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for her, hung out to dry, the woollen ponchos full of life beside the ordinary clothes of our days, my father’s vests, his trousers, his underwear, the banality of them held tight with wooden pegs.
    These days, without Mam around, the old man has let the rings of dirt settle down around him – eleven years of it on his shirt collars.
    In the bathroom, clumps of hair sat in the sinkhole, under the waterlines. A tiny sliver of soap in the dish. I got some shampoo out of my backpack, sank down into the bath. It was nice, that black silence outside the bathroom window, no mosquitoes or dune bugs battering against the air. Only a couple of harmless moths throwing themselves stupidly against the window. I lay in the bathtub until the water grew cold. At midnight I woke the old man to see if he wanted to go upstairs to his bed, but he grunted sleepily: ‘I’m grand here, it’s comfortable, I sleep here all the time.’
    The edge of the chair made a red line on his face, which ran down to the sparse grey beard. His beard may have its own entropy, so that instead of growing outwards it is shrinking inwards to his skin. It looked like a stubble of only one or two weeks, but it has probably been there for months. Two large patches on his cheeks, where the hair doesn’t grow anymore, adding symmetry to his bald pate. I watched him as he woke. He rubbed the red line away from his cheek, coughed, reached for the stubbed butt in the ashtray, smelled it, flicked it towards the fireplace, lit a new one. ‘They taste bloody awful when they’ve been stubbed out,’ he said. He held the new smoke between his teeth, looked around the room. ‘Jesus, it’s chilly enough though, isn’t it?’
    I went to the cupboard underneath the stairs to get the blue beach blanket. It smelled a little musty. Waited for him to finish smoking, handed it to him. He pulled it around himself, tucked it up to his chin, gave me a wink. He brushed my hand away, though, when I offered him a cushion to put behind his head.
    ‘Conor,’ he said, ‘I thought you were dead, for crissake.’
    He’s the same crotchety old bastard that he was when I left five years ago. Bit stupid for me to come home and think that it might be any different, I suppose. But a week is a week and we can probably tolerate each other that long – besides, I’ll have to make arrangements to get up to Dublin for a few days, get everything sorted out for my visa. But I wonder what he’d say if I told him that these days I’m living in a cabin in Wyoming, working jobs that hardly pay the rent, just drifting along. Probably wouldn’t give a damn, though, wouldn’t faze him one bit. Living his days now with those slow castings.
    I sat up in the bedroom tonight and looked out the window to the bible-dark of the Mayo night, the stars rioting away. In a strange way it’s nice to be back – it’s always nice to be back anywhere, anywhere at all, safe in the knowledge that you’re getting away again. The law of the river, like he used to say. Bound to move things on. When I left home I promised myself I’d never return – at the train station he shoved a ten-pound note in my hand and I threw it right back at him as the train pulled away. But enough of this. Enough whining. I am home now, and a million possibilities may still lie outside my window, curlews resurrected to the night if I want them to be.

WEDNESDAY
    grand morning for the dogs
    Cooked breakfast for him this morning, but he didn’t want any. He said that ‘sunnyside up’ is an American notion and that I’ve developed a bit of an accent to go along with my cooking.
    He just sat with that lazy inertia in his eyes and peddled the eggs around on the plate with his fork, leaving a trail of grease. Every now and then he touched the fork against his teeth. His lips moved as if chewing something, the lower one reaching out over the top. They made a dry sort of smacking sound, settled down to nothing again. He steered his finger