Jesus, said Cushla. All he did was walk down a street?

It’s not about what you do here, he said. It’s about what you are.

She told Michael about the letters on the wall, the shit-flinging neighbours. The other children tormenting Davy because of the smell of frying on his clothes. That he considered it newsworthy that his father got a job.

Past the cemetery where they had buried her father, its sloping lawn and slim lanes of headstones. The army barracks, rolls of barbed wire on top of high fences glinting weakly in the evening light. Up and away from the town, and into the hills. The hedgerows had been cut back hard, except where the gorse was bustling and straining from the straight blocky lines. Michael’s house was further out this road. Why was he bringing her here?

He pulled in by an iron gate that was visible only for a moment to a passing driver.

She told him about Slattery’s terrible address to the children, Gerry’s singing, how she joined in to take the bad look off him. I haven’t a note, she said, and it’s the worst song in human history.

He laughed, a sound she felt in her lungs, and she thought she would do anything to make him happy.

What about you? she said.

Busy.

There was so little he could tell her.

They got out of the car. He took her hand and helped her up on to a hump that edged a narrow gully. The fields were dotted with ewes and lambs. The sky was cloudless, the hills across the lough petrol-blue, ribbed with white dashes, bungalows, rows of houses; the water dark where it narrowed towards the shipyards, the city sprawled around it.

He stood at her right shoulder. The valley is a natural amphitheatre, he said. Depending on the wind direction the sound can carry all the way over here. Sometimes you can hear bombs.

I went to college on the Falls. If you go up the mountains on the other side you can see the army helicopters hanging over the streets and flats, said Cushla, like an alien invasion. He didn’t answer and she wondered if she had crossed a line. In the pub, she would not have mentioned that part of Belfast, let alone commented on the military presence.

It must be intrusive, he said. Living with that level of security.

He pointed out the Cave Hill. Samson and Goliath, the cranes in the shipyard; he said that only in this place would mechanical devices be given biblical names.

He asked her what she planned to do for Easter. She had no plans, a fact that had not bothered her until now.

Nothing, really.

But you’ll have a family lunch on Sunday, I’m sure, he said.

We’re not really that sort of family, she said. Does that sound awful?