On the Edge of the Loch: A Psychological Novel set in Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

untended reception desk. Just then his glance diverted; in the distance the young, green-eyed girl caught his eye; once again she seemed to gesture toward him. At that moment a train of shuffling bodies spilled between them, headed by the celebrating couple. When it passed, the girl was gone. He waited another minute, confused, torn for time, and left.
    At 6.17pm he trudged into Aranroe train station, sent a half-wave to William, and boarded the 6.20pm express to Dublin. As the train started, his eyes met William’s through the open window. The old station master tipped his tattered de Gaulle cap. An instant later they both waved. Tony watched until William was no more.
    After the blackness of the tunnel, an almost-hidden Mweelrea barely showed. He pledged to climb to the summit, just like at fourteen he pledged to come back home, and here he was, thirteen years after, good to his word. Soon again another good-bye, he thought, another forced departure. He pulled his mind from the passing countryside, into reflection. Some things, he had learned, could be lost, even the sacred, and other things, he knew only too well, persisted and persecuted. He needed to learn how to let go, how to discard, and what to save. Yet even when he tried hard, as he had done since he got out, there were always pools to drown in, as Joel Vida had cautioned him; for him it was Jesus Pomental, then the unbearable trial, then Shift Commander King Kong Yablonski’s vile reign and bloody end, and his father’s death, and stinking prisons; these were the things that wallpapered his mind, he had to deal with them, put them each in their place, and move on.
    * * *
    Though Kate tried a number of times to get inside his head, he did not accede. To him the facts of his own life were not worthy of the few hours they would share.
    He said nothing of Lenny. They spent time reminiscing about growing up in the heart of Dublin. Birthplace of Shaw, O’Casey and Behan, as their father had always boasted. The city that of the five emigrant MacNeills only Kate had reclaimed, a decade earlier as a twenty-nine-year-old with a new counselling qualification. They recounted their exodus as children from the city centre to the north shore, five miles out, to woods and hills and Bull Island, all bunched together in one previously impossible-to-imagine place, and how soon they grew to love the wonders of never-ending fields, and lakes and tree-swings and apple- and pear-orchards ripe for robbing, and old haunted mansions and chestnuts, plus their first house of their own, which they never stopped prizing. They talked about sisters Violet and Patricia, now both settled in America, the middle two between Kate at the top and him at the bottom, about Ronan’s dying and how warmly they remembered him, short life that he’d had. And mother, now in Florida, in her mid-sixties, buying a new condominium and doing very well according to her infrequent letters. And poor dead father’s gambling: horses, greyhounds, anything that kept the bookies in big cars, and his life-long battle for trade union solidarity on the docks. They recalled warmly, too, occasional trips to their maternal grandparents’ tiny farm in Sligo, and watching the countryside roll by out of dirty bus windows.
    Kate and Tony’s spirits mixed easily, the closeness that had long tied them as strong as ever. In these hours his darkness became a lie he’d been telling himself. It seemed certain, as it always did with Kate, that he could start over, neutralise the catastrophic events of Newark and prison, chart a new life through the wisdom that comes out of dark experience. After everything, all the horror, he could do that. Through losing he could win.
    Then, all too soon, it ended, conceding only to time.
    That morning, without sleep, Tony MacNeill departed for America, reliving every instant of the fifteen minutes spent with Lenny Quin. Just the beginning, he pledged, there was more to come. For no fear inside