Tomorrow I plan to avoid another heart attack on a plate and find a quiet place to write this. I’ll probably sunbathe in my bikini. Give the pheasants something to look at. It might not be so bad. When you close your eyes you can be just about anywhere you want to be. I can lie by the lake and imagine I’m by the pool in Marbella, that the splashing of the swans as they shake out their feathers is Mum. She always used to lie, not on a sunbed like everybody else, but along the edge of the pool, near the filters. She’d allow her hand to hover over the water, slapping the water lightly. It sounded like toddler’s barefeet walking about the place. It was either to keep cool or because she liked the sound. I used to like listening to it. Though for some reason I always told her to shut up. Something to say in the silence, something that would make her open her eyes and look at me.

Who could have known all of that? Only Mum.

Maybe I’ll sunbathe right in the path of Arthur’s lawnmower on the grass and hope he’ll run me over. If it doesn’t kill me, the least it could do is save me from a full body wax.

Arthur’s not so bad, actually. He doesn’t say much. He doesn’t even make many reactions, but I get a good feeling from him. Most of the time. Rosaleen’s not so bad either. I just have to try to figure her out. She reacted so unusually at dinner today-shepherd’s pie, yum-when I told her I’d spent time with Sister Ignatius. She said Sister had called round to her during the morning and mentioned nothing about meeting me. That must have been when I was in the shower. Would love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. Then she kept interrogating me on what kinds of things Sister and I talked about. Honestly, it was constant, and even Arthur seemed uncomfortable. I mean, did she think I was lying about it? Really, it was weird. I wish I hadn’t told her what I’d learned about the castle. Now I know that whatever information I need to learn, it most certainly can’t be from her. I suppose Rosaleen and Arthur are just different. Or maybe it’s just me that’s different. I never really thought of it that way before. Perhaps it was always just me.

In case I die of dehydration and somebody finds this diary, I should mention that I cry every night. I go through the entire day, save for bluebottle and ruined-castle breakdowns, as strong as can be and then as soon as I crawl into bed and lie in the darkness and stillness, the world only then seems to me to be spinning. Then I cry. Sometimes for such long periods of time my pillow becomes soaked. Rolling down the edges of my eyes, along my ears and tickling down my neck, sometimes down to my vest, I just let the tears go wherever. I’m so used to crying, I don’t notice it sometimes. Does that make sense? Before, if I cried it was because I’d fallen and hurt myself, or because I’d had a fight with Dad, or I was totally drunk and the slightest thing made me upset. But now, it’s like, whatever…I’m sad so I’ll cry. Sometimes I start and then stop as I convince myself that everything will be fine. Sometimes I don’t believe myself and I start again.

I have lots of dreams about Dad. Rarely is he really Dad, but instead a mixture of different people’s faces. He starts off as him, then becomes a school teacher, then becomes Zac Efron and then some random person that I saw once before in my life, like the local priest or something. I’ve heard people say that when they dream about a loved one that has died, they feel that it’s real, that the person is really there, sending them a message, giving them a hug. That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds. I used to think that people who talked like that were quacks, or fundamentalist religious freaks. But now I know that that is just one of the many things I was wrong about. It’s got nothing to do with religion, it’s got nothing to do with mental stability, but it has everything to do with the human mind’s natural instinct, which is to hope beyond all hope, unless you’re a cynical bastard. It’s got to do with love, with losing somebody you love, a part of you being torn away that you’d do almost anything or believe anything to have returned to you. It’s hope that someday you’ll see them again, that you can still feel them near you. Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn’t make you a weak person. It’s hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it’s a maybe. A ‘maybe someday things won’t always be this shit.’ And that ‘maybe’ immediately makes the shittiness better.

I thought that we were supposed to become more cynical the older we got. Me? I was born looking warily around the hospital room, from one face to another, and just immediately knowing that this new scenario was shit and that I was better off back inside. I continued life like that. Everywhere I was, was shit, and somewhere else, in the backwards direction, was better. It’s only now when the matter-of-factness of life has hit me-very dead, death-that I’m beginning to look outwards. Scientific people think they’re looking outwards but they’re not. They think that emotional people only look inwards but they don’t. I think the best scientists are the ones that look both ways.

Despite all that I’ve said, I know that Dad isn’t in my dreams. There is no secret message or secret hug. I don’t feel him with me here in Kilsaney. They are merely obscure dreams with no meaning or words of advice. Mirrored segments of my day broken up as though a jigsaw, and thrown in the air to hang in my head without order, meaning or sense. Last night I dreamed about Dad, who turned into my English teacher, and then the English teacher was a woman and we all had a free class and I had to sing for everybody, but I opened my mouth and nothing would come out and then the school ended up being in America but nobody spoke English and I couldn’t understand anything, and then I lived on a boat. Weird. I woke up when Rosaleen dropped a pot or something downstairs in the kitchen.

Maybe Sister Ignatius was right. Maybe this diary will help me. Sister Ignatius is a funny woman. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since I met her two days ago.

Yesterday. I’d only met her yesterday.

I like her. The first thing I like about being here-okay the second thing, after the castle-is her. It started lashing rain while I was in the castle yesterday and I could see Rosaleen coming down the road towards me with a coat in her hand, so I feel bad, but I just had to run in the opposite direction. I didn’t want her knowing that I spent time here; I didn’t want her to think that her guess was right. I didn’t want her knowing anything about me. I had no idea where I was running to. The rain came down really, really hard-less of a sun shower and more of a power shower, and I was soaked right through to the skin, but it was like I was on autopilot, my body just switched off and I ran, and without really concentrating I ended up at the walled garden. Sister Ignatius was standing in the greenhouse, waiting for the rain to stop. She had a spare beekeeping suit for me. She said she had a feeling I’d be back.

Because I’d interrupted her the day before she hadn’t been able to get back to checking the hives. She’d other duties to attend to. Praying and stuff. So she showed me the inside of the hives yesterday. She drew on the queen bee with a marker so that I could see which one it was, she pointed out the drones, the worker bees too, and then showed me how to use the smoker. Looking at it made me feel dizzy. Something weird happened to me. She didn’t notice. I had to put my hand out and hold on to the wall so I wouldn’t crumple to the ground. While I was feeling like that, she invited me back next week to help her extract the honey, which she then puts in jars and brings to the market. I was so busy trying to breathe that I just said no. I just wanted to get away. I wish I’d just told her that I didn’t feel well. She seemed so disappointed and now I feel really bad. I also need to get to the market so I can see more people. I’m going insane here, seeing the same people every day. Also I want to know if everyone will stare at Rosaleen and Arthur like they did outside the pub. They must have done something in the town to be looked at like that. Organised swinging parties or something. Gross.