He was away off down the stairs. He pulled his anorak off the hook and opened the hall door.

‘Ask her,’ he shouted over his shoulder as he ran up the street. Curtains twitched with curiosity. He needn’t have bothered running, Brendan never moved.

Joe ran for a long time without realising where he was going. His heart was hammering so hard inside him that it felt no longer as if it were in his chest, but as if it had escaped and was thudding in his legs and his head, even his hands felt as if they were going to burst. Gradually he slowed down to a walk and his heart returned to the correct position in his body. His head ached. He had an amazing thirst. He found himself on the road that runs out along the river towards the border. The city was behind him. The high warehouses were behind him and the bombed-out shops, ‘business as usual’, scrawled bravely on the doors. He passed the bus depot and the army barracks and the neat houses with their front gardens rimmed with raked flower beds. The wind blew aimless seagulls across the sky and the river moved, silver, towards the lough. Nothing could stop that. Then it was country, and high trees leant in winter loneliness against the tumbling walls of the big houses. Cattle searched in the fields for grass. The bare hills came closer with every step he took.

What have I done? Deliberate destruction. I hated him. Only because … for some nameless reason. Some reason I don’t understand. Father, I have sinned. Who will forgive me now? I have told the truth, but only to destroy. I too am destroyed. So forever is the destroyer destroyed. So …

‘Everything will be all right tomorrow.’

Her voice was so gentle, and now she too would hate him. Worse, despise him.

A road to the right wandered down the hill towards the river. He went with it. Smoke streamed from the high chimneys of the power station on the other bank of the river. A curve of grey and white houses formed a bay, and boats rocked gently on its sheltered water. He sat down on a wall and looked at it all. Beyond the houses the river opened out wide into the lough and then somewhere far away there was the sea. The world. The real world. Perhaps it was all the same. Perhaps everywhere you went people were lost, searching with desperation for something they would never find. Mutilating themselves and each other in their desperation. There was no safety. A bird got up slowly from the field below him, ungainly for a moment and then soaring with a perfection that took away your breath. The song he had heard in her room came into his head.

I see the last black swan

Fly past the sun,

I wish I too were gone

Back home again.

My body’s black and sore.