Falling Out of Heaven
John Lynch

To my parents Finn and Rose

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Counting in the Dark

The Last Thing to Go

Stronger than Pain

The Horizon

The Firebird

The Fall

The Pier

Eating God

What You Don’t See

May

Blue-grey

The Boys

Baby Man

The Gift

Peter

The Lacewing

Standing in the Mouth of Love

The Room at the End of the World

The First Man

Pieces of the Day

The Shifting of the Earth

Fishing

Clouds

The Stain

Honour Him

The Seagull

Torn Down

Falling Together

Take it Back

The New Sun

The Healing School

Winter

Bring a Protestant

Peace and Reconciliation

Black Daffodil

Farrell’s Undoing

Water

Wildflowers

The Kiss that Never Was

Dying Egypt, Dying

Snow

References

Memory Down

Softer than Love

Begging for a Fairytale

The Sign of the Cross

Spilled

Days Like People

No Bounce

Dead Man’s Hand

Like an Egg

The Twin

On the Wing

Raw

The Cave

Shilling Hill

The Warriors of Winter

Among the Bridges

Planet Earth

Alf

The Beast with Two Backs

Words of Flame

The Tough Guy

Mrs Johnson

Fucking Around with Love

Clive

Almost Time

Walking Backwards

Missing

A Land of Paper

The First Meeting

Killing Two Birds

Being Kissed by Angels

State

My Brother, My Killer

A Whisper Away

Cassie

Light and Stone

Buried Alive

Buying Beauty

The Sign

Spirit Against Spirit

Not for Diamonds

Sanctuary

Tea with the Vicar

A Second Face

A Mouthful of Rain

The Child

Breaking Free

Touched

Shotgun

Like My Own

The Last Day

The Quiet Friend

Some Kind of Peace

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Counting in the Dark

He was told that he had a month. Nineteen days later he was dead. It was his back. It had been bothering him. It was strange, he told a friend, it was like someone had stabbed him. He went to masseuses and chiropractors and they bent him and pulled him like he was a bendy toy but nothing seemed to help. Eventually his wife suggested he go to a doctor. It’s nothing, he had said to her, something is out that’s all, or maybe a muscle is in spasm. Go and see a doctor, she had said. They took X-rays, they took blood. When can I have the results, he asked? You can have them now, was the reply, you see, what you have has already taken you without you realising it. The doctor then showed him the X-ray and said that his spine was rotten, that the cancer had eaten it from the inside out. There’s nothing we can do, I’m sorry. He went home and closed the curtains and sat in the dark. He counted. He began with seconds, moved on to minutes, then hours and then days until he reached a month. He spoke to his wife, he told her that he would be leaving and that she had to be strong. She demanded a second opinion, he told her that would be a waste of time, and time was something that he didn’t have much of anymore. His name was Thaddeus and he decided to work one more week at the one thing he was good at, counselling, but he didn’t say anything to any of them, he didn’t look for anything in any of his patients’ eyes. He gave as he always did. The pain stopped him after four days and after that he was given morphine and confined to bed. A Macmillan nurse was with him to the end, she was young and attentive.

It is moments since I got the news. A lot has happened since I first met him, much has changed in my life since he first stood before me five years before. A man sees his life in another’s death and as I sit here and gaze out the window of my living room I think of my own story and how it nearly broke me. The man who called me to tell me the news is a part of that time when the world splintered before my eyes. He cried as he spoke, telling me how much we all owed him. I agreed and cried too. I imagined his last days alone with the knowledge that the clock of his life was ticking down more loudly than ever before. I am sure that he faced them with courage, although you can never be sure. When my wife comes home I tell her. Come and sit down, she says. She looks at me and shakes her head; everything is going so quickly, she says. He was a good man, Gabriel, like you.

I look at her, at this woman that I nearly lost and I smile. She asks me if I’m okay. Yes, I reply, she then asks me what I’m thinking. I tell her that I am back in that hospital where I was forced to claw back what was left of my life.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘It’s the past…Let it go…’

But I’m no longer listening. I am back in that time when the ground rose to meet me. I am five years younger and I am falling.

