Magic Megan

{ Mulligan's beer garden in Stoneybatter }

Back in Town

I feel a little bit unsure when I get back to Dublin, like maybe I don't belong here or something, so I put on my aviator sunglasses and I go out driving. Am I a fugitive or some kind of a lady cop? Nobody knows.

I stop to pick up Megan — magic, magic Megan — who'd surprised me at the airport when I landed back in Dublin. SURPRISE she'd said, throwing out her arms, and I had been confused and then happy and then I'd started to cry a little bit. But crying at an airport isn't the kind of thing a fugitive and/or a cop would do, so let's not talk about that right now.

Back in town, back on the road. Is there any feeling greater than driving around town in your aviators? Sometimes I don't know whether to wave hello to people or pull them over.

Happy Summer Solstice

{ with Juste and Vala at midnight in Reykjavik }

Thank You So Much for Thinking of Me

Dear Adrian

Thank you for your email asking if I'm ever coming back home. I'm pleased to be able to tell you that I've accepted a job in Ireland and I'm on my way back for the rest of the summer. I should be there as soon as tomorrow.

You know, it means a lot to me that there are people like you — real Dubliners — asking for me and referring to Dublin as my 'home'. When I left town back in March it was like the city no longer had a place for me. I felt crazy and lost, unrooted and alone, and it was all I could do to run away to America again... like I do whenever things go a bit wrong.

But this has been a very good time for me. I've spent many evenings pouring my heart out to my closest friends, and they've fed me baked goods and interesting things made out of spinach. I've also poured my heart out to many strangers, actually, and some of them even stopped in the street to listen. I drove it like I stole it on the freeway, I made it through Vegas without losing any money or sleeping with anybody, and I've photographed many rock bands and some babies. (Well, mostly babies to be honest. Apparently 'that is where the money is').

I've also spent some time in Oakland with people less fortunate than I am, and I've realised that just because I don't have a forwarding address right now doesn't mean I can swan off around the world referring to myself as 'homeless'. I am not homeless, Adrian. I am the opposite of homeless. I've been the guest of so many beautiful people in their beautiful houses; I've eaten at the finest roadside diners; and I've slept peacefully in a tent in a northern Californian forest. I've seen Nevada, Reykjavik, and wild, wild Oregon, and I've thrown up my arms on a rooftop in Brooklyn and I have taken Manhattan.

Oh, and I also hired a hitman to shoot dead the worst side of my personality in the Arizona desert — but that's another story.

So as you can see, Adrian, I'm not crazy anymore. I'm just a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and I just want to come back home and get some work done for a while.

Thank you, so much, for thinking of me.

Annie

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Er, yeah, that's grand Annie, I just needed your credit card details so we can charge you for the extra month you were away.

thanks

Adrian Jones, Manager

Storage World

Herdís Hekla

This is my little goddaughter, the daughter of the previously mentioned "David the Postman" who moved in to my spare room all those years ago. David married Arna and had two lovely kids in a small town on the south coast of Iceland, where they built a shed and turned it into a cafe. Next time you're passing Eyrarbakki you should visit. He still bakes amazing bread.

The Iceland Weather Report

{ Alda Sigmundsdóttir }

An Empty House in Reykjavik

There's a beautiful little stone cottage in Dublin that I want to rent when I get back, with a tiny overgrown garden and no furniture. This could be a problem because I have no furniture either — but really, who cares? I spent my first year in Reykjavik living in a wooden house with nothing but two empty crates, a mattress, and a set of fairy-lights to my name. And that was one of the happiest times of my life.

"Er, no it wasn't, mate," says Cathy on the phone. "I remember you telling me at the time. You said you were quite depressed, actually."

"I wasn't depressed!" I say. "That was one of the happiest times of my life."

"Hang on," says Cathy. "I'll get the email up."

She puts the phone down and searches her mail for 'I'm quite depressed, actually', but I can't believe she'll find anything. I'm often overwhelmed with joy when I think back to that beautiful, wonderful time in Iceland.

"Hello?" she says. "Here it is: March 2004. Dearest Cathy. I still don't have any friends or any furniture. All I have is two empty crates and a mattress to my name. I'm going to walk into the sea tomorrow with rocks in my pockets."

Oh. Really? That's strange. I don't remember writing that.

"I'll forward it to you," says Cath. "You don't even mention the set of fairy-lights."

Nostalgia is a strange thing, isn't it? Of course, if I think about it, I do remember being lonely in Reykjavik. I remember staring out of my kitchen window at all the people on the main street in the evenings, wishing they'd beckon merrily at me to join them. They didn't. It was a very long, dark winter. I drank tea. I ate sardines from a can. I took long walks through the freezing wind out to the old lighthouse and I sat in fishing shacks and drew clumsy, poorly-observed sketches in my notebook. I didn't have a camera, or a computer, or a blog. It was very cold and I slipped on the ice a lot. I was 23 and maybe I should have gone to Ibiza with my friends.

