, the ruins at Rhincrew, the Templemichael Knights, the bloodbaths, the hooded hordes. The great houses on hills, the kitchen-hole drownings, the queuing of the scrofulous. The midstream islands, the mud-holes, the iron-ore mines, the weir at Rathmore. The boats and barges and schooners plying the waters with coal and corn, sand and gravel, salt and stone; the glint of salmon and lamprey and the heads of otters. The snow-white swans, the roosting birds. The river’s longing, the Illud Tempus. The remembrance of water. The cosmological clock ticking time back to zero.

Parataxis. All that is lost. All that is concealed. A sudden verticality in the horizontal. The primeval, medieval, coeval contents of the riverbed: drowned forests, ancient sap in the veins of ancient trees, eons of flora and fauna, incrustations of deep riches, of fossils and sand and silt, bipedal bones, teeth, fur and feathers. Calcious sediment of cold-blooded fish, warm-blooded mammals. Ancestral ooze: human, ovine, bovine, porcine, equine, lupine, corvine, canine, feline. The ancestral stock and sins of the multitudes. The soup of swamps and birdless forests before the age of man, before green-fringed banks and primitive ferns, before rocks and roots burst forth; before the river capture. The myriad of minute organisms below, above and beyond the perceptual register of man. The watery echoes of sonically different raindrops falling on multifarious leaves. Wetlands, mudflats, flyways of migrating birds. The chorus of thrush and blackbird, the warblers high and hidden. The brown river, the bright air, the running sky, the hidden lairs, the habitat of millions. The otters, eels, minks and minnows looking back at wading, half-amphibian man.

When a river erodes the land and acquires the flow from another river or drainage system, usually below it, the first river is said to have captured the second in an act of piracy. The waters of the captured river are usurped by the captor and, at this point, the two become one. The causes: erosion, the superimposition of drainage, tectonic earth movements, landslides, the formation of natural dams, the movement of glaciers. The natural course of one river is altered, thwarted; the river departs its own grid of understanding, changes direction, flows on and enters the sea at an entirely different location. An eternal separation from the source ensues, a catastrophic event – the tail severed from the head, the worm cut in two. The bend in the river, the turn of the Sullane at the Inch, is the very point of capture, where, seventy million years ago, one river beheaded the other and the aggressor lost its way and cut down into the sandstone ridges and pirated the lower river and its route. A calamity for both rivers. But is not evolution punctuated by such calamities, such upheavals? Is not the sixth extinction near at hand?

Is it the low that takes the high or the high that takes the low? He is not sure. Who is the pirate, the aggressor – the lower or the upper river? His head starts to hurt. He had always thought the upper river – at a weakened, eroded point in its riverbed – had dropped down into the lower river or a lower, dry riverbed and, being the stronger one, had taken over the weaker lower flow. But the geological accounts, if he recalls them correctly, say the most common form of capture, called abstraction, occurs when the river that flows at a lower level cuts through the land dividing it from another river flowing at a higher level, causing that higher river to divert and rechannel itself. But how can river water cut through the land above it? He squints into the darkness outside … Once there were two. Now there is one. He holds his head in his hands … Poor river … A broken will, a spectral presence. A savage grace.

That the rug has been pulled. That his life has been thwarted. That his destiny has changed.

That it forbears, is ever patient, ever suffering, ever enduring. Long forgotten by the gods, ever in the service of man. Holy, seminal, giver and sustainer of life, sanitator, hydrator, germinator of life, quencher of thirsts and fires, cleanser of bodies and souls, gladdener of hearts, delighter of eyes. Docile accepter of Fate. Where once it carried memories from the realm of the dead to bubble up in poets, the pure hue of blue now carries human waste to the sewers and moderates nuclear reactors. That, since time immemorial, its collective experiences and memories in all its states (solid, liquid, gas and those derivative thereof), during all its cycles and circumambient journeys, in all causative occasions of joy, beauty, suffering (the glint of salmon in its rapids, the tranquil spring well, the swimmer’s graceful stroke, the taking of life), and its presence at all natural, unnatural, scientific and unscientific actions, reactions and occurrences are all recorded and imprinted in its DNA. Bruised, battered, debased, diverted off course, forced through taps and pumps and pipes and turbines, catapulted through locks and dams and reservoirs and hydraulic colliders; endlessly recycled; swarmed with pathogens, sickened with leachate, bleachate, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, with PCBs and TCEs; choked with micro-beads, fossil fuels, trash-entrapped gyres; subjected to sedimentation, acidification, chlorination, eutrophication, humiliation, anoxia, hypoxia, electrolysis; physically degraded, chemically altered, molecularly distorted, atomically perverted, metaphysically defiled. Used, abused, electrocuted … poor exhausted water.

In the moonlight he runs. On the avenue he stumbles, falls, rises. On the road he walks towards the bridge of souls.

Divided, exiled from itself, each half eternally mourning the loss of the other, looking south – nostalgic for the old route, for the whorls of old currents and stone pillows, the original neural way. Longing for reunion. Longing to be known. Longing to be understood.

On the far bank, under a canopy of trees, two Charolais bulls hitched to a bronze plough. Above the trees, the church, the steeple. On the water, a trail of God’s saliva, the glint of little fishes, the lustre of reeds and grasses. The tremolo of wind in the trees. The blood-wounds of the town and its hinterlands trickling into the river. People crowding to the water’s edge. The river parting. The drenched world made visible: reeds and rushes, old boats and bicycles marinating in mud; bottles and cans and footballs and dolls and chicken bones and old mattresses and Madge Corcoran’s yellow Escort and Milo Finnegan’s VW Caddy. Madge and her baby, serene in the dark. Perished animals and the drownded dead, long accustomed to the depths now. All washed in the blood of the river. Tom Donoghue the county councillor in his suit and tie, Bina Rabbitte in her nurse’s uniform; Conor Mahon with his 21st birthday badge still pinned to his shirt; Jimbo McInerney still weeping for his horse, and Paudge Fleming and Bridget Flynn and Paddy Boyle and Ulick Veale and Ulick Vesey among the swarming souls. And on the surface, oblivious to it all, anglers angling and families boating and jet-skiers skiing and skinny-legged herons at the Inch and tractors barrelling over the bridge into town and trucks nosing up Main Street and Dilly Madden on the footpath cursing them all and Bun Heapy in from Botany for a barrel of gas and Paddy the Vet above with Paddy the Gas O’Donnell pulling a calf as their sons walk hand in hand into the river at Drumona and Paddy the Gas asking Paddy the Vet, Is it the Euphrates, Paddy, that’s the fourth river of Paradise?

What spectacle, in need of his contemplatio, consideratio and designatio, appears in the sky above the Inch?

A polygonal shape, a celestial templum, a sacred imago hovering above the water. Attended by a flight of birds, a trail of clouds, an eagle with the liver of a sacrificed goat in its beak. At the exact point of the river capture the heavenly templum aligns its axes with the river’s stars, lowers itself over the water, fixes itself to the river mundus, and is inaugurated. Ego te inauguro.

His soul in repose in an aqueous kingdom. The river in repose. Man and nature in perfect harmony. Time and space in perfect symmetry. The world a work of art.