Nineteen-year-old Aoileann, principal teller of this extraordinary tale in which horror and motherhood entwine, lives with her iron-willed paternal grandmother and the wreck of her bed-bound mother on the grey, windswept island of her birth, a place she has never left. Almost the first thing we learn of their home is that its windows have been filled in with shards of stone, since the nameless catastrophe of which they are all survivors: none must see the grim drama that plays out inside.
Although Aoileann’s grandmother, known only as Móraí (Gaelic for grandma), is herself an islander, it quickly becomes clear that on this place of outcasts – with its brutal rituals, its cruelty and its impenetrable dialect – theirs is a pariah household. The islanders jeer and stare, and Aoileann has had “bad times” when they’ve caught her alone on the beach: the locals spit after the most casual contact, to avoid contamination. Even Dada, Aoileann’s father, perhaps incapacitated by guilt at the part he may have played in his wife’s degeneration, has retreated to the mainland. The lives of his mother and child revolve around keeping what Aoileann calls “the bed-thing” alive and presentable for his occasional visits.
