The window of this room looks over the backs of buildings in the centre of Dublin. I shipped the worktable back from an apartment I had in New York when I had a fellowship at the Public Library. The chair is one of the most uncomfortable ever made. After a day's work, it causes pain in parts of the body you did not know existed. It keeps me awake.
The small painting at the end of the mantelpiece is of Vinegar Hill overlooking Enniscorthy in Co Wexford, which we could see from the house where I was brought up. It is by my mother who died seven years ago. The African mask near the floor under it was owned by my younger brother Niall, who died suddenly two years ago. Behind the mask is a framed page with large print of Finnegans Wake which once belonged to James Joyce.
I write in longhand in notebooks using disposable fountain pens, covering only the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then rewriting some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side, and then, after a while, putting the stuff on a word processor which is in the other room. At the moment, I have the first third of a new novel, the first two chapters of another novel and a new story, all in longhand and revised, but waiting to be typed. No one has seen any of it. My handwriting, without my noticing, sometimes resembles my father's, or my uncle's, or my mother's. As soon as I notice, I make it resemble my own again.
The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up.