You could hear the wind and the traffic outside, and I loved her the most then. I can’t remember all the things I told her: silly stuff to soothe her, about Big Jacky and the aunts in Carrickfergus and the way the starlings swooped and shifted like thick black smoke above the Lagan river at dusk. When she finally mumbled words to say goodnight, and her breathing grew deep and regular, I would wrap myself tight around her sleeping back, her breasts like heavy silk beneath the weight of my arm.

With her there beside me, I found that I could remember things without so much pain. I never told her the truth, though, about how I got the scars.

‘How did you get those?’ she would ask sometimes, tracing the marks on my legs and face with the tip of her finger. ‘What happened to you, Jacky?’ she would say lazily. She liked the defective tracks left on me, the way a child is pleased by a patterned stone it picks up on the beach. Each time she asked, I gave her a different explanation: sometimes a car crash, sometimes a motorcycle accident, sometimes a love affair with a woman who had hands made out of can openers. The explanations were different on purpose, to let her know that I was lying, because I didn’t like the idea of her being fooled. But I didn’t want to talk about what had really happened. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me, or to see me the way I saw myself, lying on a patch of waste ground crying in a pool of blood and piss.

Every so often, though, the dream returned: the hooded figure advancing towards me as I filled with fear. Eve would tell me in the morning that I muttered and shifted in my sleep but she couldn’t make out what I was saying. I was grateful for that much, at least. I said I had always had bad dreams, even from a child.

17

‘You’re a weirdo,’ Raymond told me one day, as we sat on a wooden bench waiting for Eve to pick up some things from her mother’s house. We were both freezing cold and his voice rang out in the icy air like a clear bell. He didn’t say it in a show-offy way, the way children do when they playfully rehearse a whole singing string of insults in front of some frowning adult: ‘You’re a nerd, you’re a prat, you’re a big cowpat, you’re a weirdo, you’re a freak, you’re a geek.’

No, he said it calmly, as though the thought had first occurred to him some time ago and he had pondered it carefully since, turning it over in his mind, and had finally assured himself of its truth.