Togher is the setting of Evan the Head’s flat, a place where the unnamed narrator’s first impression of Evan’s composed charm gradually opens onto a more troubling mix of drugs, false identities, occult interests, and domestic intimacy. Recalled during the narrator’s later stay in Evan’s caravan, the flat gives the relationship a history—and makes the household’s unseen tensions part of the present story.

Setting and First Encounter

The narrator first met Evan in a pub on Barrack Street in Cork, a rough venue marked by drug dealing, feuds, and occasional shootings. Though the narrator felt nervous there, Evan appeared calm and smiling at the bar. One night, the narrator went back with him to his flat in Togher and bought three sheets of acid, White Lightnings, described as producing ferocious visuals.

That first visit also revealed Evan’s ease with deception and reinvention: he showed the narrator passports held under three different names. The narrator admits to having been impressed at the time, a response that gives the memory both its youthful credulity and its retrospective edge.

Evan’s Stories and Occult Interests

In Togher, Evan’s talk ranged from elaborate sexual fantasies to the occult. He repeatedly spoke about organizing a proper orgy and told the narrator of one he and an old girlfriend had arranged in a graveyard in Swansea. That story, in turn, is linked to his interest in Aleister Crowley’s books and his suggestion that the narrator might be a white witch.

Evan’s insistence that magick should be spelled with an extra k condenses the flat’s atmosphere of performance and private belief. The narrator presents these stories not as proof of supernatural power, but as part of Evan’s mysterious, sometimes persuasive persona; the certainty with which he speaks sits beside the aliases and drugs that first made him seem worldly.

The Household and Its Afterlife

The narrator had seen Suze in the Togher flat, lumbering under children and dope smoke on the couch. Elsie, by contrast, remained unseen: the narrator had only heard her crying once from a distant room. The difference between the visible, crowded couch and the far-off cry gives the flat an uneven domestic presence, in which some inhabitants are plainly before the narrator while another is known only through distress.

Later, while staying in Evan’s caravan, the narrator asks whether Suze still loves him. Elsie answers that she does not, but that Evan has a spell on her and that she can break it. Her reply reaches back to the flat’s earlier occult talk while reframing it as an account of control within the household. Togher therefore matters not only as the setting of the narrator’s first dealings with Evan, but as the remembered home against which the later language of a spell acquires its force.