The Last Thing to Go

I remember how the room they had put me in smelled of disinfectant and crisp sterile sheets. I was wearing a white gown. I knew that I was in trouble, that I was in a place where broken men like me came to be mended. I had lost track of time and I recall being grateful, but I also knew that there was a price to be paid, there always is when a man renounces the hand he has been given to play. They left me alone for long periods, calling in only to make me swallow a pill or to readjust my bedding. But I knew that they were never far away. I was highrisk and they were watching, they always were. When I see him now, that man lying in that white room, his mind tearing him apart, I have trouble believing that it was me, but it is something I must never forget. His forehead glistens, his mouth is dry and he craves the one thing that has almost destroyed him, a drink. He is shivering but it is not from the cold. He believes he is in danger, but he will not ask for help. He will not admit that he is beaten, no matter what they say or do to him.

How I came to be there and the prisoners I took along the way was not something that was available to me as I lay in that bed. My curse will be that as the days pass I will fall in and out of memory, good and bad, terrifying and benign. My name was the last thing to go and as I sit here now five years later, healthy and in good spirits, I feel pity for the animal I had become.

A doctor came to see me shortly after I was admitted, she was young and I remember her breath falling on my face as she bent down to me, it was cool like summer lemonade.

‘You seem a little better,’ she said to me. ‘A little less agitated.’

I saw that she was not alone, two men stood behind her, their arms folded.

‘Please…Try not to upset yourself…It serves no purpose…’

Then she wiped my brow and smiled at me, and for a moment I wanted to trust her, but my heart was too sore and too poisoned.

I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to tell her that I feared my mind and that when I was alone I lost sight of myself, and that I was at the mercy of the past with its dark assassins. That’s why they tell you to live a good life, because there is nothing worse than a bad memory, it will grow a mouth and sing cruel songs.

Stronger than Pain

My mother loved butterflies and she loved God. She was a tall woman; He had made her like that, she said, because her mind would be closer to the sky and His love. She had been gifted by His divine power, she had one of the fruits of the holy tree, she could speak in tongues. When she was young God had moved through her. He had laid His joy across her heart and asked her to move forward to spread His Word. She said that she had been standing in a field that overlooked her house and she could see her mother and father moving about their garden tending to the flowers. It was an autumn evening and the land around shimmered in the fading light. She was sixteen and she wore a dress that had small butterflies embroidered on it. Her father had bought it for her, just after he was told he had cancer. He had gone into the town one day and returned with it. As he handed it to her, they both knew that he was saying goodbye, and that it was a gift that she must treasure. She told my sister and me that she had been sad all day as if her world had come to an end. As she stood in there above her house she watched the shape of her father in the garden below and she said she knew from looking at him, the way his back was bent and the way he held himself that he had hardly any time left. He had lied when he had said that it could be a year or so before he left, she could tell that it was only weeks. She remembers how the certainty of it moved through her and she said that in that moment something happened that changed her life forever. A monarch butterfly landed on her shoulder and nestled next to one of the embroidered ones stitched into her dress. She said she knew that it was a sign that God was saying that our lives were just the same, as brief and as beautiful as a butterfly’s. Just then she felt a power move across her heart, she said she knew immediately that it was God’s love, reassuring her, letting her know that no matter what happened she would be alright and that her father was going to a better place. She said she knew that God was touching her for a reason, and that she was being prepared for something. Two weeks later to the day her father died, he collapsed in the garden, just as the weather was beginning to close down for winter. He was waked in his favourite suit, the one he wore for special occasions at the bank of which he was manager. It was for special customers, so it was only right that he should go to meet God in it. It was as she stood over his open coffin that she felt the force come to her again. This time it brought language, an ancient tongue that the first apostles had spoken when the Holy Dove had touched them on the brow.

