Elaine Lennon is a film historian. She is the author of ChinaTowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne and is widely published in international film journals.
She has a background in television production and film financing and was a lecturer for a decade in film studies and screenwriting at the School of Media, Dublin Institute of Technology.
John’s Book
By Elaine Lennon
The last morning in Mayo was bright enough to make the trouble difficult to believe.
The Atlantic lay blue and almost motionless beyond the fields, the sort of morning on which Ireland seemed to have been invented specifically to make people forgive it. A pair of hooded crows were picking at something in the grass. A hare appeared briefly at the edge of the road, looked at the burnt orange Ford Ranger Wildtrak and disappeared into the ditch.
Gene was standing beside the truck in his sea boots, looking through his Sea Scopix marine binoculars.
John came out carrying two mugs of coffee.
“What?”
Gene lowered the binoculars.
“There’s something out there.”
John followed his gaze.
Far beyond the headland, almost lost against the blue, something grey was moving across the water.
“Boat?”
“Maybe.”
Gene raised the Sea Scopix again.
John waited.
“Too fast.”
“You sure?”
“I’ve been doing this longer than you’ve been alive.”
John smiled.
“Unfortunately.”
Gene lowered the binoculars.
“It’s not fishing.”
The Ford Ranger was Gene’s truck, salt-stained and permanently half-equipped for a life at sea. There were waders behind the seats, rope in the load bed, a toolbox, tackle boxes, waterproofs and a plastic crate of things Gene regarded as essential because, at some point in his career, each of them had proved useful.
Two Motorola walkie-talkies sat in the centre console.
John’s phone buzzed.
Jessica.
A photograph of Red.
The rooster was sitting on the wooden picnic bench outside the Blue House in a patch of sunshine, looking extraordinarily pleased with himself. His comb was bright scarlet; his tail feathers had the iridescent green-black sheen of oil on water.
Red is back
John sent a thumbs-up.
Gene looked over.
“That’s a fine bird.”
“He knows it.”
They drove east.
At a filling station outside Castlebar, Gene put diesel into the Ranger while John went inside for coffee. A television above the cigarettes was showing the sea.
The sound was low.
John watched the pictures.
Grey water. A vessel. A map. A red line.
The attendant increased the volume.
“…precautionary measures… maritime traffic… temporary restrictions…”
Gene had come back inside.
“That isn’t the one.”
John looked at him.
“How many are there?”
Gene shook his head.
“Don’t know.”
The television cut to an advertisement.
They drove on.
By Sligo the traffic had thinned. Garda cars appeared at junctions. White Hyundais with their blue and yellow fluorescent stripes like motorised toothpaste tubes. A portable electronic sign instructed motorists to turn around. Nobody seemed able to say why.
Gene switched on one of the Motorolas.
“Try me.”
John pressed the button.
“Testing.”
Static.
Then Gene’s voice came back.
“Perfect.”
“Primitive technology.”
“Primitive technology works.”
At Blacklion they were stopped.
The Garda was young, wet and exhausted.
“Cavan’s restricted.”
“Restricted how?”
“Certain routes.”
“Which ones?”
The Garda looked past them.
“Where are you going?”
“Cavan.”
“You can’t go that way.”
“Why?”
“Water.”
Gene laughed.
The Garda didn’t.
“Contamination.”
“There’s a lake behind us.”
“I know.”
“What contamination?”
“I don’t know.”
John looked at him.
It was the answer that frightened him.
Not the water. The fact that the man was telling the truth.
Gene’s phone rang. He listened.
His expression changed.
“Donegal?”
Gene nodded.
“What happened?”
“Something at the coast.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
He looked at John.
“I’ve got to get back.”
The Ranger was parked near MacNean’s Restaurant.
Gene killed the engine.
“You take the Audi.”
“You’re taking the Ranger?”
“Obviously.”
John got out.
For a moment the brothers stood beside the road.
Gene pointed north.
“Killybegs.”
John nodded.
“Cavan.”
“Keep the Motorola.”
“You keep the other.”
They looked at each other.
Then Gene got back into the Ranger.
John watched his brother drive away.
The Ford disappeared towards Donegal.
John walked to the silver Audi RS6.
It was a notch beneath a supercar and looked nothing like one. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
He started the engine. It purred into action. He floored it.
The quattro system took him home through roads that were already becoming unfamiliar.
By late afternoon Cavan Town looked almost normal. Pandemic normal. People were buying coffee. Bulk packets of toilet rolls. Bottled water. A Labrador was dragging its owner towards a bin. Two jackdaws quarrelled over something in a car park.
