The Swan takes us back to his, you should have seen the state of this place. Tommy’s da called ahead and arranged everything, we were bedding down with two blokes from Liverpool in the back room of this squat in Queen’s Crescent, four mattress on the floor and bottles lying everywhere and no shower. You can use the YMCA for that, one of the guys says to us, this obvious homo called Rick. No danger. We spend most of our evenings in a pool hall on the Holmes Road name of Paradise, playing for money. What paradise is this we dreamt ourselves into, I says to Tommy, what kind of garden is this, I says to him that night.

*

Swans mate for life, do you realise that, son? That’s how The Swan gets his name. The eyes of a swan are inscrutable, this is what this cunt I’m playing pool with says to me. Inscrutable. Cunt name of Blackie, must have been six foot two. The eyes of a swan, he says to me, are as black as hell’s gates. The Swan’s partner was killed in action, that’s all he says to me, none of the specifics. But he has been faithful ever since, he says.

By this point The Swan is half-blocked and has his arm around Tommy and is singing in his ear. I catch a line of it, an old Irish folk song about a widowed swan looking back across its life and recalling the still, faraway lochs that it had sailed over with its long-lost partner, the great flowing rivers that were a part of them and that had delivered them to the future, the green Irish fields, down there, beneath the two of them.

Are there swans in Belfast? Blackie says to me.

And everything feels like it is in code:

being a swan,

a swan in Belfast.

The Swan is on his feet now. I dreamt I was a swan, he’s singing, floating on the tide (his long-ago partner and himself) past long-abandoned mansions (like up on the Malone Road) all overgrown with trees (and misty-wet with rain) and with thick vines hanging down, and there is another sort of bird living in this song, a bird that moves to greet the swans (all in this song where they have been expected for such a long time), and they are led along a path (in the shadow of tall fir trees) and isn’t it a pity, isn’t it a shame, of course it’s tragic, of course it is strange, because we’re swans, he sings, to the whole room now, and what do swans need with a mansion, with a house with a butler and a maid, and the swans are led into a library, a library all piled high with books, and the swans look around, and on every shelf they see, there is everything they could have dreamt of reading, stories of all their friends as they were growing up, the memories of their parents, as little birds themselves