one of them said. He stepped back off the footpath

so I could see his face in the streetlamp

and when the other moved I knew them both.

But bad and all as the knocking was, the quiet

hit me worse. She was quiet herself now,

lying dead still, whispering to watch out.

At the bedroom door I switched on the light.

“It’s odd they didn’t look for a chemist.

Who are they anyway at this hour of the night?”

she asked me, with the eyes standing in her head.

“I know them to see,” I said, but something

made me reach and squeeze her hand across the bed

before I went downstairs into the aisle

of the shop. I stood there, going weak

in the legs. I remember the stale smell

of cooked meat or something coming through

as I went to open up. From then on

you know as much about it as I do.’

‘Did they say nothing?’ ‘Nothing. What would they say?’

‘Were they in uniform? Not masked in any way?’

‘They were barefaced as they would be in the day,

shites thinking they were the be-all and the end-all.’

‘Not that it is any consolation

but they were caught,’ I told him, ‘and got jail.’

Big-limbed, decent, open-faced, he stood

forgetful of everything now except

whatever was welling up in his spoiled head,

beginning to smile. ‘You’ve put on a bit of weight

since you did your courting in that big Austin

you got the loan of on a Sunday night.’

Through life and death he had hardly aged.

There always was an athlete’s cleanliness

shining off him, and except for the ravaged

forehead and the blood, he was still that same

rangy midfielder in a blue jersey

and starched pants, the one stylist on the team,

the perfect, clean, unthinkable victim.

‘Forgive the way I have lived indifferent –

forgive my timid circumspect involvement,’

I surprised myself by saying. ‘Forgive

my eye,’ he said, ‘all that’s above my head.’

And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him

and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.

XII

Like a convalescent, I took the hand

stretched down from the jetty, sensed again

an alien comfort as I stepped on ground

to find the helping hand still gripping mine,

fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide

or to be guided I could not be certain

for the tall man in step at my side

seemed blind, though he walked straight as a rush

upon his ashplant, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

Then I knew him in the flesh

out there on the tarmac among the cars,

wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers

came back to me, though he did not speak yet,

a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,