Surely I’d be more contented here, in Kerry. There’s a man who lives in the cottage at the end of the Earth on a cliff in Ballinskelligs, with early morning turf smoke piping out of the chimney. From his freshly whitewashed bread-loaf house, I’m sure he understands what it’s all about, as the light breakdances across the sea for him as he drinks tea or whiskey at the window. He must be in a constant state of euphoria from years of sun beams painting for him on the water – a splitting heart, a spray of baubles, a river of light snaking towards the toe of the slope he lives on.
I decide it’s a man, because of the hand-scrawled “No entry” sign and the low-bellied car. I decide that if this man were to be presented with a photo of the Earth from space and asked if that’s where he lived he’d say with a drawl, “‘Tis of course”. When they show me the same photo, in my east coast empire of concrete and cranes, I’ll say, “So I’ve been told. Mad, isn’t it?”.
A woman in a horsebox in Cahersiveen asks me where I’m from after I ask for a coffee. I live in Dublin, I say, because I’ve lived in so many places that I’m not sure where I’m from. “Eugh, Dublin! Always in a rush.” I don’t know if she decides to toy with me then, taking 10 minutes to produce the coffee as I stand quietly alone in a drizzle.
She’s right. I am always in a rush.
The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 25 to No 1
St Patrick’s Day Quiz 2025: 50 questions to test your Irishology
Adolescence review: A dark and often unbearable insight into the nightmarish extremes of our teenagers’ lives
The estate agent quoted a jaw-dropping figure for what he thought our house would go for
I’m not sure Dublin is to blame for my hastiness; it runs deeper than the city. I get nauseated by people’s languid speech. I can feel a sense of faintness come over me when someone’s voice blubs like a recording in slow motion. Come on, I’ll be thinking, come on, come on, come on. Out with it! I don’t have time for your slow mouth, your slurry syllables.
Some little fairy sprinkles me with luck and I end up in a stone cottage for a week-long residency with writers’ and artists’ retreat Cill Rialaig. The power goes off. After a few hours I emerge and ask a man working on something down the road if he knows anything about the outage. Being a hair’s breadth on the right side of despondence, he says, very slowly, that the power will be back at half past five. With absolutely no change in his demeanour, facial expressions or tenor, more gloopy words drip from his mouth: “You can have a sup of tea here if you want.” He looks down, and I after him, at a whistling kettle on a fire nestled in a curve of the low stone wall he is working behind. We look at it together for several seconds like it is some dead creature that we have come across and made a silent pact to bury together.
There are a dozen islands scattered miles out in the green sea behind him, shards, hunks and dollops of rock to spend all day marvelling. This man is as unmoved as the ancient stones around him. It should be of no surprise that he has cobbled together an open fire in the middle of a March morning to boil water for tea on the side of this sheer slope before offering to share it with a passing stranger with the temperament of the lepping hares on the hill.
Maybe with time, Kerry could douse my frenetic soul with stillness. I could adjust to the pace of the farmers with lobster-skinned faces and deep, lethargic tones. I could learn how to lean against their aloofness like a door jamb. Over years, I would absorb their gnarliness, mirroring the knuckly, wind-shaped trees around them. They are calm, but not quite at ease. There is a heaviness that makes me feel like the people have been here for a hundred lives. They know something I don’t know. What they know is in the sea. If I could look at it for long enough, be in it for long enough, I’ll figure it out.
I’ll go back to my beloved Dublin, and Kerry will go back to my reverie. Soon, hopefully, not too long from now, I’ll turn the corner somewhere a good way past Killorglin, where the land cleaves open and the endless horizon will wind me like a ball in the chest. When I roll around a hill near Caherdaniel, I’ll take in the expanse and briefly, I’ll understand everything, like the man in the cottage at the end of the earth.
