Page 14 of The Elements

I’m in the old pub, reading a novel, when Tim Devlin walks in.

He stops and looks me up and down, as if I’m a car or a piece of livestock that he’s considering putting in an offer on, and I stare back, challenging his gaze, but neither of us says a word.

Instead, he makes his way toward the bar and orders a pint of Guinness before walking back toward me.

“Do you mind if I join you?” he asks.

I haven’t spoken to anyone in almost a week, and realize that I’m in need of human contact, so I put my bookmark in its place and indicate the seat next to me.

“I thought you and I were never going to talk,” I tell him.

“Well, one of us needs to make the first move, I suppose,” he replies, a phrase that bothers me.

Does he think we’ve been dancing around each other all this time, waiting for the right moment?

If he does, he would be wrong. “Let me get you another drink first,” he adds, seeing my almost empty glass. “What’s that, a white wine?”

“Yes,” I say, and he puts his pint down, then returns to the bar, where he chats briefly with the publican.

I wonder what sort of relationship they have, these two men supposedly in competition with each other.

It’s a small island of only four hundred people, but perhaps those four hundred have a rare thirst on them so there’s enough business to go around.

“Now then,” he says when he returns, taking the stool opposite me rather than joining me on the banquette. “I don’t think I’ve introduced myself, have I? Tim Devlin.”

“Willow Hale,” I say. “So, what made you decide to talk to me today?”

“I’ve been serving you soups and sandwiches for months now,” he replies, “and we never exchange more than a hello and a goodbye. It’s got a little awkward, don’t you think?”

“A little,” I agree, finishing my first glass of wine and starting on the second.

“I had the impression from the start that you wanted to be left alone.”

“I did, for the most part. You probably thought I was the rudest woman in Ireland.”

“Oh no,” he replies, shaking his head. “I already met her. Sure I was married to her daughter for years.”

I laugh, despite myself. A mother-in-law joke. I thought they’d gone out with the ark.

“This island seems to draw us in, doesn’t it?” I say.

“Us?”

“The forlorn.”

“What makes you think I’m forlorn?” he asks.

“You wear your loneliness like an overcoat,” I tell him. “It’s one of the reasons I haven’t talked to you either. I always assume you just want to get on with your work without any fuss.”

“That’s true enough.”

“Can I guess?”

“Can you guess what?”

“What you’re struggling with.”

He shrugs.

“If you want,” he says.

“You were a bad husband,” I say. “You drank or you gambled. Maybe you cheated. In the end, your wife divorced you and it was only then that you realized what you’d thrown away.

You’ve regretted your actions ever since, but she met someone else in the meantime and wouldn’t return to you, so you came here, to the island, to disappear. ”

“Not bad,” he tells me, nodding his head. “Although my wife didn’t divorce me. She died.”

I have the good grace to look ashamed of myself.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That was flippant of me.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” he replies, waving this away.

I wonder whether I’m supposed to ask how his wife died but, before I can, he changes the subject.

“And you,” he says. “How are you enjoying life on the island?”

“The first few months weren’t easy,” I tell him. “I found the isolation strange. But now, well, I’m worried that I’m becoming institutionalized. Although I feel quite content most days. So maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

“Content enough to stay?”

“Not forever, no. But for a time. When I arrived, my head was quite… how shall I put this? Messy.”

“And now it’s clean?”

“Cleaner than it was anyway. There’s something about long walks, little social interaction, and no Wi-Fi that does wonders for the soul.”

“It’s why I have no router in the new pub,” he tells me. “I don’t want people sitting on their phones, Twittering away or checking their Facebooks or any of that shite.”

“I never understood the appeal of all that,” I tell him. “Sharing every random thought or interaction we have with the world. Don’t most people prefer privacy?”

“You’re better off not being on it,” he says, leaning forward and lowering his voice.

“When you come under the kind of scrutiny you came under, it must be corrosive to the soul. All those strangers attacking you, calling you names, thinking they know you when they don’t have the first clue.

Using you to alleviate their personal misery and sense of failure. ”

I turn my head to my right, toward the wall, and close my eyes for a moment.

