I'm not over the moon about the Christmas decorations in town. Not by a long mark. There's a big neon Santa Claus outside Brown's and on either side of him is an angel. The centre piece is a nativity scene made out of flashing rope lights, wrapped in tinsel.

I asked to speak to Norman Brown, but his secretary said he wouldn't be back for a while. I told her I'd probably be around forever, but she felt his holiday in Orlando might last a bit longer than that.

"Is it something I can help you with?"

I explained my feelings about the display outside, but she just looked at me dumbly.

"I don't understand. Who exactly do you have a problem with?"

When I told her, she closed the ladies' magazine on her desk and blinked.

"Santa Claus and Jesus?"

"Yes," I said.

She looked from me to the emergency exit, and then back to me. She was alone in the upstairs office and the panic bar on the big red door had a heavy chain looped around it.

"There's always the window," I suggested.

"Santa Claus and Jesus?" she repeated.

"They weren't exactly contemporaries," I said. "Imagine an illuminated tribute to Vishnu and the Easter bunny."

"That sort of thing is offensive," she said with a slow uncertainty, "very offensive."

I went to Grogan's for an outside beer, but I was hardly there five minutes when Ed Grogan came and took the Kosangas cylinder from the patio heater. He snarled at me and then went back into his warm pub. The air turned cold and I was just about to leave when an elegant woman in an open fur coat came out and stood on the top step. She took a lollipop from her purse and started to suck. I watched her for a while. She was about forty and blonde. She had a couple of bright orange chopsticks pushed through her hair, and this supported a construction of loose curls at the back of her head. Was she attractive? Yes, but most women are unless they're hostile. Hostility is the only trait that's hard to cover with make-up. And this lady wore a lot of make-up, but it looked like it had been applied with care.

"You're staring at me," she said, coming over and sitting down at my table. I continued to stare.

"The eyes are not windows," I said. "They're mirrors."

"Very cryptic," she replied, as she rolled the lollipop to the other side of her mouth.

"I can tell by looking in your eyes exactly what you think of me," I said.

"And what do I think of you?"

"You think I'm nuts," I replied.

She laughed, but didn't deny it. She introduced herself as Kitty and when asked as to how such a rare and exotic flower turned up in this dreary town on the 19th of December, she said she was on a road trip, spending nights wherever she happened to stop.

The door to the back lounge swung open for a moment and a couple of women screeched like torture victims. All karaoke is bad karaoke, but these girls were wringing misery out of 'Living On A Prayer' as if it was the national anthem for a recently invaded republic.

Ed Grogan stepped out to see if I was gone and was shocked to find me seated and lost in conversation with a woman who seemed to be enjoying my company. His body trembled and his hand went nervously to his lips, as if he were trying to stop himself from saying something dreadful. Kitty tapped him on the elbow and he reacted as though she had prodded him with something sharp.

"I wonder if you could you bring us a bottle of champagne," she asked.

He looked at me as if I was a dog that might be whipped more often. His lips curled back to reveal teeth that had been ruined by too much sweet coffee. His nostrils opened wide and the hairs on the tip of his nose started to twitch. He turned to Kitty, giving her his pasty impression of a smile, and inquired, "The Bollinger or the Moet?"

"Whatever is best," she said. Then, as an afterthought, she added, "and if you wouldn't mind turning on the patio heater." The rage in his face almost burst like an exploding cigar.

It doesn't take that long for two people to finish a bottle of champagne. It's mostly bubbles. We were nearly at the bottom of the bottle when I asked her what we were celebrating.

"Me getting out of hospital," she said. "I hate hospitals. Too many rules."

That made me smile, because the hospitals I had known had no rules at all. You could be anything; you could say anything; in fact, if you weren't behaving strangely, people started watching you. They put you on a 'watch list' and you could feel all their eyes upon you.

In most hospitals, when they realise they can't cure you, they let you go. Not my hospital. In my hospital when they found you incurable, they wanted to keep you forever. The place itself was making you worse, but still they wouldn't let you go. Imagine checking into a clinic with a broken leg and a month later you're still there, but now you have two broken legs. A week after that, your arms are dislocated.

