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  Knowing that she would not sleep, she organised an automated upload schedule for her blog and social media accounts, everything primed to publish at the best time to reach as many readers as possible. In the event of something happening to her, it would take seven days before her readers started wondering where she was. A morbid thought.

  Her personal email account had far less traffic. Her stepsister had messaged, a few days ago. Shade clenched her jaw. There’s no way she’ll make me a godmother if she thinks I’m ignoring her.

  “How are you getting on in Ireland?”

  Shade read the meaning that Oliva omitted. “Good, same as anywhere else this side of morning. I can confirm that hangover and jet lag don’t mix well at all. Send sympathy.”

  A green light came into life beside Oliva’s picture, indicating that she was active.

  Shade had not expected a response so soon. The bus slowed. Shade looked up in time to see a sign that informed her that they were coming off the motorway into Galway City. She used that as an excuse to ignore the implied question, “Are you okay being back in Ireland?”

  “Arriving in Galway now, keep me updated on the baby. Bye!” Shade typed.

  Before her trip she had studied every path that she would need to walk the streets of Galway with the confidence of a local. Act like you belong, makes you less of a target for pickpockets. She had heard that advice often enough from fellow travellers that she added it to a series about travel safety on her own website.

  A heavy sea fog grounded all flights to the Aran Islands, which meant her only option for getting out there that morning was the ferry. She wandered the main streets in search of food, exploring the city through the lens of her camera. Shade sat in Eyre Square waiting for the transfer bus. Cawing seagulls contested car horns for the most annoying sound. The birds spotted her breakfast roll and the remains of a muffin and started edging towards her. Irish seagulls have nothing on Italian pigeons. The flock circling above her grew larger. Some landed close to test her and not seem squeamish in front of their peers. Remembering what happened with the pigeons in Rome, Shade threw the end of her breakfast one way and ran the other before they could mug her.

  She strolled by hostels and hotels taking pictures for a “Best places to stay while in Galway” post. It was only recently that she could entertain the idea of staying in luxury hotels, though she found it hard to spend the money without seeing the high thread count in the bed linen as contrails from flights she could have bought instead. Besides, that’s off brand. Even if money was not an issue she would always choose a decent hostel over a fancy hotel any day. They were, in her estimation, the friendliest places on the planet. Almost everyone is in the same situation – exploring a new country or city. Where else was a conversation about the weather actually of interest? They are a great place to go to when looking for temporary friends. And you can read all the books available on travel, but there is no better education than the one you get from meeting travel veterans and hearing their horror stories in hostel common rooms.

  Shade drank strong liquid soul from a take-away coffee cup she clasped in her hands to warm them. It was easy to differentiate the tourists from the islanders on the bus to the ferry. The locals spoke Irish in thick, lyrical accents and were dour at the prospect of a two-hour journey that had long lost all novelty for them. To Shade though, the open rocky expanse of Connemara’s landscape drained her camera’s battery and filled two notebook pages.

  She joined the crowd queuing to get on board a large boat. “This one’s heading to Inis Mór,” the gateman said after taking one look at the colour of her ticket. “You’re over there on that one bound for Inis Meáin.” He pointed to a much smaller boat, the senior of the harbour. “You’re the first stop.”

  The second gate man waved her through without a word. There was hardly anybody else walking down the gangway. She stood at the rear of the boat watching as the deckhands began their practised routines before settling in themselves. The ferry ambled out of the sheltered harbour. Their wake curled away like an opening seam, disappearing into dense, muffling fog.

  High waves made her seek shelter inside the cabin. She sat behind an excited French couple.

  In open water the white-capped waves that looked docile from the coast now broke against the ship with worrying force. Spray lashed against the windows. In her mind Shade could hear tiny cracks forming on the glass. One minute she saw sky, the next she looked straight into the dark greenish-blue of the Atlantic. The French tourists became silent and hunched over until one of them bolted to the bathroom. The other one soon followed, he sprang up to fill the only other toilet on board. The locals did not seem surprised. Shade expected to see money change hands as they placed wagers on how well the unaccustomed would stand the rough crossing. A deckhand put down his paper to see what they were laughing at and grinned at her. None of the regulars seemed the slightest bit perturbed.

  “Tourists,” Shade said nodding at the recently vacated seats.

  She cringed at the memory of saying that not fifteen minutes past as she lay across three seats gulping down air. Tears streamed into her hair. Her breakfast had notions of travel. Locked muscles now hurt from shaking. The journey was taking so long that she wondered if the captain had missed the island and was now sailing out into the Atlantic Ocean. She opened the map on her phone and zoomed in to her location with stiff fingers. It took a while for the details to sharpen. The satellite image showed a maze of stone walls and a few bands of habitation. The most striking feature was all the grey. Finally the ferry slowed and angled itself through the storm walls into port. Large buoys slid down the side of the ship.

  Once enough passengers had got off ahead of her she stood on uneasy legs and tried to slink off the ferry. A group of old women bound for Inis Oírr smiled kindly when she looked up to see if anyone had noticed. They all did. She saw patient laughter waiting until she was out of earshot.

