Free Notes from a Coma by Mike McCormack

were like brothers. It was common knowledge that JJ had been reared in Owen’s house and that they had sat together in the same desk right from their first day at school together. But one look at them and you knew straight off they weren’t real brothers—JJ with his sallow skin and dark eyes and Owen with his fair hair and summer freckles. But even so there was an uncanny closeness about their friendship and I was wary about stepping into it as I did. It worried me that I might drive some sort of wedge between them and then both of them would end up resenting me and I would end up the loser on both sides. But it didn’t come to that. Owen just moved aside and let me move into the vacant space beside JJ as if he’d been keeping it warm for me all the time. There was no jealousy there, no awkwardness—that’s how open-hearted Owen was.
    Ten minutes in their company and you’d know why they got on so well together. People have it that JJ was the one with all the brains, the sharp one who read all the books and anguished over things. Owen on the other hand was the direct one, the one who refused to tie himself up inknots over anything. That’s the way everyone saw it: JJ the tortured brainy soul and Owen the man who lived in the moment with no care for broad metaphysical speculation as JJ put it. But that’s only half the story. It tells you nothing of Owen’s sharpness and common sense and it tells you less of how JJ envied him this laid-back attitude. JJ’d read some sprainbrain book or see something on telly and he’d be full of it for days afterwards, arguing it and discussing it and gnawing at it like a dog with a bone. Owen might see the same thing but he’d refuse to get bogged down in it, he’d make some comment and pass on. In those moments I always thought he was the smart one, the one with a sense of his own limitations. He’d be the first one to tell you he didn’t have JJ’s brains or learning but if you ask me he was the wiser of the two. The awful thing is that this difference, the very cornerstone of their friendship, was the very thing that came between them in the end.
    When it was all over JJ told me he was convinced Owen had blundered into someone else’s death. The way he saw it Owen should have lived a long happy life, married with a wife and kids, carrying on into old age and complaining of damp weather and arthritis. One night he’d lie down beside his wife and die in his sleep, passing over to the other side as calmly as he had done everything else in his life. If you’d known Owen you’d have known what he meant.
    It was the summer after I got out of hospital and if there was something on that night I cannot remember what itwas. Myself and JJ had spent that whole year together and we were happy. Sometimes we’d meet up in the evenings in one of the pubs in town; on this particular evening we were sitting in Thornton’s when Owen came in. One look at him and I knew he was in bad form. Work—he was driving a tractor for Peter Monk that summer—was hard and the hours were long; he was still in his working clothes. He was limping as well, a football injury from earlier in the week, and it was still sore. But his main trouble was woman trouble. Earlier that summer he’d fallen for one of the American students who come to Louisburgh each year to do some module in Irish studies. Her name was Mary Gee, a blonde toothy girl from Minnesota who, as JJ said, smiled like she was advertising some new feminine hygiene product. Owen had fallen for her and was broken-hearted when she’d returned to America at the end of May. She’d left Owen some vague promise of returning in August and his hope was that she’d stay in his house for a month or two. He wrote to her every second day but her responses had been fitful at best. All he knew was she was now working in a bookshop in Duluth, hardly making the sort of money that would finance a return trip to Louisburgh. He’d sent her some money but