In Ireland the sky was blue and we went to the beach. No, really! We rented the smallest, cheapest car from the airport Avis, me and Olive and Nora and Walter, so small and so cheap a car that the desk girl didn’t even try to talk us into an upgrade because it was clear we weren’t looking for luxxxe. “A small automatic,” I’d said, and we walked across the parking lot, following the instructions on the rental form that read: Lot number: Fence.

She was round and golden, like a buttered biscuit out of the oven, an Irish soda bread loaf of a car, and we took the highways south, tucked in between the massive Thursday morning delivery trucks, circling Dublin and southwards still, till the signs read “Wicklow” and we hooted with glee like a weekend away.



We sat down for ham and cheese sandwiches on brown bread that first day, and tea in a yellow enamel teapot. We wandered down the main street called Main Street, into a toy shop and a thing shop and a Baltic food shop. “Polskie produkty!” Nora said, and we went in to unfamiliar cheeses and tubes of red sausage and graphic tubs of yogurt. From the butcher we bought lamb, and there was lamb for dinner that night, and salty roasted potatoes, and a bottle of wine, and then another.

Nora’s house is on the water, with the view of the squat red-and-white lighthouse and the fishermen and the boats coming in to dock in the river. At night we stood on the balcony and the stars were low and bright. The sound was the sea, the sea, there was the lighthouse flashing on the water, and the sound was the sea.

In the morning I stood on the balcony as the weathered fishing boat came lurching in. “I’m going to yell ‘Top o’ the mornin’ to ya!’,” I said, “D’you think they’ll hear?” “They won’t hear you across the water,” they said, “but we will, and we will smack you.”



The breakfasts were those breakfasts that stretch into lunch, with the coffee pot always on the heater and the blue milk jug at the ready, with the plates cleared just in time for more, please. There were raisin scones one morning and corn muffins another; there was melted cheese on toasted potato bread one noontime, and squash risotto and stuffed eggplant one lazy late afternoon. One night a rifle through the cupboards turned up a box of brownie mix – “No Pudge! Fat-Free Brownie Mix,” the box read. “Just Add Yogurt.” We added yoghurt, and a bar of chocolate, and a couple of good glugs of whiskey. We ate half the tin before we dragged ourselves off the couch and into our coats, across the bridge and down the street for three Guinnesses and a half-pint of cider.



The days were for poking around in the main-street shops, for an almond tart from The Griddle, for the beach at Brittas Bay. Olive and I teased the waves till the bottoms of our jeans were soaked, and then we retreated to the sand and the smooth stones. After, the boys kicked a football about in an empty parking lot the colour of the end of summer, while a farmhouse on top of a hill was orange warmth golden glow into the twilight. Sunday we tumbled down the country lanes, and all around us it was green and green, and then green again. Nights, the fine, soft rain came down in the halos of streetlights.



And there was Nora’s band of merry men – Donnchadh, a Crispin Glover double whose girlfriend took weed out of her handbag; who made us laugh and then took off into the Saturday night with a cold beer in his jacket. He hugged me and said, “Good-bye, my chicken.” Brian, who directed us home via the long drive home from the beach to show us the look-out point over the town. “You bring a girl up here,” he said, “tell ’er her eyes sparkle like the lights in the nighttime.” “If you don’t get her then,” he said, “you were never gonna get her.”



Oh, but it was good to get out of the city, to hear the sea from the sofa, to call to the ducks and the swans under the stone bridge, to watch the seal in the water, to have him watch us. I woke up early one morning for a walk down the lane with the little doors and the lace curtains. A little old lady was in red against the morning grey. The hills surrounding the town were waking too, and dotted, already, with cows.