He was already twenty-nine when he left. He sat alone in the train carriage, perched on the edge of his seat, the rhythm of the rails carrying him toward the boat, toward England, and away. He wasn’t uncertain about leaving—but he was deeply uncertain about where he was going, or for how long.

The realization had struck him forcefully two summers earlier, during his first trip to Greece: he had to leave Ireland and the safety of his teaching job.

The Aegean Sea—gorgeous and impossibly blue—had stunned him. The radiant light, the vivid colours, the sheer sensory shock of it all. He saw then that the world must be full of wondrous things, and he wanted to see them.

Then came the people. It was the time of the hippie movement—some returning from the East, others heading toward it. He spoke with them, listened to their stories, and felt his curiosity swell into longing.

He had worked briefly in England and the USA, but learned little new. These were anglophone countries, their cultures too similar to Ireland’s to truly challenge or change him.

But something deeper was driving him. For some time, he had felt he wasn’t a real man—and he suffered for it. He had never made proper love to a woman, and at twenty-nine, that absence gnawed at him. He had failed with women in Ireland, England, the USA, and most recently, in Greece. His fear of disappointing them had robbed him of the beauty of intimacy—the soft, unspoken closeness of lying beside someone you care for.

One girl, vivacious and sharp-tongued—a friend of a friend from Belfast—had recently taken him to bed. In the morning, she said bluntly, “You should see a doctor.” It stung. He knew she was disappointed. But he also knew that a doctor wasn’t the answer. Talking about it wouldn’t help.

His back also ached—a slipped disc from the last Gaelic football match he ever played for his club. It plagued him forever afterward, making sleep on a mattress at times during his life, nearly impossible.

His old-fashioned green rucksack sat on the opposite seat. He looked at it vaguely, remembering how, two summers ago, he had rubbed ash and dust into it to dull its newness. The memory didn’t make him smile—just a little embarrassed.

The clickety-clack of the train echoed off the walls of Lansdowne Road rugby ground, returning garbled, like a message lost in translation.

At the pier in Dún Laoghaire, a girl in her early twenties sat alone. Her long hair was tied in two plaits that fell over her breasts, her flower-patterned dress draped over a fold-up canvas chair and down to her ankles. Between her legs, she held a cello, drawing out a plaintive air—long, mournful notes stretched into the evening.

The night boat to England was preparing to leave, crowded with returning emigrants. It was a summer evening in 1973, and daylight still lingered. The girl had a hippy look, a quiet defiance of conformity. She stared steadily at the departing boat. He looked to see who she might be playing for, but saw no one at the rail responding. He felt it could be for him. Her music mirrored his sadness, his sense of stepping into the unknown.

As the boat swung out of the harbour and met choppy water, the wind turned cool. The girl grew smaller in the distance. He drifted toward the bar.

Inside, a young man—already drunk and shouting—recognized him. A neighbour’s child, returning to work in England. They were from the same parish.

He had taken this Holyhead boat many times before. It embarrassed him to see Irish workers drinking themselves into oblivion—either in relief at going home or in dread of returning to anonymity. He watched them grow louder, their bodies looser, their language slurred, their clothes disheveled. Some vomited. Some slumped, senseless. He tried to understand. Surely many led hard, unhappy lives in London or Manchester or elsewhere.

He had felt it himself—sadness, loneliness, insecurity, a sense of being marginal, even inferior—during his own brief stints in England.

Why, he wondered, do some people become painfully sentimental when drunk? He felt the Irish were among the worst. He slipped away from the arm around his shoulder, the drunken goodwill that squeezed too tightly.

He went to the toilet and didn’t return. He was leaving. Escaping. He sat in a corner, feeling sorry for himself.

He never returned to live in Ireland.