John recalled that first lockdown Saturday when he walked into Lidl, his mouth covered in a bandana. He chuckled at his reflection in the glass door. He could have been a bank robber in a western. The staff outnumbered the customers that morning. The other man was wearing a gas mask. A woman wore a snorkel.
He bombed along the street edging out of town.
A man was jogging along the pavement. John had once asked him what he was running from. He wondered now if he had known.
At home the router was flashing. Then it stopped.
The phone showed one bar. Then none.
The television froze.
The refrigerator went silent.
John opened the tap. Water ran for three seconds. Then stopped.
He looked towards the hall cupboard.
His go-bag was there. He had assembled it years ago: torch, batteries, first-aid kit, water-purification tablets, power bank, folding knife, spare socks, two protein bars he had forgotten to replace and the Radiflix wind-up radio.
He took the Moleskine from the desk. Black cover. Elastic strap. Good paper. He had bought it because he liked writing by hand. With a Pilot V-Pen.
He wrote:
Something has happened at sea.
Then:
Roads restricted. Water failing. Gene gone to Killybegs.
He closed it.
His bookshelves filled two walls. Engineering. History. Fiction. Politics. Birds. Espionage. War. Landscape.
A new book by Eoin Lenihan, Vandalising Ireland, lay open beside the chair. John picked it up. Read a page. Put it down. History and prophecy, all at once.
At 3.17 the phone rang.
Katherine.
“John.”
“What happened?”
“There’s someone outside.”
“Who?”
“Masterson.”
John was already standing.
“Where’s Jessica?”
“With me.”
“Call the Gardaí.”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No answer. What would they do to him anyway.”
John looked at the dark window.
“Is he still there?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“By the lounge.”
“Stay away from the windows.”
“John -”
“I’m coming.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m coming.”
He hung up. He took his keys. Then stopped. He remembered Storm Éowyn. The trees had come down across every road to the Blue House. Hargaden’s trees. Great trunks across the lane, branches tangled into the telephone wires, knocking the telegraph poles.
The electricity had gone.
The phone had gone.
The broadband had gone.
Then the water.
He had driven the Audi through the debris and got Katherine and Jessica out. They had stayed with him for nine weeks. Jessica on the sofa. Katherine at the kitchen table, marking Geography assignments. John learning that a fifteen-year-old could consume an almost industrial quantity of toast. They had thought it was exceptional. Now it seemed like instruction.
Morning came.
John drove towards Ballyjamesduff.
The normal route was blocked.
A tanker stood beside two Garda cars.
“Water supply,” the Garda said.
“Which one?”
“Local.”
“What happened?”
“Treatment problem.”
“What treatment problem?”
The Garda shrugged.
John turned around.
He took the road through Ballyhaise.
The Agricultural College fields were green and rich beneath a pale sky. A tractor stood beside a shed. Several people were filling plastic containers from a tap.
A rosy-cheeked man in a lumber shirt and hob-nailed boots waved John down.
“Have you got water?”
“No.”
“Where are you going?”
“Ballyjamesduff.”
The man shook his head.
“Don’t bother.”
John drove on.
He passed the college.
Past Ballyhaise. Towards Killykeen.
He saw the sign and muttered:
“I’m going round the world for sport.”
He had been here before. Not recently. A few days out with Jessica and Katherine over the years. And as a boy, with Gene, in their father’s Opel Kadett. He had let them practise driving on the quiet roads among the trees.
“Bring it back in one piece, that’s all I ask!” he said, dangling the keys in their hands and retreating to the relative safety of The Irish Times and a cup of coffee at the restaurant without casting a backward glance.
They had been terrified and delighted, changing gear badly, stalling, laughing, scraping branches, discovering the strange freedom of a car moving through a landscape where nobody seemed to care what two teenagers were doing.
Killykeen had always seemed like wilderness in a park. Now John drove through it too fast. The Audi’s wheels struck dead branches. A pothole jolted the steering. Rainwater lay black in the hollows.
A roe deer broke from the trees and bounded across the road. John braked hard. The deer disappeared into the plantation.
He sat still for a moment. His heart was beating too quickly.
He drove on.
The forest was beautiful. Sitka spruce. Norway spruce. Scots pine. Bracken. Moss. Wet bark.
The luxury cabins appeared between the trees, empty and immaculate, their glass reflecting the forest, as though Scandinavia had been inserted into Cavan from an artist’s maquette.
Beyond them lay the lake. Lough Oughter was not the postcard colour people imagined. The water was brown-green, stained by peat and vegetation, broken by weed and pollen and the dark reflections of trees. It was beautiful because it was alive, not because it was clean enough to drink.
