Someone praying. Say Amen even if you don’t understand. Someone is calling my name. I should sober up. I should straighten up and fly right. Someone is saying my name but that place is where the knives are waiting and my eyes are sealed by light. The avenue of limes, the leaves all orange above and around me, my dad treading up and down inside a barrel of grapes. The dogs weaving in and around the trees. And Mum isn’t dead like they told me, she’s riding a bicycle in a purple dressing gown and carpet slippers. They can’t see me. I’m invisible, just here absorbing the sun. I’ll find her by the canal. She’ll tell me what to do. She’ll give me something to drink. My tongue will shrink back, suck in the water, turn pink. I’ll be perfect. It’s so clean. Was it always this clean? Jump in, and in the water the holes will close up, stitch themselves back. Everything mended. No more paper-cuts. Letterboxes everywhere. I hold up the shelf in Karen’s room and feel the vibrations through my arm as she presses the power button on the drill. At the match I’ll join the queue for a meat and potato pie. There’s no rush. There’s nothing, nothing but time.

Hands touching my hair. My eyes are still sealed. Mum with her hands in it, telling me, ‘They’re only jealous lad, they’re jealous ’cause you light up every room.’ And even if it wasn’t true I decided to believe it, I decided to think it as I walked into every dancehall and cinema and office. And so it was. And when May finally said yes in the car by the river with the rain falling and the shadow of it reflected onto the dashboard, onto our hands and laps as though they were blank canvases just waiting for that moment of projection, I said ‘I always knew you loved me. It was the hair wasn’t it? No one could ever resist the hair.’ She gave me the look then, called me a silly bugger and she was right. She was always right. And the gearstick between us and my hand up her back underneath her bra strap and her nose on my nose and the exact familiar smell and taste of her.