understand. I know I was twenty-three, I had just started working at the magazine, you and I were living together in that horrible flat in the Liberties, and Kate was still in Dublin, and Tom, and Aoife. We went out to parties together, we had people over for dinner, we drank too much wine, we got into arguments. Sometimes Simon would call me on the phone from Paris so we could complain to each other about work, and while we were laughing, I would hear Natalie in the background, putting away plates in the kitchen. All my feelings and experiences were in one sense extremely intense, and in another sense completely trivial, because none of my decisions seemed to have any consequences, and nothing about my life – the job, the apartment, the desires, the love affairs – struck me as permanent. I felt anything was possible, that there were no doors shut behind me, and that out there somewhere, as yet unknown, there were people who would love and admire me and want to make me happy. Maybe that explains in some way the openness I felt toward the world – maybe without knowing it, I was anticipating my future, I was watching for signs.
A couple of nights ago, I was getting a taxi home on my own after a book launch. The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again – the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything. As soon as I realised what I was feeling, I tried to move toward it in my thoughts, to reach out and handle it, but it only cooled a little or shrank away from me, or slipped off further ahead. The lights in the empty offices had reminded me of something, and I had been thinking about you, trying to imagine your house, I think, and I remembered I’d had an email from you, and at the same time I was thinking of
Simon, the mystery of him, and somehow as I looked out the taxi window I started to think about his physical presence in the city, that somewhere inside the city’s structure, standing or sitting, holding his arms one way or another, dressed or undressed, he was present, and Dublin was like an advent calendar concealing him behind one of its million windows, and the quality of the air was instilled, the temperature was instilled, with his presence, and with your email, and with this message I was writing back to you in my head even then. The world seemed capable of including these things, and my eyes were capable, my brain was capable, of receiving and understanding them. I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.
I had no idea you had been reading the Bible in hospital. What made you want to do that? And did you find it helpful? I thought it was very interesting what you said about the forgiveness of sins. I asked Simon the other night whether he prays to God, and he told me yes – ‘to say thank you’。 And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn’t want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.
17
The second Friday evening in May, Felix spent eight minutes in the security queue leaving work. One of the people ahead of him had set the machine off and was taken into a side room to be searched. A sheet of paper on the door read: SUPERVISORS
ONLY, ID TO ENTER. The queue stalled outside and the sound of raised voices came from inside the room. Felix exchanged a glance with the person standing in front of him, but neither spoke. By the time he got through the scanner and into his car, it was thirteen minutes past seven. The sky was dense and white overhead, with shafts of sunlight penetrating here and there through the low cloud. He switched the CD player on, reversed out of the parking space and left the industrial estate.
A few minutes down the road, he pulled off into a flat gravel area overlooking the sea.
A wooden visitor centre at the entrance was closed up and no other cars were nearby. At one end a large yellow posterboard displayed information of historical and geographical interest. Felix parked at the outermost edge of the lot, the Atlantic stretching grey and rough outside the windshield. He unbuckled his seatbelt and unzipped the black puffer jacket he was wearing, revealing a faded-green sweatshirt underneath, with a small white embroidered logo. He took his phone out of his pocket, switched it on, and then opened the glovebox and started to roll himself a joint. The phone made various buzzing noises, receiving messages which had come in while he was at work, and his eyes flicked back and forth between the screen in his lap and the rolling paper on the steering wheel. When he was finished, he held the unlit joint in his mouth and scrolled through the messages and notifications on-screen: various social media alerts and app notifications, and one direct text message, from his brother Damian.