  “I’m going to lie down,” Shade said.

  “You’ve forgotten your bag,” one woman with stark white hair said.

  For a moment Shade actually contemplated leaving it to spare herself a few extra seconds on board. As she shouldered the backpack she decided that, if the fog never cleared and a plane never came for her, she would make a good go of starting a life on Inis Meáin. She was never leaving by boat.

  The French couple sat pale and shivering on deck, their final stop was the other island. Had Shade been set to stay on Inis Oírr she would have still disembarked here.

  A low tide made no difference to the pontoons at Ros an Mhil, but on the island they needed to climb to the top deck to disembark. She looked away from the faces of the lead-bellied ferry men. In doing so she noticed a pinewood coffin beneath the seats. She blanched at the sight of it, tasted bile and swallowed hard, trying not to think about the burning in her throat.

  “Are you here for her?”

  Shade followed the voice and realised another passenger was watching her. The man was tall and tanned in an Irish way, which meant he was covered with freckles. Unkempt and indifferent to fashion. She shook her head and he lost interest in her as if she had disappeared. His eyes lingered on the coffin for a moment as he turned back in line.

  She stood by the railing trying not to heave as the passengers left in slow, single file.

  A small group crowded around a thick white sack. She peeked over the head of a child and saw a wide-eyed, brown calf staring up at them. A reflexive “Aww” escaped her lips, drawing the attention of the islanders.

  “That’s dinner,” one said, and then laughed at the dismayed look etched across her face.

  “The island isn’t volcanic, is it?” Shade asked, only now noticing the white plumes of smoke rising from three separate parts of the island.

  This comment drew more attention and furrowed brows. Shade pointed towards the white pillars of smoke rising through thinning fog. She took the place of the calf as object of their curiosity. She only hoped she did not mimic i
ts perplexed expression.

  “Ah, they’re only burning a bit of rubbish. No harm.” He spoke in Irish then, to the others, and they laughed.

  Feeling horrid, Shade shuffled away to the end of the pier wall where she dropped her bag and slid down against it. The islanders ignored her for the most part. The crew unloaded cargo with haste. Families collected their own while hosts corralled their guests. The man that had caught her staring at the coffin helped as a few careful men lifted the coffin onto the back of a trailer, then he walked on. He never spoke a word to those who helped him. They respected his animosity by returning it in kind.

  One man put his shopping on the back of a bike that was not chained up, and cycled away. After a bit of time living in New York City that particularly surprised her, unless he did not own the bike, in which case she was quite used to that. The ferry unhitched its tethers and set off again into the rough.

  The pier soon emptied leaving her alone and heaving from the journey. No trees grew on the island to obstruct the view. As she waited for the seasickness to fade the fog cleared. Lethargic white clouds drifted overhead. The outline of two stone fortresses dominated its silhouette. A raw limestone slab on the edge of the Atlantic. A labyrinth of stone farmed and made into walls to hem in more stone. Shade took pictures and studied the features and contours of the island on her screen.

  I’m sitting with my back to Ireland and over the rise of Inis Meáin and across the Atlantic somewhere is New York. She missed it, but not enough to stay. A faded blue outline of a flower was all that remained of her New York friend’s attempts at adding to her tattoo of Chantham Island Forget-Me-Nots. She took a careful sip from her canteen and then splashed some of the water on her hand to wash off the remains of the ink.

  When she was sure she was not going to vomit she stood and set out for her temporary home. I have a warm welcome in mind for my new bed. Walking along a small seaweed-strewn beach, she watched waves curl across golden sand like melted butter scraped across toast. The water was so clear that you only knew its presence from the play of wind and light across its surface. She took a long deep breath, the air was clean and cool. Then the wind changed direction, and she got a whiff of mouldering seaweed and gagged.

  It was impossible not to notice the walls. Looking left cross the Foul Sound was Inis Oírr and behind that the imposing Cliffs of Moher. To the right was Inis Mór, largest of the three islands. Robins and finches hopped across the dry stone walls, while wrens wriggled through the gaps. Vast swathes of barren, stark and beautiful rock. Things only grew here after generations of effort. A purple haze hovered above fields of grass that had gone to seed.

  She unpacked her scratched and battered drone. When convenience and the law permitted she took an aerial bearing of new locations. Travel blogging was all about showing a unique perspective on the world. There were plenty of detractors of her work. She was always conscious of her writing but she never second-guessed drone footage. What better way to see the world than a bird’s-eye view? That set her apart from other bloggers who saw drones as a needless expense. For many of her readers she acted as their eyes for places they would never see.

  The propellers whined, startling a few curious cows that sauntered away in fright. A donkey in the adjacent field stood unperturbed, his grey head resting on the stone. Shade photographed it from the camera hanging around her neck while the drone hovered a foot in the air. When she tried to launch it a red warning light indicated it had already flown out of signal range. “I hate you,” she said to it. The unblinking light, that had become a common problem, reminded her of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  After a few tense seconds the warning light went off and and it shot up into the air in response, Shade liked to imagine, to the unsavoury thoughts she was having towards the old drone. On the small screen of the controller the ground appeared as a monotone mosaic, expanding into greens and earthy browns, a solid rock almost indifferent to the attempts at cultivation upon its surface. You had to respect the tenacity or stubbornness that enabled people to live here, before there was decent internet.

