THE GEOGRAPHY OF A FATHER

There were landscapes and landscapes. They drove through County Clare towards the Burren. She expected to feel uplifted, to gaze in awe at the towering limestone cliffs, the field of stones, to get weepy at The Road of the Dishes. When she was little, her grandmother had told her stories and she’d imagined white pudding bowls that stretched for miles.

She didn’t like the Burren. The relentless grey, the everywhere karst and stone and boulder and nothing, not even a tree moving. It was like her childhood home on Sundays. Her father sleeping in the spare room – the pearl-button accordion by his bed, empty of wind.

“Can’t we go back,” she said, but the journey was on their list; it was ancestral land, it had to be ticked off. Sometimes the only way was through. She’d read that somewhere. You just had to grit your teeth, suck it up, keep going.

Much later, she’d meet others who’d been inspired by the Burren. They’d climbed the cliffs, written screeds of poetry, painted the grikes and clints, the limestone pavement. They were blown away by the Burren. But for now, she was in that inbetween place, the same place she’d been in as a child. When all was said and done and the shouting had died down, she was supposed to love him. But she didn’t love her father and it gave rise to a sadness and an awful longing in her and a great capacity to lie.

“The Burren was awesome,” she’d later say, staring into her plate, “truly awesome.”