It happened when she placed her hand on her dead father’s forehead; she said that she felt a rush deep inside her like the sea spilling onto a shore and she knew that God had chosen her. She heard a voice, it spoke deep inside her next to the place where she kept her dreams. She saw the hem of her Lord’s gown as she bent to wash His feet, she was among His disciples. She was favoured and loved. She saw the blood on His brow and the wound in His side as He gazed down at her from the Cross. She tasted His despair on her tongue. She said that the passion of His final hours filled her heart and flooded her mind. Such pain, she told us, excruciating and unending, but through it all His love shone through, she could feel it sitting like a small sun in the darkness of her grief. As her fingers felt the cold of her father’s dead flesh, she knew that she was chosen and that she must speak, to tell the world. So her tongue spelled out the code of his love in that room where the mourners had gathered. Some thought her mad, because they would not or could not be open. Others fell to their knees and praised God in His wonder. Her mother was not so pleased; she thought that she was making a show of herself in front of the mourners and pulled her away from her husband’s dead body, spitting at her to be quiet. She told us that her mother may as well have been trying to halt a spring flood; God was in her as surely as there was breath in her body. One of her mother’s friends followed them out to the hall and tried to reason with her, telling her that this was a sign that the Lord’s own hand was behind this. But our grandmother wouldn’t listen, telling her friend to mind her own, that this was family business and didn’t concern her.

Mother said she was saddened by this and that when they buried her father two days later she felt God knocking on the door of her heart again, but this time she had to refuse Him entry for fear of angering her mother. She said that as she stood there in the new soil of the opened grave she vowed never to betray Him again.

When she met my father, he told her that God was his friend and had steered him through many lonely periods in his life. He had been a sickly child who disappointed his father, and had spent his childhood toughening his body and building muscle so that he would be accepted by him, of course he never was, his father died still cursing him for being frail. So when he met my mother he became what she wanted him to be, he presented her with a caring, Godfearing man. He was used to being what he wasn’t.

She got married in the butterfly dress. She had it altered slightly to fit the occasion. It was her way of staying committed to her calling, she said. Her mother, by then broken by old age and a failing memory, didn’t put up much of a fight; she wasn’t able to, she said. Some people thought that it was inappropriate, that a good Catholic bride should get married in virginal white not in a faded mauve dress with the butterflies of the world dotted all over it.

My father, she said, never objected, he wanted her and would do anything to get her, even betraying his own nature. It was all done so he could possess her, and when she accepted the wedding band he offered her he changed almost overnight it seemed and the world darkened. Later she would have to hide the dress from him. God was now a threat to my father. He resented his hold on my mother’s spirit. He began to taunt her belief and hunt down the goodness that she was trying to bring to their home. He began to ridicule the butterfly dress saying that my mother was cracked in the head and that if he had his way he would have them married again properly this time, in a white wedding dress, like normal people. We are a laughing stock, he would say in later years, the whole place is laughing at us. When he was drunk he would rifle the drawers and the cupboards of our house searching for that dress. He would grab her by the shoulders and shake her, his eyes locking with hers. Where is it? he would say, where did you put it? She would never tell him.

‘I will ask God to guide you, Johnny.’

‘Don’t. Don’t,’ he would say.

I would see fear in his eyes, and sometimes his anger would subside.

‘God loves you, Johnny…’

‘Don’t.’

‘He wants you to put down your anger towards him…’

‘No. Stop…’

‘It doesn’t have to be this way…’

I would watch from the top of the stairs as this big man was made small by my mother’s words. His arms would fall from my mother’s shoulders and he would stand there like someone under a hypnotist’s spell, his body swaying from the booze, and the soft murmur of my mother’s speech.

‘He knows you try to be good…He knows your heart is wounded…Just as He was, Johnny…Just as He was…’

‘I’m no good…I’m no good.’

‘There is goodness in everyone…’

‘No.’

