The Night Swimmer Read Online Free PDF

tin bucket. Outside the windows the intermittent hum and beat of the harbor. In the bar Albert and Fred paced out distances and shouted into mobile phones, pints in hand. By the early afternoon the music downstairs would come on and I would go down and find Fred with the dartboard demonstrating his winning form to Albert.
    I was thinking, I said, I could scout out some good spots. The islands are supposed to have the best entries. They have actual beaches.
    Fred walked over and put his arms around me and gave me a series of intermittent squeezes, the air wheezing out of my lungs. He was deliriously happy.
    Explore the islands, he said. Stay a few days. Come back and tell me all about it.
    I wish you were coming, I said.
    No, he said, you don’t.
    Fred knew that long-distance open-water swimming isn’t something you can really do with another person. After a few minutes you are consumed with the roar and crackle of the sea, and after an hour you are swimming in the ocean of your mind, alone.
    Albert had booked a room for the next six months at a bed-and-breakfast on Cape Clear Island, as a kind of bonus to use until the pub was finished and we had found proper housing. He gave me a map of the island and a ferry schedule.
    Have to stay out on Cape Clear, he said, if you want to know the real Irish.
    There were few points of entry around Baltimore unless I wantedto go in off the docks in front of the small crowds of sullen locals waiting for the ferry. So I packed up my gear in my rubberized duffel, along with a backpack with a sweater, jeans, underwear for a week, my tourist map of the island, small laminated sea charts of Roaringwater Bay, and my hardback copy of The Journals of John Cheever sealed in a Ziploc bag.
    Sitting on the seawall in the harbor waiting for the ferry I spotted a small dark head in the water just off the pier. A lone gray seal, with its sad dog eyes glossy and deep, quietly watching me. I walked to the end of the pier to get a closer look and it seemed unperturbed by my approach, regarding me with its unblinking eyes, then with a liquid movement it dipped its head and was gone.
    *  *  *
    I don’t mind the term blow-in, Stephen shouted to me over the noise of the ferry’s diesel engine. The wind brought sea spray over the gunwale and into our laps, soaking my jeans. Stephen, wrapped tight in his parka, didn’t seem to notice.
    However, Stephen said, I do mind the use of the word fucking placed before it. That’s what they call you around here: fucking blow-ins.
    The ferry rocked in the choppy swells, and the other passengers, about a dozen people, most dressed in various kinds of flimsy coats and carrying satchels and boxes of groceries wrapped in plastic, huddled together at the midsection taking refuge behind the pilothouse. I could not tell if they were speaking Irish or just the gravelly, heavily inflected English of West Cork.
    Stephen wore a knit cap, his round face bordered with a neatly trimmed beard. He was like a large rotund badger wrapped in human clothes.
    Ah, he said, what can you do? It’s a beautiful place all the same.
    His accent was not Irish, rather pleasantly English. The ferry threaded its way through strands of rock and barren half islands, the green slopes of Sherkin Island ahead, Cape Clear a murky shadow beyond.
    You see, Stephen continued, if you weren’t actually born on the island, then you are a fucking blow-in. Meaning you’ve blown in on the winds, not a real islander. I’ve been here for eighteen years and I’m still a fucking blow-in.
    I tried to smile, my cheeks wind-blasted and stiff.
    Stephen told me he had a six-acre plot on the northeast side of the island, where he ran a small farm with his wife. A few cows, mules, and hens, nothing fancy, he said. His daughters lived on the mainland. They had come to Cape Clear Island on holiday when the girls were children, and returned many times over the years. When the