A grey heron stood in the shallows. A cormorant surfaced.
John thought of the blocked water mains.
At Rann he saw a fiftysomething man beside a spring. The man was dressed too well for the place. Navy cashmere coat. White shirt. Leather Church shoes already suffering from the mud.
He was filling expensive-looking glass bottles with spring water.
John stopped.
The man looked at the Audi.
“Nice wheels.”
“Thanks.”
“Water’s better than petrol at the moment.”
John smiled despite himself.
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough.”
The man looked towards the lake.
“There’s water everywhere.”
“Yes.”
“Just not the sort you’re allowed to drink.”
John looked at the bottles.
The man’s clothes seemed absurd.
Then the man said, “You should keep going.”
“Why?”
He looked down the road.
“People are beginning to turn up.”
John didn’t ask who.
He got back into the Audi.
The Motorola chirped.
“John?”
Gene.
John grabbed it.
“Where are you?”
“North.”
“Donegal?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
Static.
“Gene?”
“It’s not just the boats.”
“What does that mean?”
The transmission dissolved into noise.
Then nothing. John tried again. No answer.
His phone buzzed.
Jessica.
Another photograph. Red. This time the rooster was outside the lounge window. The photograph had been taken from inside.
John enlarged it. Red’s head was turned towards the camera. Behind him, reflected in the glass, was a human figure.
John called. No answer.
He called again. Nothing.
He accelerated.
The route through Ballyjamesduff added miles. At least twenty-five from Killykeen to the Blue House. John knew every one of them.
He passed the outskirts of the town. There was shouting near the County Museum. For a moment he thought there was a fight. Then he saw the trench.
The First World War trench had become part of some grotesque local re-enactment. Men in improvised uniforms were crouched in it while others shouted from the opposite side. But the groups had divided themselves according to local racial factions, turning a memorial to a European war into a travesty of another one.
Someone had brought a speaker. Someone else was filming on a phone.
John slowed.
A man with boot polish on his face waved at him.
John drove on. He did not want to know.
The road to the Blue House was blocked by a tree. Freshly cut. Not storm damage. The chainsaw marks were pale.
John got out.
There were tyre tracks in the mud. Wide tyres.
A smear of green paint on a broken branch. He thought of Hargaden’s John Deere Gator.
The one-eyed dog. Half Collie, half Patterdale Terrier. A real bastard. Hargaden’s dog had been bred, if that was the word, for suspicion.
John drove around the obstruction through a field entrance. The Audi’s wheels spun. Then the quattro caught.
He reached the Blue House.
Katherine was standing in the doorway, Jessica behind her.
John got out.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he?”
Katherine knew who he meant.
“Gone.”
“Masterson?”
She nodded.
John looked towards the lounge window frame. There were feathers on the grass. Red feathers. Some had caught against the wall. Others lay beneath the window. A few had blown as far as the path.
None were by the study. Instead blood was smeared on the wall.
He looked at Katherine.
“What happened?”
“He killed Red.”
“How?”
She looked at Jessica. Then back at John.
“He caught him.”
Her voice was controlled.
“He throttled him.”
John looked down.
“He beat him against the front door afterwards.”
Jessica began to cry. Katherine put an arm around her.
“He wanted us to hear it.”
John looked towards the new private road behind the house.
“Hargaden?”
“Yes.”
“He paid him?”
“To frighten us.”
John remembered Masterson. He had known him years ago. Everybody did. The murder had happened when Masterson was a teenager. He had spent his twenties and thirties in a psychiatric hospital. When he came out, people said he had changed. He hadn’t. He had simply learned where he could behave badly without consequence.
He had tried to kill Katherine ten years earlier. An Alsatian. A deliberate attack. She had escaped badly bruised and terrified.
The Gardaí had taken statements. Then somehow the story had become that Katherine had been trying to kill Masterson. His mother had said that Katherine had turned him into a paranoid schizophrenic. Nothing happened. Masterson never picked on somebody his own size. He liked animals. Not because he loved them. Because they were weaker. He tortured them. He had found Red, Hargaden had found him. It was almost a perfect arrangement between a thug and a deranged animal-torturing sadist who was untouchable by police, hospitals, the law. Born to kill.
“Where’s the body?” John asked.
Katherine shook her head.
“Gone.”
“Why?”
“He’s insane, not stupid.”
John understood. Without a body, there was nothing. Only feathers. Only frightened women. Only a man everybody already knew was dangerous. And the Gardaí had other things to worry about. Roads. Water. Fuel. The border that nobody looked after these days. The coast. Something much bigger than a madman killing birds. They were not coming for Masterson. They had not come before. They were not coming now.
