Was she kidding? I’d have just stayed there then.

In bed that night, after a slow lingering lovemaking, we were entwined in each other and she asked,

“Are you content to be with me Jack?”

I told the truth,

“More than my bedraggled heart could ever have imagined.” After I got home and we were arranging for Laura to come to Galway, I went to the church, lit a candle, pleaded,

“I’ve never asked for much, but if it doesn’t screw with some inflexible Divine plan, could I please have this woman with me, could Paris be, indeed, A Moveable Feast?”

And, I don’t know, the candle flickered, went out.

An omen?

Maybe.

My drinking. She was aware of it, Jesus, how could she not? But seemed to think there was hope.

I abetted the illusion. No doubt, I’d fuck it up. Sure as the granite on the walls of Galway Cathedral. But if this were my one last day in the sun, then I intended to bask.

My odd times friend/accomplice/conscience was Stewart. A former drug dealer who’d reinvented himself as a Zen-spouting entrepreneur. He’d saved my life on more than one occasion. I was never sure if he actually liked me but I sure as fuck intrigued him. I could hear strains of Loreena McKennitt carried on the light breeze from somebody’s radio. Worked for me, till my mobile shrilled.

I answered, heard,

“Jack.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Stewart.”

Before I could snap off some pithy rejoinder, he said,

“Malachy has been badly hurt.”

Father Malachy, bane of my life. Close confidant of my late mother, he despised me almost as much as I did myself. Stewart still clung to the notion I could be redeemed. Malachy believed I had no future and my present was pretty much fucked too. His ingrained hatred of me was fuelled by the fact I’d once saved his clerical arse. He could have been the poster boy for “No good deed goes unpunished.”