These islands

I used to think I was rational. I'm no longer so certain. The week before last Christmas I was in the off-licence in Cleary's pub buying Power's whiskey: it was a tenner a bottle. While the barman was picking it out, I looked into the public bar. I saw a little man talking loudly, oblivious of the hush that had fallen and that I, even at a distance, recognised as the harbinger of pub violence.

Suddenly, a woman appeared behind him.

"I told you, Seamus, not to be drinking our money."



She punched the side of his head.

"And I warned you what would happen if you did."

Another blow.

"I may be your wife but I'm not a fucking eejit."

She went to make a third strike but was stopped.

"Easy Molly," said the peacemaker.

Talk resumed; my bottle came. I paid and left.

In the street outside I saw the unhappy couple. She was the bosomy wife and he the runty husband, I thought, from a seaside postcard. And then I forget them, until one Sunday recently, when I parked up in the town dump, the trailer hitched to my towbar piled with clutter from my shed that I had spent the morning emptying. Where I live, in Northern Ireland, there are people who survive by picking through what the rest of us throw away, and as usual this Sunday, there were half a dozen of them there and one was Seamus, the battered husband from Cleary's.

I waved at him, which according to dump protocol gave him the right to forage first through my stuff, and he joined me at the side of the trailer.

"Wild warm," he said and put his hand into a tin full of doorknobs, removing a horseshoe which I'd found in my house when I bought it 12 years ago, and which I'd always meant to put up but hadn't and which, earlier that afternoon, I had found in my shed and decided to dump. So into the Jacob's tin it had gone, although as I did this, I noticed in myself a twinge of anxiety accompanied by the unexpected idea that this was unlucky.

"You'll need this surely," said Seamus, hanging it over the side of the trailer, "but I'll take the doorknobs."

He made his selection and we dumped the rest. When the trailer was empty I saw he'd piled what he wanted by a bicycle.

"How'll you get all those things home on a bike?" I asked, for it was a lot of stuff.

"There's a man sometimes runs out here with his car," he said. "Maybe he'll give me a lift back."

But Seamus didn't know for sure this man would be out, nor had he a mobile to call him. I offered to drive him home. Along with the bicycle, we put what he wanted back in the trailer and tied it down. The horseshoe was still where he'd left it. He handed it to me.

"This is a good one," he said. "You keep it."

Once again the unwanted idea came to me that to throw this away was to court bad luck. If Seamus hadn't been there I could have overridden my anxiety, but in his presence I felt that not only was there was no reason not to keep it, but that I must positively hold on to it. I stowed it on the back seat.

Half an hour later I drove into Seamus's estate. Limp tricolours hung from lampposts and Bobby Sands eyed me suspiciously from a gable end.

"There's the house," said Seamus, and I pulled up.

We began unloading. The front door opened and Molly emerged in a Mickey Mouse nightdress followed by an alsatian whom she addressed as Killer.

"Is it more rubbish you're bringing home?" she said, as Seamus sidled through the gate with a box of scythes and hedge-clippers.

"Molly," he said, and he rolled his eyes towards me, an unmistakable signal to his wife that if they were going to argue, could it please not be in front of the stranger.

We finished unloading and I said goodbye. Then I drove away past green, white and gold kerbstones, the empty trailer twisting and clattering behind.

I got home and my ten-year-old daughter came and squinted into the back of the car in case there was a bag of sweets or ice creams on the seat.

"A horseshoe," she exclaimed. There was delight in her voice. "Did you find it in the dump?"

"No," I said, and I got out. "I've always had it."

I got the horseshoe and set it on the ledge of one of the kitchen windows, resting on its rounded bottom. To put it the other way was to court ill luck, for that way all one's good luck was liable to fall out, as Seamus had told me on the way to his estate, and although I knew this, I had thanked him for the information as if I hadn't.

"You weren't throwing it away, were you?" said my daughter. "That would be bad luck, you know."

"No," I said, "of course I wasn't."