I remember sitting there in the dark, drawn by the noise, watching as my father struggled with the blackness that sat across his soul. I saw how my mother’s heart was reaching out to his, asking it to join her in the sunlight that she had found. There was something else in that moment when they held each other’s eyes, a moment when something hung in the air between them. It was as if my mother was waiting for him to complete a sentence he had started, to get to the bloody meat of what was bothering him. He never did. Those moments when he let her in were rare, and then he only did it partway. Most of the time though he would tear himself away from her gaze and stumble away like a man who had just been blinded by the truth of something.

‘God’s love is stronger than any metal,’ she would say. ‘Stronger than stone…Stronger than pain…’

She had to choose her moment to work her way around my father’s moods. Once he picked up a glass full of milk and hurled it at the kitchen wall as we were seated for dinner one night. My mother had suggested that she help out at the church on Sunday mornings, handing out communion. Without a word my father had stood and lifted the glass and smashed it above the heads of my sister and me and then calmly sat down again and continued eating.

Sometimes she would come and sit with me, and pray over me as I drifted off to sleep.

‘Close your eyes,’ she would say. ‘They are all around us…The saints…God…Can you feel Him?’

I would nod, but it was a lie.

‘He loves you, Gabriel…He loves you…God adores you.’

I would squeeze my eyes shut and beg my mind to make them appear to send them from her heart to mine, these warriors, these guardians from the gates of heaven.

‘Close your eyes, Gabriel…See them there the host and soldiers of our Lord.’

Try as I might, wish as hard as I could, all I could see was darkness; a black endless emptiness that I knew was waiting for me when my time on this earth was done.

‘Your father doesn’t understand…He said he did…Once…He told me many things…Soft things…That make a woman feel special…’ she said almost to herself. ‘He’s had a hard life…It was tough for him…’

‘Mammy…’

‘Ssh…Concentrate…God needs patience…needs gentleness.’

She had been beautiful my mother, but belief in God had made her ugly. There was plainness to her, and greyness in her eyes as if she was weary beyond words. She became smaller when my father was around; she shrank as if his presence ate into her spirit. I watched her skirt him, trying to double-guess his moods from the shape of his shoulders or the look in his eye. It took me a long time to realise that my sister Ciara and I did the same thing, that we were stunted, that our hearts cowered when he was in the house.

I knew that the black dot of pain that lay in the centre of his eyes also lay in mine, and that it was a stain that no amount of washing or praying could shift. I think of my loneliness, how it coils around the centre of my being like a long thread of steel and realise that he must have been the same, he stood on the outside of our family condemned as an ogre, just as I do now.

The Horizon

They were telling me to calm down. I watched as they moved about me. It was my second or third night there, I can’t be sure. I was doing quite well until I dreamt about you. There was sorrow in your eyes and you turned me away. I stood there and pleaded with you but you walked away and kept walking until the horizon claimed you and you were gone forever. I woke up screaming and in a moment I was surrounded by nurses and doctors. I think that I fought them, I can’t be sure. I remember how they smothered me, laying their bodies across mine and I was sure that my heart was going to explode through my chest, spewing blood across the pristine sheets. I wanted to tell them that I wished them no harm, that I was dying from a lack of love that’s all. But they weren’t in any mood to listen.

There must have been four of them, all men and though they were being physical with me, they kept talking, whispering reassurances, saying things like relax, Gabriel, try and relax, we’re here to help you.

Needless to say I didn’t believe them, and somewhere I didn’t trust that I was awake, and then I thought that maybe you had sent them to make sure that I stayed away from you and our child. That made me cry, and for a moment everyone stopped and waited.

‘It’s okay,’ one of the younger nurses said. ‘Everything will be alright. You’ll see.’

Part of me wanted to believe him but all I could see was everything that I had thrown away. I needed the one thing that I knew they wouldn’t give me, the hot fire of whiskey on my throat. It was the only thing that had the power to burn the memory of you from me. It was then that I saw the syringe and I began to fight them again. The young woman doctor had it in her hand as she made her way to me.

‘I need his forearm,’ I heard her say. ‘Quick. Quick.’