John went inside.
The water tank was nearly empty. He worked. The tank. The gutters. The downpipes. The roof. The old rain barrel. Plastic drums. Camping filter.
He turned the problem into numbers. Litres. People. Days. It helped.
The Radiflix hissed on the kitchen table.
A voice emerged. Emergency measures. Supply disruption. Fuel restrictions. Pharmaceutical deliveries.
John looked at Katherine.
“For years they’ve only been giving people a month’s supply.”
“Because the drugs weren’t in the country.”
“Exactly.”
They both knew what that meant.
A month sounded reassuring until the month was gone.
The electricity failed. The house fell silent.
John looked towards the window.
The rifle was in its case. He had a firearms licence. He could use it.
He also knew that a rifle would not restore the water. It would not restart the pharmacy deliveries. It would not bring the Gardaí. It would not tell them what was happening at sea.
Outside, something moved along the private road.
The one-eyed dog appeared first. Then the John Deere Gator. Hargaden was driving. Masterson walked behind it.
John saw them.
They saw him.
Nobody spoke.
Hargaden stopped the Gator.
Masterson stood beneath the fir tree. He looked towards the feathers. Then at the house. He did not approach. He didn’t need to. He had already made his point.
After a minute Hargaden reversed. The Gator disappeared. The dog looked back once.
Then it was gone.
There had been no confrontation. That was the point.
John closed the door.
That night they slept in the same house. Not safely. Together. There was a difference.
Rain came hard against the roof. The containers filled. Then, almost as suddenly, the rain stopped.
Sunlight appeared through the clouds. The wet garden steamed. A blackbird sang from the hedge.
Jessica stood beneath the porch.
“I miss Red.”
John nodded.
“So do I.”
The Motorola chirped.
John grabbed it.
“Gene?”
Static.
Then his brother’s voice.
“John.”
“Where are you?”
“Killybegs.”
“You made it?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
A long silence.
Then:
“Don’t go near the coast.”
“Why?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Gene.”
“They’re not fishing boats.”
The signal disappeared.
John waited.
Nothing.
He opened the Moleskine. He wrote until his hand hurt. He wrote about the vessel. The Ranger. Blacklion. MacNean’s. The RS6. Killykeen. Their father’s car. The forest. The deer. The dirty lake. The man in the cashmere coat. Ballyjamesduff. The trenches. Red. Masterson. Hargaden. The dog. The water. The medicine. The sea. Then he stopped.
He looked at what he had written. This was no longer a notebook. It was a record. A diary. A book. His book. He finally inscribed his name on the inside page: J. Lowell.
*
By 3rd November, nobody used the word temporary anymore. The Army was on manoeuvres nationwide, lining the land border unacknowledged since 1998. The ports were protected. Immigration had been stopped and there were visa requirements for entry following decades of looking the other way. Spot-checks began on the millions of foreign residents. Whole regions were populated by Eastern Europeans and it was hard to tell the difference between Poles, Ukrainians and the new enemy, embedded for close to three decades. The RAF and French Air Force swarmed the coastline. An explosion on a shadow vessel off the Celtic Sea created an oil slick killing the fish that Ireland wasn’t allowed anyhow. Food was rationed. There were new arrangements for water. Fuel. Medicines. Roads. Some were official. Some were improvised. Some belonged to people who had discovered that an emergency was an excellent time to become important.
Ireland had not ended. That was the strange part. Children still went to school. Farmers still complained about the weather. People still argued in supermarket car parks where long queues in the rain for staggered shop openings led to threats of revolution. Foxes still crossed roads at night. Magpies still stole things. The lakes still filled. The forests still grew. The sea remained blue on fine mornings.
John had written everything down. Not because he believed anybody would read it. Because otherwise it would become memory. And memory, he had discovered, was too willing to make the past seem orderly.
On the evening of 3rd November he stood beneath the fir tree at the Blue House. There were still feathers on the gravel and patio. Red feathers. Rain had flattened them.
The sun came out.
John thought about the things people had once called permanent. The telephone. The roads. The water. The supermarkets. The medicines. The State. He thought about Gene in Killybegs. He thought about the Ranger beside MacNean’s. He thought about the Audi on the road through Killykeen. He thought about two boys in their father’s car, learning to drive among the trees. He thought about how quickly people learned to live with what had disappeared.
Then he went inside.
The Moleskine lay on the kitchen table. He opened it.
On the final page he wrote:
When the world stops working, it does not stop all at once; it leaves you something to lose.
© Elaine Lennon 2026