“I want us to be happy and safe and free,” she said. “Free from all this fighting and estrangement. I know I did wrong. I know the damage I’ve done.” But he just sat there drinking and looking at her. “I couldn’t fall in love with anyone else. I am in love with you, Jack. Don’t go off with anyone else, please. Please.”

“What,” he said, “if I already have?”

“You wouldn’t put me through all that, and then tell me that you’ve been unfaithful as well?”

“I might.”

She sat nude by the window looking out. He sat on the armchair with his trousers round his shins.

“Can we call it even?” she asked him.

She got up and played “Madame George” by Van Morrison. It was a long triumphant Belfast lament. Jack tried to concentrate his mind on Catherine. Where had she come from? What had she come home to? What was he doing there? He wanted to say: Look, we have both been unfaithful to each other, but didn’t. He didn’t do anything. Her disloyalty and guilt drove him to unparalleled lust. They made love in a sweltering panic to someone else’s passion. He poured her a glass of wine, then himself another glass.

“Have you another bottle?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said sadly.

25. What Did Shamey Coyle Do When He Left Prison?

25

What Did Shamey Coyle Do When He Left Prison?

Left alone in their house in working-class Belfast he often found a sound he could not place running through his head. It was like the static across the trawler’s radio at sea. To drown it out he tried talking to himself. But this “talking to himself” implied a mild exchange, an off-hand chat. In fact, what he was at amounted to verbal self-abuse.

In the company of others the rant would stop.

Yet as he stood in the urinal of a pub or sat on a seat in Ormeau Park it would begin again. Till eventually he realized one day in the Hatfield Bar that the sound he was hearing was his own crazy thoughts raging in his ears. A verbal tinnitus followed him across the tiled floor, through the door, over the thin carpet till he took his seat and settled. And still soundlessly it might persist, so loud that Jack felt that whoever was closest to him would hear the echoes from inside his head. He began to dread being alone. After a night of drunkenness he would wake with such overwhelming pangs of guilt that he felt mentally unstable.