Someone else speaks. I hear the words sleep and trust, but my hearing is going, it is mixing with sounds from the past, my first baby words, and my mother’s voice, as soft as surf spilling onto a beach, plates being stacked, the hollow chime of our hallway clock, my sister’s laugh, and then my father’s hard bark like a seal demanding fish.

The Firebird

I watched as he patrolled the house, his eyes flicking periodically in my direction, sizing me up, daring me to shatter the silence he had spent the best part of the morning setting in place. It began with the way he responded to my mother’s request that he run her into town. He stared at her as if she had just insulted him and then walked the length of the kitchen and looked back at her, disdain in his eyes. She knew better than to say anything, that she had to let him posture and sulk his way through this latest mood otherwise there would be war.

From her he moved on to me. I remember I was drawing at the table, it was the picture of a bird in flight, a red bird with bright orange flames for wings. I had spent most of the morning on it, enjoying the feel of the crayons between my fingers. I could feel the heat of his presence as he stood over me; I could smell tobacco and diesel and hear the sharp running of his breath.

I recall sitting there, my hands frozen in the middle of their task, my brain desperately trying to read the situation. Should I look up at him and smile, careful not to make it too sure or confident, or should I continue drawing? I knew from experience that the best thing was to do nothing. After what seemed an age he moved off and sat by the door of the kitchen and lit a cigarette. I watched my mother, her eyes keeping track of him; aware at all times where he was, and most crucially who he was looking at.

I felt sorry for her that morning. I loved her; I wanted to kill for her, to smash down the grey walls of her life and to free her. Anger clutched at me as I looked at the man she had married as he sat there, the smoke from his cigarette climbing lazily, his legs crossed.

He saw it in me as I looked from her to him, my eyes meeting his, in that second he had me. He knew it; I had revealed myself to him. I remember him smiling as if to say go on, let’s see how long you can hold it, let’s see how big you are.

‘Seen enough?’ he asked.

I nodded carefully and took my eyes from him, wondering if he would pursue it, but he didn’t. I was easy prey. I was a pushover.

My sister broke the silence that morning. She rushed in from playing outside, her hair strewn across her face, her doll Lola pressed to her breast. She threw open the door and yelled.

‘Mammy.’

The wind rushed in, blowing apart the game my father had been playing. It ran through the kitchen like a storm of freshness, banishing the silence, busting it into a thousand little pieces.

‘Sssh,’ my mother had said. ‘Your father’s thinking.’

‘What? What did you say?’

‘Nothing. I meant…’

‘Don’t take the piss.’

‘I’m not. Please, I’m not.’

‘Yes, you were.’

‘No, I wasn’t. It just came out. I didn’t mean it that way. Ciara, come here, do this dress up, what have you been doing to yourself?’

‘Don’t fuck around with me,’ my father said as my mother fussed over my sister, running her hand across her face, gathering the snot from her nose between her fingers and shaking it into the sink, then running the tap.

‘Don’t speak like that.’

‘I’ll speak any fucking way I please.’

‘Alright. Alright.’

‘Is that clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘I said yes.’

‘Good.’

As he left he slammed the door behind him. I remember sitting there looking at my hands, they were shaking. Ciara began to cry, dropping her doll as she put her hands to her face. My mother bent down to her and pulled her close as we heard the sound of my father’s car pulling out of the garage in the yard and roar away from the house. I could imagine him sitting there, his hand ripping through the gears, his eyes blazing with anger, his world small and cold.

The Fall

I believed that I was falling. It was as real to me as my next breath. As I lay there in that hospital bed night after night all I could see was the tumble of my body through space. I could feel the moisture of the clouds bathe my face and the wind tugging at my clothes. I could see my life spread out before me like a half-assembled jigsaw. Sometimes I was glad and enjoyed the sensation, happy to be leaving everything behind. Other times fear held my hand as I fell and I would shake and moan as I saw the ground below hurtling towards me. I remember grabbing at the air, trying to find something to hold on to. I had left love behind and my only hope was these men and women who tended to me, whose job it was to bring people like me back from the brink.

