The Ikon Maker

'With forty pounds he went back to England. Curlews cried in the bog next to Ballinasloe station. A taxi-man looked harassed – no work maybe. They kissed – slenderly. The train left. She walked away.' And so Diarmaid O'Hallrahan withdraws from his mother once more, as he returns to London just before his eighteenth birthday. In the quiet of her Galway home, Susan is forced to confront a ruptured relationship with her only son, and the ikons – feathers, beads, paper accumulated into shapes – mark