I have 143 words to say to you

My cousin looked at the images. "With a bit of work that could be quite nice". He started doing something with Photoshop. Wiping away the blackness and somehow what was behind it started to show through like those squidgy boards you used to get with black rainbows. "See how easy it is?" he said happily. "You can rotate it so it's not at a such a strange angle."

He had a PHD in Chemistry.

I liked my out of focus, out of shape scenes of darkness. It was art.

It was Christmas Day. In a quiet bungalow on the North west coast of Ireland. Earlier that morning my cousin and I had listened to Radio 4 in the car before venturing out into the wind. I could feel my Grandmother watching as we sat there in listening comfortably; relations. The weather lashed against the windscreen.

I wished I wasn't a girl as usual. My cousin remembered us as girls, my sisters and I. I remembered him too - always experimenting.

It was a National Trust spot. There was a Centre. Perhaps they sold huge, black, hexagonal stones.

I'd imagined the Causeway to be enormous. It was difficult to gauge due to all the Eastern European tourists taking advantage of the free day. I hobbled on hard coal cobbles for a while until we turned a corner. The sun shone on what looked like the Grand Canyon. I took a picture of my cousin - his hat resting like an egg cosy. He was so tall it was difficult to get in the top of the hummock he stood against but his kind brown eyes shone behind his glasses.

He was a quick walker and his legs are long. Sometimes he went ahead but it didn’t matter. I'd come here for silence really. I'd left my children for a Christmas without me. Nothing seemed out of order one year on from the break up.

Back at my Great Uncle's bungalow my cousin had moved onto the Orange marchers. It would take more than Photoshop to make any one of these people look well shot (and shot is not a word one uses lightly in this neck of the woods). He must have stood there a while to get such good close-ups of muscular arms bashing their drums. There was nothing surprising here. All expected. All shaven headed, bully beef brigaders flying self-righteous flags. I wondered what he might do with such images? Perhaps he had a Myspace profile.

My bed was a Princess and the Pea job; a blow up on top of a put up which equaled precarious. I balanced on it as he gave me his slide show.

My period had started just as I'd departed from Stansted. I was horribly aware of the bag of used tampons I'd been keeping in the corner. Somehow the thought of carrying that bag into the clean clean kitchen saying, "this is definitely organic" to my Great Uncle, was inconceivable. So there it sat, by his feet, with him going on about pixels and wiping away my imperfections. I kept thinking about those women who hide babies - like the way bulimics use buckets in cupboards.

In Belfast I'd seen a man with a bicycle and two dogs. A performer - perching one dog above the other like a mother and baby and playing a little song. Leering at everyone with bad teeth. Christmas joviality. "Sure enough that's a sin", one woman passed by muttering under her headscarf.

I wondered whether it had been a Catholic sin or a Protestant sin. You don't get much sin in England.

We'd gone for a couple of long walks already and still had Boxing day to come. He'd shown me the old house - the one I'd written so many thankyou letters to for many years.
It looked exactly as I'd imagined. A monument to seventies living with wide windows and a mosaic porch set in dark wood. A developer had bought up the whole row. They were going to knock them down for luxury flats. I peeked into the windows hoping to see my Great Aunt standing there like Joan Crawford in a white apron with her horn-rimmed glasses and constant cigarette.

We went down to the wide river which cut across Coleraine. "I used to come here," my cousin said, "probably sitting morosely" he laughed. I imagined him at fifteen, his mother shouting in a Schizophrenic rage perhaps, in her immaculate home at the top of the hill.

A lot of things in Northern Ireland have been burnt. I'd looked up poetic cafes on the net. One looked good then I noticed a posting about a fire which had rendered it. My cousin liked burning things as well. On his PC.

It had been a bungalow as well - my grandma's. In a cul-de-sac in Lowestoft with a similar mock velvet burned out three piece. Memories. Support stockings and a strange circular electric heater which only got plugged in on a Sunday. Silk knickerbockers which she kept on at night, along with her thermal vest. Warm flesh all exploded out of her corset. Set free.

I would sit between her legs on a Friday by the gas in the sitting room and watch Within these Walls while she rubbed my back.

Must've been ten.

The bed was a small double. It was always cold. I would wake up beside her and not want to move. Not be able to move.

She had that popular constable on her wall. The one with the river. I would try to focus on it.
The same image sat on the wall in my great uncle's front room - between the state of the art speakers and the ornamental china figure collections displayed in mock posh cabinets.

They'd been like mother and daughter you see.

I remember her ringing up for hours.

I mentioned I fancied a game of backgammon. My cousin disappeared in the loft for a while then brought me to a huge white glass-topped table with counters inlaid with old pennies - like something out of that film with Liz Taylor and her fur hood - The Millionaires.

I must have beaten him thirty times. I could see him working out the probabilities with his Phd brain. He didn't realise it was all about patterns and luck. It should have got boring. We even tried to swap dice at one point. Nothing but victory ensued.

Boxing day we went to Londonderry and he opened up a little. The nearest thing I had to a brother while his mother was the nearest thing my grandmother had to a daughter. And the orange was the nearest thing the bar had to a soft drink and so it went on.

A tour of the city walls led to a view over to the Bogside. I hadn't taken my cousin seriously about the term "bogside". Then we'd seen a bogside inn and a bogside café and a bogside bookies. They didn't mind apparently. The bogsiders. And they didn't seem to mind the sides of their houses being painted with huge images of children in gas masks - like a particularly terrifying Doctor Who episode. I wanted to go down. We parked carefully. It was so quiet. Were the bogsiders having a happy christmas I wondered, as we walked up and down the streets a bit. Scared to open my mouth in case some English came out. Scared to take a picture of the huge, martyred schoolgirl who looked uncannily like my daughter. What were they trying to say? Look at our children? Our children will carry it all on? I knew nothing.

Why had I come to this place for peace? Still trying to adjust to my sudden freedom from tyranny. Perhaps I needed to be frightened.

Ireland is so strange. You get mountains which just appear and you think - why didn't I see that coming? Just round the corner from all the barbed wire was the coast. The wide sand. And a surfer bobbing in the distance. We'd come to some ancient trench circles. Nothing to stop us going inside. They were thought to be like waiting grounds for travelling neanderthals. No-one was buried or anything.

As we stood inside I could hear the sea and imagined it coming right to the edge and over the top. Filling up these ditches and drowning us. One circle was very wet - a bogside circle perhaps; while the other was just on the soggy side.

When you come to places like that you want to feel something don't you. All I could feel was an overwhelming sense of waiting at a bus stop.

We clambered out quickly and strode across a little wooden bridge.

"That's where they make the whisky", my cousin indicated up river, "the salmon come through here to the sea as well. They use the water to wash the barley". I imagined the delicious combination of whisky and fresh salmon.

We walked onto the beach. I wondered about the surfer's family. Imagined him leaving his house with his board under his arm while they tucked into another licquer chocolate and passed each other the nuts. How irritating he must be to live with.

Something made me turn back to the circles. At the edge of the beach lay a huge slightly flat sheep. It looked so restful. Even from a distance it looked large. Perhaps it was bloated. Was this a tradition perhaps - to leave corpses to rot like that. It seemed so indecent. Almost a sin.

It fitted my mood though. The perfect image. The death of my marriage. The freedom to lie under the sky and just rot away.

"Let's go back to the car. It's a Clare in the Community Special in a minute", my cousin suddenly turned tail. It wasn't the longest sentence he'd said so far but it was a start.

"They've been starved those two," my mother had said when I got back, "they don't understand about being loved.