I fell into my past. I walked the hard ground of my childhood again. I saw our marriage. I saw our love begin and end. I became a ghost walking the corridors of the living. They told me later that it wasn’t uncommon for a man in my condition to believe strange things, to think that he is in peril. Some never return from the strange land that they find themselves in. Hell is alive and well in the minds of men such as me, one of the nurses said with a strange grin on his face.

There were times as I lay in that hospital room when I felt my fear subside, it was as fleeting as a bad man’s smile. For a moment, I was embraced by a sense of peace, and my body’s fever abated. It was in moments like these that I tried to ask God to forgive me, but I was still too angry with him and the words never made it past my lips. I still blamed him for all that my father had done to me. He died a long time ago but he still had a hold on the guts of my being. His hands are always there twisting and pulling. Sometimes when I was falling I could hear him whispering, taunting me.

I thought of my life, of how I had believed that I was a fortress, standing alone on the horizon of other people’s lives. I saw how much of a lie that was. I had learned the hard way. Here I was, alone, dependent on the kindness of these doctors. I thought of all the pain I had caused, the misery I had brought to my door and the doors of others. At night sometimes when I woke I would call for someone to come and sit with me. If no-one came I would lie there shivering in the dark hoping that my fall was almost at an end.

The Pier

I see you as I first saw you, your eyes shining, your face offered to me as I bent to kiss it. We were in a bar in County Clare, behind us people were celebrating New Year’s Eve, and we had slipped away and left them to put the old year to bed. We stood on the small wooden pier that fronted the pub and watched the night sky turn in glitter and ice high above us.

How long ago that New Year’s Eve seems and yet sometimes in a moment when my weary spirit is caught off-guard, I taste your sweetness once more as if it was all about to happen again. I’ll be ready this time and meet you on the long pier, which divided the sea and held us and our dreams that night long ago.

‘I love you.’

‘I know,’ you said.

‘Do you?’

‘Do I what? Know that you love me?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh you mean…?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do I love you? What do you think?’

‘I think yes.’

‘Then you think right,’ you said.

Just after, you smiled and quickly closed your lips over your teeth, and a slight embarrassment flickered across your eyes. It was because one of your incisors was crooked, I’d seen you do it many times, most especially in company. It gave you a vulnerability that made me want you more. I remember I put my fingers to your lips and ran my thumb across them, holding your eyes.

‘But…’

‘Love isn’t just saying. It’s doing too,’ you said.

‘I love your mouth.’

‘Gabriel, I’m serious.’

‘The wow of your mouth.’

‘Gabriel?’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you listening?

‘Yes.’

‘Then show me, Gabriel. Show me.’

‘Your lips…so beautiful.’

‘Gabriel.’

‘Yes?’

‘Words are easy. I don’t want that, do you hear, I don’t want that.’

Eating God

I see her holding my young body down, her hand on the nape of my neck, forcing me to spit out the prayer. I remember her body shaking as she implored heaven for release.

‘Holy Jesus, we implore you…Holy Christ, fruit of the vine…’

‘Holy Jesus,’ I said, echoing her.

‘Holy Jesus…The one true Lamb…The one true God…Enter me, Lord…Fill me with the sweet Glory of your Love…Come to me, Jesus, in Love, in Sorrow.’

‘Mammy,’ I would say. ‘Mammy.’

Her eyes would glaze over, the look I used to see in the eyes of fish I caught, as they lay on the riverbank and death passed over them. Her head would move from side to side and a film of foam would cover her lips. I would hold her hand and squeeze it until my knuckles whitened. I felt as if I was holding on to her as she dangled above a steep drop and that I was her last hope.

Then I would feel her leave me, it passed through her body and into mine, the feeling of absence, of flight. She was no longer mine; she was beyond me. She had passed into trance. Then the noise would pour from her. Words half known, bastardised and tangled, child words, woman sounds, all fell from her lips, and God, always God, the word that kept coming, kept shining through like a flame on a dark hillside. It would last for minutes sometimes, her mouth working, sweat forming in the small well between our clasped palms.