Kitty was staying in the hotel adjoining the pub. I told her that in my mind it would always be the 'Unexpected Hotel'. Ed Grogan had built it in the middle of the Economic Miracle and now it was
sitting mostly empty. Local rumour had it that the top two levels were unfinished, the floors a tangle of electrical cables and scaffolding bars. At first it wasn't even attached to his pub and nobody in town seemed to know what it was as it crept steadily upwards and outwards. But that's the way things were back then, two years ago; every town in the country had what looked like a wayward container ship slammed into the middle of it. These days the ground floor units are all unoccupied except for the photos pasted on the inside of the glass, handsome, adhesive people working on computers, checking out sweaters and waving at us.

When the unexpected hotel was finished, they knocked through a doorway that led into the pub and Ed Grogan took out a two-page centre spread in The People welcoming his business to its new location. Sometimes you can see individuals who look like bearded foreigners, leaning out the hotel windows, smoking cigarettes. They might be employees or they might be undocumented detainees, accommodated at the pleasure of the state. There is so much about this country that I no longer understand.

Kitty asked me if I believed in God. I told her I did, but I wasn't so sure he had any plans for coming back.

"Supposing he does?"

I nodded across the street, to the illuminations on the front of Brown's shop. "I don't know," I replied, "but he may not be too happy with the Santa Claus thing."

Looking like she had made up her mind about something, she leaned across the table and asked me in a low voice if I'd like to come to her room, and I said yes, yes I would.

Once you go into the lobby of the unexpected hotel, you're in an atrium with rough adobe plaster and lodge poles criss-crossed on either side of the skylight. Large ship's lanterns hang from chains that loop through exposed joists and there is dark Jacobean wood panelling coated with craquelure varnish. The article in The People said that it was a Santa Fe motif, touched with a hint of maritime.

Three receptionists stood awkwardly waiting for guests to welcome. All three nodded graciously at Kitty, but none seemed to know what to make of me. Did I deserve a nod and a smile or would I be better taken care of with a discreet call to Security? The hovering question was never answered, because Ed Grogan appeared from nowhere and barred my way to the elevator.

"Guests only beyond this point," he barked.

Kitty turned back and gave him a steady gaze that, for a moment anyway, seemed to destabilise him.

"Has my friend ever done anything wrong here?" she asked.

"No," he said, "but I find his very presence offensive."

"Could I have a quiet word with you, for a moment," she asked.

"Nothing you can say is going to change my mind," he replied, but nevertheless he allowed her to lead him into a corner that was mostly dominated by a trio of towering cacti and a framed Georgia O'Keefe depicting what looked like a ram's skull being devoured by giant, mauve genitalia.

I watched her as she spoke, calmly, and I noticed how his expression changed. His face seemed to droop, his body compressed in shock, he nodded twice. He almost looked gentle for a moment, but then he turned and came over to me.

"Right, buster," he said, "it'll never happen again, but tonight you're in. Enjoy it while it lasts."

In the elevator she turned to me and asked what I had ever done to Ed Grogan to elicit this sort of meanness. Nothing really, I just happened to see him once in a place where he did not wish to be identified.

"A house of ill-repute?" she asked, coyly.

"Something like that," I said, remembering one particular night in the locked ward at St Patrick's. His eyes met mine briefly as he passed, running down a corridor in his underwear, a zig-zag of blood trailing from his fingertips to the terrazzo; two nurses chasing after him with the control straps and the Haloperidol.

"I'm not here," he screamed, and then all the other lunatics took up the call, as so often happens.

"I'm not here."

"I'm not here."

"I'm never, ever here."

Everybody screamed. Everybody laughed. And yet nobody was there at all.

The hotel room was very nice, with bedside lights that came on when you put your card in the slot beside the door, and there was a hum of air conditioning I found comforting. It was like being aboard ship on a sea that was calm, but never still.

