Last night: McCabe's Bar. No Irishman ever fails to find an Irish pub on holiday. It is a national duty. Over a couple glasses of Iberian cognac I watch the South Africa-Tonga rugby match and sketch a few discreet studies of our neighbour, an old man with the fluffiest white sideburns. Later the husband draws me into the company of people from the North, of the Protestant persuasion. "You're in Orange country," the husband whispers. I am a little wary: all that history.

The husband teases them with the idea of a united Ireland. The two older men show us photos: a motorcycle, a Yorkshire terrier-Chihuahua cross, a Japanese girlfriend, the son who plays Gaelic football. "They're into that, the young ones," the father says bemusedly. The younger couple remembers all the music festivals they attended in the South only a few years ago. Everyone starts to relax, order rounds of Baby Guinness, toast "Slainte". Still, it is with some mutual relief when we part ways.

//

Monday, Monday, a dreamy lazy Monday at last. I lie in bed or on the sofa, alternating between napping and reading. I am often still for so long, one might mistake me for a corpse. The bedroom with its lacy shadows and sea foamy curtains is a perfect tomb.

I don't need the society of others, the company of even the husband. I don't want to look at beauty, for it requires energy and feeling. I don't want to think about food, because my appetite is only for these hours of solitude and silence.

I await that moment of pure self-disgust, when I will heave myself off whatever I am reclining on with a great huff, and hurriedly don clothes and sandals, to rush out into the world, miraculously exhumed, with several urgent imperatives, born from guilt, in mind.

That moment never comes.

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