The pulse of my heart. If anyone heard her.

I knew your father, he said. He was a beautiful man.

He was, she started to say, but his words had slayed her. She took a sip of the whiskey.

I’m sorry, he said. I’ve upset you.

Don’t be. It was lovely, what you said.

When he began to speak again she could feel his breath below her ear, and her shoulder began to curl up involuntarily, as if it was trying to meet his mouth. Some friends and I are trying to learn Irish, he said. We meet every couple of weeks and murder it at Penny’s kitchen table. Maybe you’d teach us.

Gerry was between them, then, thrusting another drink at her, only slightly less flustered than on his earlier return. Michael took the empty tumbler from her hand and gave an ironic half-bow as he backed away. After the whiskey, the rum and Coke tasted sugary and artificial. She drank it down to be rid of it. An announcement told them the performance was about to resume and they joined the throng moving towards the stairs. Michael was ahead of them, between Penny and Jim. When they took their seats, he didn’t look for her.

There was a lightness in Gerry’s step as they walked to his car, as if he had got something he was dreading out of the way, an exam or an interview. He put on the Horslips tape that had been playing when the soldiers stopped them and told her about his summer in Israel. The hippy girl from Brooklyn who manned the lookout tower in a sun-top, a rifle slung across her chest. The heat haze on the hills. The sense of community. In other ways it’s worse than here, he said, if you can imagine that. He wouldn’t go back. What were you and Your Honour talking about? he said.

Is that not how you address a judge? He’s a barrister, said Cushla.

Oh, excuse me.

He said he’s learning Irish.

Exoticising the natives. Fuck’s sake.

Cushla turned away from him and looked out the window. Beyond it the dark acres of the park seemed to stretch for miles. It wasn’t like that, she said. He just sounded interested.

Aye, right, said Gerry.

Cushla didn’t reply.

When he pulled up outside her house, the hall light was on, a pinkish glow at her mother’s window. She pictured Gina sloped against the pillows in the gloom and didn’t want to go in alone, to feel the absence of her father. She asked Gerry in for a cup of tea. By the time she had put the key in the lock she was already regretting it.

5

Cushla got off the train from Belfast just after four. The sun had come out and the wet platform seemed to be steaming. She exited the station and walked along the esplanade, turning right at the end to go through the tunnel to the pub. Its walls were dabbed with words sacred and profane. FUCK THE POPE AND THE VIRGIN MARY. FOR GOD AND ULSTER. MARTY LOVES DIRTY TITS. Cushla wondered if Dirty Tits was a girl, or if Marty liked tits that were dirty.