But I also remember that the empty house was where, eventually, I did manage to make some friends. I remember the girls from work coming over to drink Viking beer on the floorboards with me. They brought cushions. I remember them laughing at my (frankly ridiculous) stories, most of which I completely made up just because I didn't want them to ever leave again. Ursula started inviting me over, a mountain guide who I referred to as 'my Swiss Army Wife'. She cooked elaborate Italian meals with one hand, rolled smokes with her other hand, and opened bottles of beer with her teeth. A postman called David moved in to my spare room and baked a lot of bread. Spring came along, the midnight sun shone, and I loved everything about it.

I never did get any furniture, though.

"Well, then why not take this empty cottage in Dublin," says Cathy. "You already have some people there that you can start to fill it with."

"Yes, I think I will," I say. "And if I ever feel like walking in to the sea with rocks in my pockets, don't worry, I'll be sure to send you an email all about it first."

Quentin Fottrell

{ West 22nd Street }

I Heart New York

"You're a New Yorker," says Jeff, "if you've been in the city longer than the person you're talking to."

I've been here two days and I am quite clearly still the newest person on the whole island of Manhattan. We're at a costume party on the Upper East Side and I'm wearing my battered leather jacket and a trilby lent to me by Quentin, because needless to say I didn't have anything even vaguely glamorous in my rucksack. The party is confusing me because now I think everybody here drinks martinis and dresses like Mad Men characters all the time. Maybe they do?

Jeff and I eat pretzels and watch the inimitable Quentin flit around the apartment like a social butterfly. He moved here only three months ago from Dublin and it's like he's been here all his life.

I want to be a New Yorker, too, I think to myself. In fact, I won't be happy until New York shows up at this party wearing an I ♥ Annie t-shirt.

On a Rooftop in Brooklyn

{ The Fantastic Ms Cox }

They Will Simply Feed on Your Eyelids

The fleas turned out to be mites, the mites turned out to be bedbugs, and the bedbugs turned out to be a complete figment of my imagination. If you've never experienced bedbugs — or at least never experienced reading about bedbugs, alone, all night long on the internet — then you should probably stop reading this right now because you just won't understand. You probably think bedbugs are funny, or fictitious, or even cute. But they're not.

"Do you know anything about bedbugs?" I asked my friend Ed on the phone, after waking up covered in what looked like small insect bites one morning.

"Yes," said Ed, with a heavy sigh of apprehension. "I know they are an excellent reason to sell your house."

*

Bedbugs are insects the size of small woodlice that live in the darkest crevices of your home. They come out only in the hour before dawn, when your sleeping body is at its stillest, and use their long incisors to inject you with an anaesthetic so you can't feel them sucking out your blood for 10 or maybe 15 minutes. You might wake up an hour later itching like crazy, but by then the bugs will be gone back to their hiding places. It is no good changing beds, or sleeping on the couch: the bedbugs will find you. It is no good trying to poison them: bedbugs are almost entirely indestructible. It is no good sleeping with your clothes on: the bedbugs will simply feed on your eyelids.

"You done any travelling lately?" asks the exterminator — whose name is Vinny from Texas — when I call him in a panic.

"Um," I say, trying not to swallow my tongue. "Some."

"Yeah," he says. "They probably came in your backpack from a motel or someplace like that. I can come over first thing in the morning and give you an inspection."

"But I can feel them crawling on me," I say. "I'm looking after this house for my friends – they're coming back next week. I need you to come right now, Vinny, right away."

"Can you actually see any bugs right now, ma'am?"

Vinny doubts very much that I can. It is 10 o'clock on a bright Sunday morning and he wants to get back into bed with his wife. He wonders where I got his cellphone number from. Online, probably, on one of those hysterical bedbug 'forums'. He wishes he knew how to delete it. Isn't there some kind of service provider — not unlike Vinny's own pest control business — that can eradicate your personal phone number from the internet? He can hear Julie getting out of the bed upstairs. Dammit. There is no finer feeling to Vinny than lying pressed up against her beautiful warm body when she's sleeping in on a Sunday morning, and now he's missed it.

"No," I say, pacing back and forth in the empty house. "I can't see anything. But I can feel them. Crawling on me. Feasting."

"Ma'am," says Vinny, sighing. "You been under any stress lately?"

My stress is entirely centred around the fact that I am house-sitting for two of my closest friends and, after they have looked after me for two whole months — cooking for me, caring for me, listening to my shit — I have now gone and infested their house with indestructible termites. They are about to lose everything – everything! — and it is all my fault. Welcome home, closest friends.