  Panning the camera up Shade spotted a dark veil encroaching on the island. She brought the drone down and stuffed it back into her backpack after pulling out her raincoat. She hurried towards the village.

  Sheets of rain lashed across the land, a wall of water that announced itself with a few polite drops. It passed as quickly as it struck, off to bother Inis Oírr. The wet rock reflected light, turning the land into cracked sheets of burnished silver.

  An old van pulled up beside her. The year on the licence plate was only a few years younger than she was.

  A woman leaned over the empty sun-bleached passenger seat and rolled down the window. “Where are you heading?” she asked.

  “A man named Padraig is renting his cottage to me for a few days.”

  “That’s right? Hop in so out of the rain sure.”

  It was hardly a drizzle now, but the weight of her backpack was mostly from expensive electronics so she accepted the lift.

  “Which Padraig now? The island’s full of them.”

  “Close to the pub.”

  “Yeah you’ll find most of them there.” She smiled and drove on.

  “Whoever starts selling bikinis with rain hoods here will make a fortune,” Shade said.

  “The forecast gives good weather ahead, just a few showers. Are you here long?”

  “Only for a week.”

  “Well you’ve come on the right one. There’s a play on up in the fort in a few days.” She pointed over the dashboard to the largest of the two island forts. “There should be a few tickets left at the shop. I work up there, I’ll save you one if you fancy.”

  “Please do, I’ll be around once I settle in, get a bit of shopping done and out of the way.”

  “Is this the one?” They stopped outside a cottage with a long narrow pathway hemmed in by fields on both sides. In one there was a donkey. The other held two young cows that regarded the car with a mix of distrust and the kind of interest an animal holds for anything that may provide food.

  “This is me.” The usual thrill of arrival struck her. She had last seen this place while on the road across America. Hard to believe I’m here now.

  Shade got out and thanked the driver. As she started down the path to the house, the woman beeped a goodbye and drove off. Shade turned to wave her on but the sight of a black and white collie bounding towards her made her turn and run. Cycling through some states in America, feral dogs had menaced her for miles, if only the fear of them. She had left the pepper spray back in the US.

  Shade upturned flower pots in a frantic search for the door key. In desperation she tried the handle. It was not locked. Stepping inside she slammed the door behind her, leaning her full weight against it. Claws scraped against the other side, followed by the sound of incessant whining. With the barrier between them she started to laugh at her overreaction. She could feel her heart thumping in her chest. There was an indignant snuffle from the dog and then silence.

  She waited a while before opening the door a fraction to peak out. Her foot wedged beneath it to stop it from opening further. The sound of claws clacking against tile made her slam the door before her brain registered that the noise had come from behind her.

  The dog stared up at her, its tongue lolling plaintively.

  “Good pup – you’re not going to eat me?”

  The dog yapped and barked, its tail wagging. There seemed to be no malice to it. Shade’s anxiety faded.

  “Let’s see if there’s any food about for you.” It wove between her legs as she pushed into the house, her hands raised above her head to keep it from nipping them.

  The cottage was as quaint as advertised. A basket of turf and a stack of logs waited by an inviting fireplace, the focal point of the cosy sitting room. Rain started pattering against the windows, tempting her to light the fire and spend the evening in front of it, but there was an island to explore. Shade checked t
he cupboards and fridge in the kitchen.

  “Sorry puppy. Nothing for you, or me.”

  There was a letter on the kitchen table pinned down by an unopened box of tea bags and, she presumed, the house key.

  “Hello Shade,

  Welcome to the island. I’m two houses down in the thatch should you need anything, don’t be afraid to call in. There’s milk in the fridge for a drop of tea. Don’t worry about the dog, he’s harmless. Goes by Nip, though will go to you called or not. Don’t mind him if he starts talking to you, he gets fed twice a day here and I suspect in quite a few other places too. I hope you enjoy your stay.

  All the best,

  Padraig.”

  Overleaf he had written the opening times for the shop and pub. He had spelled out a few Irish phrases phonetically. “Top of the morning,” was not on the list. It did not appear in any of the phrase books either. She made a note to write a short blog on things not to say when in Ireland.

  “You’ve been found out, Nip,” she said, bending to scratch the dog behind the ear.

  The bedroom was the best part. It was small, with a bed buried beneath a mound of quilts and blankets, and two armchairs, separated by a table, facing a window. A bottle of wine stood on the table with a bow and label saying “welcome”. The view was spectacular: beneath the window a stone wall, and beyond that a field of brambles and the island slanting away to the ocean. Waves crashed against the coast in the distance.

  Old photos covered the walls, depicting how life on the island used to be. The women and children all wore petticoats. What was life like when everyone wore the same thing, when clothes were worn foremost for the purpose they served? Now it’s disposable fashion; what’s in vogue one month goes in the bin the next.