When I open them again, I find that I’m looking directly at a framed poster of Man of Aran , the Robert Flaherty documentary, that looks as if it’s been hanging there since the dawn of time.

A confident man with a hoop of rope is staring at the camera, penetrating the lens with his masculinity.

To his right, a little behind him, visibly subservient, stands his wife, strands of hair blowing into her eyes. She has no expectations of life.

“You know who I am, then,” I say finally, turning back to him, resigned to my unmasking.

“I’ve known who you were since the first moment you walked through my door,” he says. “But I didn’t like to say anything. I didn’t want to frighten you off, for one thing. And it was none of my business.”

“Have you told anyone?” I ask.

“I haven’t, no. I would never do something like that.

” A silence descends upon us. Part of me wants to leave; another part wants to unburden myself of my secrets, for who else do I have to confide in, after all?

Rebecca refuses to answer any of my messages.

I’m not cutting you off forever , her actions tell me.

But I will only talk to you when I’m ready, and then it will be on my own terms.

“The first thing I did when I arrived on the island was change my name and cut my hair,” I tell Tim, deciding to let some of my horrible story escape into the world.

“I scalped it right down, as you can see. It doesn’t seem to be growing back either, which both worries me and doesn’t bother me in the slightest, if that makes any sense. ”

“Why your hair?” he asks.

“I didn’t want anyone to recognize me. I’ve been in the papers so much over the last year and I wanted to be anonymous.

Believe me, when you achieve a certain amount of fame or notoriety in this country, there are days when you long to have a different face or be a different person entirely.

Just to keep the jackals away. A stranger arriving on the island would inevitably attract interest, and I didn’t want to give myself away too easily, so I had to make some changes. ”

“Most people don’t read the papers here,” he tells me.

“You’ve probably noticed that Con Dwyer only gets in a dozen or so copies of the Irish Times and the Indo every day.

And even those are always a day late. No, we have enough problems of our own to worry about here with-out bothering about what goes on over there.

” He nods in the vague direction of the mainland.

“Perhaps I’m overestimating my celebrity,” I say.

“Well, they’re not ignorant,” he adds. “They’d know the story, the islanders, if you asked them. Sure it was all over the news. They just might not recognize the players.”

“‘They,’ not ‘we’?” I ask.

He shrugs, perhaps uncertain if he’s ready to fully align himself with this community. Is he an outsider too, then?

“I wasn’t sure it would be enough,” I tell him. “The haircut, I mean. But I seem to have got away with it. At least I thought I had. Until now.”

“I’ve always been a great man for the sport,” he tells me. “So, a story like yours—”

“Not mine, my husband’s.”

“When it rears its ugly head, I pay attention. Twelve years, wasn’t it? That’s what he got?”

I drink half my glass of wine in one gulp. I don’t get the sense that he’s being unkind, or that he’s prying. He’s simply talking to me.

“That’s right,” I say.

“So, what, he’ll be in his mid-seventies when he gets out?”

“He won’t serve the full term if he behaves well.”

“Does he have a history of behaving well?”

The look I give him probably says it all.

“Are you worried that the other prisoners will hurt him? They don’t take kindly to people who do what he did.”

He’s right about this, and it bothers me that yes, I am.

It does concern me. I’ve known Brendan more than half my life, after all, and I know how vulnerable he must be in prison.

He’s not a strong man. He likes power, and authority, and fame, but he’s weak at heart.

I don’t love him, I don’t even like him, but he’s part of me.

We created a family together and destroyed it together.

Despite the terrible things he’s done, it’s very difficult to abandon those feelings entirely.

I know he will be constantly frightened.

But then, those eight little girls—the eight that we know of, anyway; I have no doubt that there were many more—he has caused unspeakable damage in their lives.

If he were killed in prison, that would be celebrated by most. How can I explain, to myself, to anyone, the fact that I would weep?

“I’m sure the wardens will keep charge,” I say weakly.

“You don’t understand the prison ecosystem,” he tells me.

“There’s not much difference between the wardens and the prisoners.

It’s just hundreds of men all stuck together inside a big stone building, some getting paid for the privilege, some not.

Some sleeping in cells, some going home of an evening. ”