"So, yeah, I'm finding that pretty fucking stressful to be frank with you, Vinny," I explain to him.

"Okay, lady," he says. "Until you've seen a bug, you don't know that it's bedbugs you got. And nobody has to lose their house. I suggest you take a valium and get some rest, and I'll come by first thing in the morning for an inspection."

And then he hangs up.

*

Bedbugs multiply like crazy, is what it says online. They are nearly impossible to kill. They carry no disease but have made many people psychologically ill: bed is where you should be at your most relaxed, not where you fear being eaten alive in the dead of night. I scratch at my wrists. There's a man on Craigslist in New York selling seven dead bedbugs for $200 each. He knows how much these things are worth: landlords won't get your apartment sprayed unless they have cold hard evidence. People get crazy in the summertime as the city heats up: families fall apart, relationships break up, everyone needs something to direct their anger at. Bedbugs just take the rap.

I close my laptop. I don't need to read this shit. I know what it is, I'm not crazy, it's almost certainly a bedbug infestation. I pull on my jacket and go out to the hardware store to buy some traps: twelve plastic cylinders that fit under the legs of the beds, each dusted with talcum powder. The bugs crawl in on their way to feed on you at night, and then they can't crawl back out again. Tonight, I will lie in the bed and wait for them to come to me, then pick them out of the traps in the morning. I can present them to Vinny as evidence, then he can spray the house with kryptonite before my friends even get back from their vacation. Yes, I'll just have to lie very still on the bed for six hours tonight.

"Essentially," I explain to Dharma, who lives across the street. "I am the bait."

"That seems a bit extreme," says Dharma, who had to comfort me earlier over all this and is beginning to worry about the state of my mental health. "Can't you just come and stay with us and throw a big old steak on the bed instead?"

No, Dharma, unfortunately I cannot. Bedbugs are attracted to the carbon dioxide in our breath, not just the smell of blood. I've done my research, I know what I'm dealing with. I'm practically the resident Oregon bedbug expert at this point.

Dharma sighs and shakes her head. "Well, good luck, Annie," she says.

That night I make sure the bedsheets aren't touching the floor: that's just like throwing a rope down to the termites and inviting them up for more. Each trap is set under each leg of the bed. My bites are itching and I smother them with calomine lotion, then I spread myself out star-shaped in my underwear, making sure plenty of skin is exposed so the bugs can smell my blood.

"Good luck, mate," says Cathy, calling to say goodnight, from way over on the other side of the Atlantic, where it is already light.

"Thanks Cath," I say, wearily. "I'll call you in the morning, with the new evidence."

Cathy doesn't say anything but she thinks that this may be the worst of my hypochondria that she's seen yet, possibly even worse than the deep vein thrombosis I had in Tibet, or the six months that I lived with breast cancer, yet refused to get a test. "Goodnight, then," is all she says, gently. "Please just try to get some rest."

Rest is a nice thought, but it's not going to happen. This is what I get for ever running away to America in the first place. An infestation; my friends' home ruined. This sleepless night, I'm afraid, is my punishment.

*

At 9.30 I'm woken up by Lola barking and a loud knocking at the front door. Fuck it, I've overslept. I pull on my t-shirt and jeans (that are hanging carefully from the ceiling) and run downstairs to let the exterminator in. Lola dashes out in to the garden to take a piss, then rushes back and bounds around him.

"Hey," says Vinny, giving her a good rub, and I instantly warm to him. "Ready for the inspection?"

He is shorter than I expected, and less Texan. I also expected him to have some kind of jumpsuit on — and a pack on his back with the kryptonite — but he just wears jeans and a sweater and looks like a regular guy.

"I'm ready," I say, letting him in. Vinny comes upstairs and together we inspect the traps. Nothing. Lola watches us from the doorway. Vinny pulls on a pair of surgical gloves, then examines the bedding. I feel strangely embarrassed that the bed is probably still warm. He goes through all the linen with a magnifying glass and a flashlight, then he goes through the mattress, then the furniture, then the picture frames on the wall, then he starts on the skirting boards. Nothing.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"But what about my bites?"

Vinny takes my arm and gently inspects the small pink marks.

"Could be mosquitos," he says. "Or a reaction to bleach, if you use that in your washing at all."

Suddenly, I want to kiss Vinny. I don't, of course: he's the pest control manager and I'm not crazy. I just pay him 50 bucks, thank him profusely, then he goes home to his beautiful wife and I start packing up for New York.

