Slam!
Help! Can somebody help me, please?
Help? Help!
The holiday row is a collapsing staircase that pitches you through a trapdoor into a dungeon of your own devising, a slapstick comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Why didn't we stay on the beach that maybe was a bit crowded but at least had some shelter, instead of coming to the deserted but exposed cove where the wind is blowing sand in the children's eyes? Why didn't we settle for fish and chips in the cheerful cafe instead of holding out for the fancy restaurant when the girl made it plain that, even if we did come back at nine, there wasn't a hope of a table?
The proximate, trivial cause is forgotten as the feet buckle on the tumbling stairs, down past what your sister said about the children at Christmas and who exactly my brother's wife thinks she is, down to the slam of the spare-room door, because there's always a spare room in the holiday home, and if there isn't you can sleep on the bloody couch.
Slam!
We didn't have a row like that during our holiday in Connemara, I'm happy to say. We did have a terse exchange one morning, and it did lead to the slamming of a door . . . but more of that later. We were in Connemara for a month. As I can work anywhere, I reasoned, why not work somewhere everyone else (wife and two daughters, aged eight and five) can call summer? I'd been coming to Connemara for 25 years, but I'd never stayed for longer than about 10 days, so I had the nebulous hope that on this trip I'd finally achieve some kind of insight into this mysterious, beautiful place, some numinous Connemara epiphany.
I came closest on Omey Island, but I don't think epiphany is quite the word. We walked across the sands from Claddaghduff at about four. When we got there I suggested that we press on by Lough Feichín to the sea, then round by the dunes past the ruined 10th-century church and back along the strands on the north of the island.
Check the tides, did you?
Oh yeah.
And I had checked the tides. But after an hour, when the ground started to get a bit spongy and the girls started to get a bit whiny and you could smell rain on the salt wind, it occurred to me that I had researched two walks across beaches to islands before we left the house that morning: one gave you six hours clear before the tide turned, the other a bare hour or so. Which was Omey and which Feenish? I couldn't remember, and of course I hadn't brought any of my maps or guidebooks with me. Stranding my family on an island with no picnic, pubs or hotels for 11 hours would certainly constitute an achievement, but only in stupidity.
We pressed on, the smile on my face an increasingly taut mask as I tried to gauge the sea level, until the first walker approached us, walking the island in reverse, and I realised the coast was clear. Maybe relief has its epiphanic side; maybe pleasure is always heightened by a ripple of pain; anyway, that afternoon among the peace and tranquillity of Omey Island turned out to be a highlight of our trip, joining the big walks along the beaches at Glasoileán and Lettergesh, the swimming in temperate waters off Roisín na Mainiach and Trá na mBan, the delicious meals at An Pangur Bán and O'Dowd's. And maybe the price of all that was the terse exchange and the door slam. Maybe the holiday row erupts to heighten our enjoyment of the holiday.
The morning we moved from Renvyle to Carna I had unaccountably morphed into the Man Who Knows How To Pack. There followed the terse exchange. It blew over. We forgave but did not forget. A week later, leaving Carna for Ballyconneely, the Man Who Knows How to Pack had the field to himself (no one wanted to come near him). He would show everyone how to do it right (no one wanted to watch). TMWKHTP crammed one last bag in and shut the boot.
Slam!
Shut the door on his hands. Trapped his fingers, to the second knuckle.
Help!
In the kitchen, seconds afterwards, although they did not feel like seconds to me, my hands thrust deep in a bag of frozen peas, quivering with shock, I looked out to Feenish Island and wished I was stranded on it.
I tried my fingers. They moved. Nothing felt broken.
Show the children you're all right.
I leaned into the car and beamed and waved my hands at the children, forgetting that my fingers had swollen to resemble butchers' sausages, the fancy kind with tomato and chorizo. The children screamed and burst into tears. At the first garage I got a bottle of Coke to boost my blood sugar. If Diet Coke is for fat people, as Paris Hilton has assured us, then Coke is for stupid people.
A holiday in Connemara is an inoculation against the banal, the ugly, the day to day: memories of a vast expanse of sky, of white beaches shrouded in mist, of the infinite variety of light, stored in the mind for the dark winter. My fingers still smart. I'm only home a day. I can't wait to go back.
The Colour of Blood, the second Ed Loy novel,
by Declan Hughes, is published by John Murray