Kitty went and sat on the bed. She took off her shoes and squeezed her toes. She smoothed down her dress and then stroked the fur coat that was lying across her lap. She wasn't sure how to look at me, now that we were on the inside of the world, rather than the outside. She reached for her purse, took out a lollipop and removed it from the protective plastic sleeve. She slipped it into her mouth and started to suck, then she looked up at me and the pain she had been hiding was very close to the surface. Like a child she spoke with the stick protruding from her mouth, "You know what it is, don't you?"

And yes, I knew. I knew that she had told Ed Grogan she was dying. I knew the hair with the curls and the chopsticks was a wig. I knew that this cherry-flavoured stick she was sucking was packed with Fentanyl, the biggest gun in the Land of Pain – you move in and out of a world of medication, as I have done, and you get to recognise all sorts of delivery systems – I knew that soon the effects would spread from her mouth to her spine and into the base of her brain and a calm, comforting balm would burnish the rough corners of her perception and, like the patients in St Patrick's, she would be here, and not here, all at the same time. She would be happy again, as she had been three hours earlier. She would loll a bit and close her eyes and maybe even giggle.

She wanted to rest, but she was afraid of what would happen when her eyes closed and her thoughts drifted away. She didn't want to be found by the lady who opened the curtains and made the bed.

"Will you watch me while I sleep?" she asked.

I nodded and pulled up a chair beside her.

"Were you hoping something else might happen?"

I said no, what could possibly be better than this; beautiful company and good conversation in a room with a deep pile carpet. Then I fluffed up the pillow behind her and eased her down. I covered her with her fur coat and tucked it in around her.

It didn't take long for her to drift away. It seemed like she hadn't slept in ages. Her breathing came so heavy it was like a bag of sand had been laid across her chest.

Through the window I could see Brown's cheery Santa Claus waving at the town. Raised voices could be heard coming from somewhere, a pointed reminder that the season of goodwill can also be a season of spectacular violence. It's the calendar moment when all the frustrations of January, all the failures of February, all the fiscal mistakes of March, all the disastrous romantic decisions of April, all the crushing disappointments of May, all the unending self-doubts of June, all the upended hopes of July, all the casual stupidities of August, all the phony desires of September, all the crumpled wishes of October, all the damaged expectations of November – are suddenly combined in a coalmine explosion of black anger that wrecks the typical Irish town on Christmas Eve.

The traffic lights turned green outside the post office and nothing moved but the wind. The dark spire of St Michael's looked like a dead antenna, no longer capable of transmitting prayers to God. The poster beside the church gates advertised live music: 'Heart Attack Johnny and the Chestpains'. Sometimes, musicians can use up all their creativity in the naming of the band; they end up artistically spent before they ever play a note.

I got up and walked around. I checked out the mini-bar prices and was shocked by how much it would cost to stay in your room and get drunk. My knee was sore. A doctor once said that I needed a replacement, but a new knee would make the rest of me feel even wearier. It would be like putting a shiny button on a tattered jacket.

I heard a sound, like the opening of a window up above and I pictured a bearded foreigner leaning out and studying the moon, then looking eastwards, hoping to see his homeland, the white block buildings and the red roof tiles and the dust that falls like soft but steady rain.

I wasn't tired and I didn't want sleep, but I wondered what it was like where Kitty was going. Would there be trees and roads and cats and dogs? Would there be night and day and sun and sleet? Would there be traffic and houses and rivers and crowds? Would we need language or would everything be accomplished with the nod of a head and the raise of an eyebrow?

She stirred in her dreams and the fur coat moved upon her like a great dark animal, sent from somewhere else to protect and keep her warm. Wherever she was going, it would go with her. She would not be alone, she would not be afraid and if she were asked about the last man to give her comfort, she might find my name on her lips.

Barry McKinley returned to Ireland in 2006, after a dozen years in New York City. He lives in Carlow with his wife, Margaret and their twin sons, John and James.