Oregon Ghost Town

{ in the window }

What it is to Love and Care for an Animal

David left town, too, to meet his wife and child on the East Coast, and I stayed on in Portland and looked after their house and dog. If Fiona took Summer with her then David took whatever was left of Spring, and the rain kept on until I began to wonder if there might be some kind of flood.

Lola doesn't seem that keen on getting wet but we go out anyway just so she can take a shit. I pick it up afterwards and put it in the bin, and even though the plastic bag stops any of it touching my skin I can still feel the warmth of it on my hand when we get back in. I get showered and put my pyjamas on because I feel like I'm getting a cold. That's okay. I'm tired of keeping busy and I want an excuse to just curl up into a foetal position for a while and mope.

I lie in bed for the day, then sneeze my way to the grocery store for enough food to survive a small nuclear war. Lola waits outside in a puddle, her ears pricking up every time she hears the automatic doors. A woman called Maureen helps me bag up my cans of soup then hands me a dog treat to give to her.

"I was brought up in a home with many pets," she says. "I know what it is to love and care for an animal."

Maureen looks and speaks like a robot, as if she never loved or cared about anything in her life, but I know that appearances can be deceptive and so I clear my throat and say thanks, that's kind. The only reason my voice still works is because of this dog. Sit down, good girl, come here. Let's make some tea and you can tell me all about your day. I very badly want her to sleep up against me on the bed at night, but she keeps jumping off and going back to Fiona and David's room as if they're still there, but they're not.

When we get in from the store I try to start packing up for New York, but just the thought of getting on a plane again exhausts me and I just lie there on the couch and stare at the wall. I decide to eat something and look online for a while, and a message pops up from Therese saying if I'm coming to NYC then maybe we could meet up? I'm excited by this because I like her blog, and I think she likes mine because she mentions the briefcase and the rogue dollars and stuff. I wonder if I should let my image slide and tell her that right now I'm lying on the couch with a bowl of mashed potato and just thinking about flying is making my legs feel paralysed. But in the end I write back and just say hey, yes, that would be great, maybe we can go out taking photos around Brooklyn. I include some exclamation marks then delete them again in case I put her off. Then I put them back in and hit send and immediately regret them again.

Eventually, Lola asks for dinner and I get up to feed her and give her fresh water. She's getting kind of old, I think. The rain seems to have stopped and sunshine cracks up the clouds so we go out to the porch together and I give her some fuss. Lie down, roll over, let me rub your tummy. Want to see a movie together this weekend? I wonder what I'll do tonight. Hot bath, maybe, then play the guitar. I forgot that my legs are supposed to be paralysed. I guess I just stopped thinking about that stuff when it was time to get up and feed the dog.

Fiona & David & baby Finn

Pit Stop

Fiona left with the baby to visit her folks back home, and it was like Summer got in her hand luggage and took off with her. The Portland rain is persistent and I now spend most of my time in damp shoes working at my laptop alone in coffee shops.

I got some work while I'm here making mood-boards for a film company back home, and I sat at the counter in The Fresh Pot every day for a week and treated it like my office job. Making mood-boards involves finding photos to illustrate the script, then working on the colours until they create the right atmosphere for the plot. This is exactly the kind of work I love, and when the director emailed me after seeing the final draft and said yes, we're done, that's it, I was almost disappointed. It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that I'm tired of being a fugitive and all I really want is to be working again. So when I got an email from an Icelandic client asking if I'd get some video footage here, I said yes, of course I would. But I have to work fast, I explained. My visa is running out and I need to get off the continent.

"We'll send the camera tomorrow," he promised.

"And will you fly me to Iceland afterwards so I can make videos for you there, too?" I asked, confidently, like an American might have done.

"Alright," he said, surprising me, and I had to reassess the direction I wanted to travel in. Iceland? Again? It's been four years since I lived there and I was sure I'd gotten over it and moved on. But suddenly I like the idea of going back, even if it's just for a short trip. I could get in touch with Ursula and see if she still lives downtown. We used to sit out on her balcony in the midnight sun, and I have romantic notions that everything will be exactly the same this time around. But I haven't spoken to her in years now and for all I know she got over it, too, and moved on.

Still, just the thought of Iceland is making up for the stupid yet crushing heartache I'm feeling about leaving the States. I love it here, I've always loved it here, and all of a sudden I feel panicked about going back to Europe. I didn't do enough; I didn't see New Mexico; I never took Manhattan.

"What about a pit stop in New York?" I asked, my new American confidence taking over completely. The windows of the coffee shop had steamed up and people came in off the streets, sheltering in the doorway from the latest downpour of Portland rain. I wondered what Manhattan Island looks like in the sunshine. "Imagine all the great footage I could get for you there," I wrote.

"Alright, Atkins," came the reply, eventually. "Just don't screw this up."