Who cared?

We grabbed it while it lasted.

Eyre Square, people lying out in the sunshine. Ice cream vendors peddling slush at five euros a pop. The country had, on a second referendum, said yes to the Lisbon Treaty. We took that for what it was,

….a brief stay from Death Row.

I was coming off the worst case of my bedraggled career. Literally, a brush with the devil. I muttered,

“Darkness visible.”

Had sworn,

“Never, never going down that dark path again.”

Whatever it was, the occult, devilment,

Xanax, delusion, it had shaken me to the core. I still kept the lights on in the wee hours. In my apartment in, get this, Nun’s Island.

Who said God had no sense of the ridiculous?

To add bemusement to bafflement, I met a woman. After the devil, I’d gone to London on one of those late deal Internet offers. Met Laura. An American, aged forty-two, and, to me, gorgeous.

She made my heart skip a beat. She was a writer of crime fiction. At my most cynical, I thought I was simply material for her next book. A broken-down Irish PI, with a limp and a hearing aid.

Yeah, that would fly.

Did I care?

Did I fuck?

She liked me.

I grabbed that like the last beads of the rosary. She had rented a house in Notting Hill and was due to come and stay with me for a week. But hedging our collective bets, we went to Paris for five days, see if there was any real substance in what we thought we had. February in that wondrous city. Should have been cold and bitter.

Nope.

Such Gods there are gave us the Moveable Feast. Glorious freak spring weather. We had a lovely hotel close to the Irish Institute and were but a Bonjour from the Luxembourg Gardens, where we spent most of our time. I was nervous as a cat, so long since I’d been in a bed with a woman, a woman I hadn’t paid for, that is. My scarred body, I dreaded she would be repulsed by it. The opposite, she seemed to embrace my hurt and pain. Whispered as she ran her fingers along one lengthy scar,