In Little Ireland

I've been describing the place where I'm living now, Little Ireland, as being like an episode Breaking Bad set at the Bates Motel. This is far from wrong but I realised tonight that it's more than that.

I'd gone out to pick some fennel by the train tracks because, well, that's where it grows. I thought of Nina Simone, of Trouble in Mind, as the wind caught the trees and the grey skies slipped interminably overhead.

Hatted, in a shirt and pinstripe trousers, the caretaker of my place looks like a Cohen Brothers character. He was climbing the stairs to his cottage at the crossroads, and I had a sudden vision of him ushering someone, hands tied, into the dust of a deserted road before shooting them in the back of the head with a double-barreled shotgun.

He turned and saw me; waved.

The vision shifted: he was in his living room, the hat on the arm of his chair, the barrels in his mouth and his eyes turned to heaven.

The streets were empty; thunder troubled the fresh-mown plains. Mist crept across the hilltop and although there weren't Twin Peaks, the trees at the summit vanished like spectres of teeth in a broken bottom jaw.

The fennel grows in thick green foams by the railway, where the only sound was the thrum of wind in the powerlines. I picked in listening silence, but I couldn't tell the tune.

The hotel looked closed, but it always looks closed: it was open, I knew, because the town dog sat waiting by the door. For some reason, every time I near it, I think I hear saloon-style piano tinkling through its leadlight windows. Of course, there's no piano there. There never was.

Rain was coming. It made the soil sing the scents of death, made the road smell of stone. A forgotten barn sagged before rowed pines; its empty door and windows shot a vacant stare across the new-sown barley. And when the rain finally came, the sky was the colour of tender flesh, and the birds made, fast, for the safety of the leaves.