The sea at Spanish Point is calm today, hardly a wave. The broad sweep of it from one end of the bay to the other and outwards to the horizon is glass–like except for the flounce at my feet. This great expanse of sea and shore jars with my sense of constrictedness, the feeling that my head is a narrow little time–capsule where I am ensconced with the flotsam of childhood memories. But these fragments are precious all the same; they are the salvage of storms on another sea.

Today the sea is not suitable for my wave–therapy. The calm breadth of it puts broader vistas in mind, signals the impossibility of staying in my memoir–hut, the cabin of my final draft (a mobile home in a nearby caravan park) among the relics of my early years.

And so, my straitened Irish childhood, my old Polonius behind the arras: to draw toward an end with you …

The various rites of passage that occur to a child around the ages of eleven and twelve are not particularly interesting in my case, because my shadow was the one going through them. Most of the time, I was in the Elsewhere with the ghost of my father's son.

Sometimes we searched for sanctifying grace in the Elsewhere, but it was inaccessible. Totally invisible and unmeasurable, like the ether which preceded Einstein's theory of light, sanctifying grace was perhaps the hallmark of 1950s’ Ireland: a parallel universe where things were completely different from what they were in reality, but which made no difference to the way reality was ordered. The solicitor's soul could be without sanctifying grace, while Moll Bailey's could be brimming with it; but the solicitor would stay the solicitor and Moll Bailey would always be Fleaballs. You could be very unhappy and have a soul full of sanctifying grace, and be very happy and have none at all, like the happy pagans. The sacraments were supposed to be outward signs of inward grace, but there was an enormous uncrossable chasm between the sign and the substance.

The machine of my body is usually driven by my shadow, but the ghost sometimes takes over the wheel.