I knew better than to say anything, I just kept my head bowed and waited for the storm of words and emotion to pass. Then she would fall silent, her body flopping forward as if she was a puppet whose strings had just been cut. The first time she did it, I panicked, thinking her dead. I had grabbed her, pulled at her white face and tugged at her hands.

‘Mammy, Mammy, I’m frightened.’

Then she would sigh and open her eyes and regard me. I would see myself reflected there, I looked so small and scared.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘The Lord is with us…All these things, son…All this pain…It’s sent to try us…’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

‘God sees it all…Remember that…There is nothing He doesn’t see.’

‘Yes, Mammy.’

I wanted to tell her that I understood even though I didn’t. As I knelt over her like a doctor tending a patient I remember wondering why I couldn’t see what she saw, feel what she felt. Why was I different, why had God excluded me?

‘Don’t tell your father,’ she said. She always said it.

‘I won’t.’

‘Promise?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good boy.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘What, son?’

‘That. The…praying.’

‘It’s like…’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘No, son…It’s beautiful.’

‘Do you see angels?’

‘Well, not really…I see light…I see the light…’

‘What light?’

‘It’s hard to explain.’

‘Try.’

‘Well…I see…I feel the power of God’s love…It’s like the summer sun on my face, only it’s forever, not just one season, or one day…And deep down in my heart I know that everything happens for a reason…That all the good things and all the bad things they all enter our hearts for a purpose. I suppose I feel safe…Like I’m on a big white cloud.’

‘Is Daddy there with you?’

‘Sometimes…’

‘Why only sometimes? Does God not like him?’

‘Don’t talk like that, son…God loves all his creatures, bad, good or otherwise.’

‘Does he like him even when he…’

‘When he what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘When he does really bad things?’

‘Son, that’s when God loves him most of all.’

Code, that’s the way we live, tapping out cloaked messages to the ones we love. We never say it, the thing of something; we never tear the secret from its cave and lay it at the feet of the ones nearest to us. All those years ago as I sat with her she told me that God was by us, that He knelt with me. I felt the rage rise in me, and I wanted to tear down her belief, smash the altar of her faith. I wanted to stand and tell her that God didn’t exist and that if He did He was more like the devil than anything else. How could He be all love? How could He love the pig man who ruled our house as if he was an agent of the damned?

What You Don’t See

‘You can either do it yourself or I will have to do it for you. It’s your choice.’

I say nothing but hold her with my eyes. I am in a bathroom of some kind but it is more industrial than personal, all chrome bars and wide porcelain sinks. I am sitting on a small folding steel chair. I am still wearing my white gown and I can see the goosepimples on my exposed arms and legs.

‘Hygiene is very important,’ she says.

I don’t feel as alone as I did, maybe it’s the long sleep or the fact that I am getting used to these people who surround me every waking hour telling me that they only have my best interests at heart. She is pretty this young girl in front of me and her face is open and rounded. She has a small plastic basin full of soapy water.

‘My name is Naomi.’

I know she’s trying to get me to speak, but it’s so long since I have that I’m not sure if I can.

‘I know that this is difficult…That you feel alone…But you are in good hands…This is a good place, you must trust that…’

She gently takes my feet and puts them in the basin. I feel the warmth spreading up my legs. She begins to move the sponge along the line of my calves.

‘You’ll feel better for this, you’ll see.’

Her hands are small like a child’s and I watch as they slide up and down my shins.

‘You’re from the North, aren’t you?’

Still I don’t reply but look at the suds forming in soapy rings on the hairs of my legs.

‘It’s great what’s happening up there now. Let’s hope it holds. It must have been tough for you all those years, all that violence…I’m from Waterford. I think sometimes that we had it very easy down here. You know, what you don’t see won’t hurt you…Now I’m going to put this mat on the floor and I need you to stand on it so I can give the rest of you a good scrub. That’s it…Who’s a good boy?’

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