“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Don’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“A car bomb’s gone off just down the road from you.”

He replaced the phone and looked out the window. The street was cordoned off and policemen and soldiers were strolling to and fro. A UDR man looked up and caught his eye. For what seemed like an eternity they looked at each other.

That night he opened the window in the bathroom and it slammed down on his index finger. Simultaneously he bit his tongue. She held his fingers in her mouth while he spat out blood. He had broken a tooth. The jagged edge continued to open the cut in his tongue. He got a nailfile and began to file the tooth.

“What next?” he asked Catherine.

Jack flaunted himself for her amusement. Wearing his fishing boots he danced a jig in the nude. Catherine could not have enough of his play-acting. Then she touched his maleness. How it mutated. Grew a head all of its own, then drooped, hanging. The flower that hangs its head. The phalarope, she called it. Then starting up into that ambiguous hardening in her hand. She studied him, a man laid out in a vest, smoking. Her mouth was ajar like a child’s. She held his penis against her cheek. There was white under her eyes from want of sleep. Because of the cold she was wearing long black socks that came over her knees. She watched him. I have not slept since I met this man, she thought. Her knees were spread unceremoniously beneath her father’s dressing gown.

She drew his hand to her.

“Feel,” she said happily, “how wet I am.”

“In time,” she said, “I will be as much a part of this as you.”

He regretted she had said that.

“And you tell me,” she said, as she fondled his head, “that you were never with Sara.”

“No.”

“I wish I had met you at the very beginning.”

“And I wish I had met you then, too.”

“The things I used to imagine about you,” she said.

“I had a few of my own,” answered Jack, “going as well.”

“Tell me.”

“Now let me see.”

It seemed hard to credit that she would ever return from the world of the senses. She held him in a furrow made in her hand. He breathed into her armpit. In the furthest mirror two people were lying wrapped round each other. The sign his penis made. The fozy nest between her thighs. He stopled her. Her hair bedewed. After imagining themselves with all those other selves, they were with each other again. She opened herself to him. It passed all understanding. They slept. And woke to find each other in the cold room. Outside, the silent clock of another Belfast snowstorm.