You need to speak clearly, sweetie.

Will you meet me? she says through the tears.

We can’t talk on the phone, she says, will you come to me?

I’ll run to you, darling, I says to her, I’ll come to you wherever you are, my heart, my sweet heart, I says. Belfast isn’t safe, I says to her, so meet me in Carrickfergus, meet me in Carrickfergus by the shore.

Come back across the crackly telephone line, come back to me a song.

In Carrickfergus, my love, I’ll meet you in Carrickfergus, I’ll meet you in Carrickfergus, by the shore. And what time will we meet?

Tomorrow, at half past three, my love.

I’ll meet you in Carrickfergus, by the shore.

*

Next afternoon I’m out there early. Don’t dare take the van. Invisibility is wearing off. I eat a fish supper and look out to sea. How come I never visited Carrickfergus before? After all, it’s just along the coast. I look out at this sea some more, this sea that has come to me, and that’s when I realise. It was waiting for us. It was waiting for us, here, in this moment. I take out my hip flask, and I spot her in the distance, from the swish of her hips, I can make her out, coming back to me, as a gift. Kathy, coming back to me. And what is it they say, about swans, in history, what is it that they rise up, on their wings, somewhere in the world, and they trigger a tsunami?

A tsunami, yes. A tsunami is like a finely calibrated gold watch, which has its time, just as this was the beginning of mine, the time I was to serve, as a prisoner, the time I was to bow down to, the time that is now coming to an end, and that looked so beautiful then, in a dark-blue pencil skirt and high heels. Its long red hair, hanging down. Inscrutable dark eyes, where the future meets the past, like a swan’s.

Hiya, Sammy, she says to me, and she sits down next to me and lights a fag. I’m pregnant, Sammy, she says to me, and with her long, red fingernails she pierced the flesh of my chest and grasped me by the heart.

I’m pregnant, Xamuel, she says to me in my arms, on this bench that had been set aside for us by Christ Jayzus and his da at the beginning of time (let’s face it), this bench on the shore at Carrickfergus, and I says to myself, let me be the father, please, make it perfect, this moment, but in my heart of hearts, I knew. Even as she caressed it, even as she held it gently in her hands, in this moment, of the two of us, even as I felt it strain against her fingers, I knew who the father was. I tried to make light of it, to turn it into a joke. Don’t tell me you’re going to give birth to a wee darkie? I says to her. But everything has its season. I held her in my arms then, in the space that was given to us, in the time that was ours, and we wept.