He had come to the sea to think. To watch the water from the long, safe distance of his window, warmed by whisky and often little pills. His room was one of four positioned above a bar in town on a slanted street on Ireland’s east coast. He had never learned the name of the town. He had stayed there before, in the years before his impossible young marriage developed its greenstick fracture. That relationship, full of rookie mistakes, as his wife had liked to put it.

During the day, the far-off water was his companion, and by night—or what passed for night after the sun died off at 4 pm—his company existed in the pub below: endless fiddle melodies, leather-patched elbows, and that indecipherable, lyrical language. He would sit, nursing one heavy stout or two, in the very corner, letting the slow rich atmosphere settle about him. He would pass the hours spinning a coaster, coaxing nods from the old heads at the bar. He watched the population of the small place grow, filling to capacity at eight, with musicians now mixed with drinkers, children balanced on arms holding hot steaming port, the whole place tapping one foot, over and over. And as the merry shining faces grinned their small-town grins, and as a stranger’s shoulder rammed into his and he was caught in the whole wondrous rhythm of it all, it made him irrepressibly, impossibly sad. And yet, every night, there he was, three plane rides and countless hours from home, voluntarily crushed beneath the deep gorgeous history—eight thousand years at least—of the only place in the world in deeper denial than he.

He was not old, just thirty-three, and still retained the countenance of a younger man. In that other life, his image had been welded securely to wealthy suburbia, made prematurely middle-aged by pressed polo shirts and polar fleece, deck shoes and mute slacks. Here, in this town, he finally felt himself. Wrapped haphazardly in layers of warmth—scarves and flat caps and ridiculous galoshes—he could almost be local. Except when he ventured to the local store for his morning paper and cigarettes, and was forced to let out his coarse native language: sounds scratching at the air like lost, angry animals. How he longed for the keys to that golden gate of the Gaelic tongue. The oldest language, his wife had told him once. He would hang back in the shop, turning biscuit packets around aimlessly to catch just a shard of an old-time greeting. He waited often minutes for a local to approach the counter, to make conversation with the shopkeeper. Oh, those burbling, velvet sounds, that softened hint of a Germanic throat.

When he’d return to his room, he’d swallow a Valium and retreat to the endless heat of an epic afternoon bath. In his mind, underwater, that old language lapped. He saw a procession of gentle, glass-faced Irish girls, with that cliché he was so pleased to have confirmed: the softest of auburn hair. They traced his brow and stretched their milkmaid legs to the edge of the bath, one pink-painted toenail nestling neatly in the downturn of the hot water faucet. But soon, and always, and ever, a set of familiar worries returned, dulled by the drugs but still so acute. He’d let his head slip beneath the water, looking up at the bare bulb above, squiggled into some sort of meaning by the vague currents set off by his own breathing.

Which is not to say he was totally alone. The regulars at the pub knew him well enough, in that way of small-town people: a weary nod of the head, an imperceptible grunt. And while this particular movement was not native to the town, or indeed, the country, the locals here had worked it to a fine art; just walking down the main street at midday confronted you with a seemingly infectious plague of facial tics. On a rare night, he tried striking up a conversation with the least offensive-looking barmaid (there was a common misconception, he had discovered, among Irish teenagers: a thick redbrick tan and a joke-binocular mascara was considered the height of beauty), who, it turned out, had friends living in Australia. Although the conversation was pleasant enough, the barmaid kept looking over his shoulder and gaping her mouth, in a most—he thought—rude way. He soon realised that conversation, to this girl, was just a reflex action designed to pass the time until her shift ended and she could escape back into whatever part of the world she considered her own.

And there were the old men huddled at the pub’s entrance, smoking in proud, Easter Island colonies, in shirts with open collars, laughing into the piercing winter chill. They would beckon him over, offer him a cigarette, which he’d take, light, and let burn down to the tips of his frozen fingers. And when he was desperate, when his thoughts got just too much to ignore, he’d go up and sit near a tarted-up middle-aged woman at the bar and let her lean into him, squeeze his leg, dangle her jewellery-fed neck to his, tell him hoarse, gory details of her sexual yens. He never let her into his room, preferring instead the candid warmth of a fuck against an outside wall, or the squeezing of limbs in her tiny, slogan-stickered hatchback. And when they had finished, when they were tidying their clothes, rubbing their hands together for warmth, he would be struck by the true age of the woman, always pushing fifty, sometimes over, wondering at her own sad story; what surly children had worn her down, what mean alcoholic had forced her to leave behind happiness and hide forever instead behind a mask of gaudy false brass.

And in the mornings, after sleeping in late with the lingering darkness, he would rise to make tea from the mournful brown kettle that sat on a little ledge above the bathroom sink. While the water boiled, he’d turn on the light above the mirror and finger his newly bearded face. He had not shaved since his long stopover in Shanghai—a superfluous but necessary visit to stock up on non-prescription painkillers—and was almost fond now of the flecked black shadow taking form on his cheeks. And he’d look into his eyes, scattered with random twigs of blood, and as the kettle screamed like an unfed baby he would wonder how much more of this he could possibly take.