It was Arsenal versus United. Bad-tempered and sparky. His father leaned forward and pulled up his socks. They watched the game steadily and they were careful not to look at each other.

You might be as well off, Moss, he said. Not saying England would be easy. It’s not easy there at all. Did I ever tell you about a rough turn I took in Wolverhampton? I mean before I met your mother even. Wolverhampton was bleak, Moss. The blacks were eating dog food. I took a bad turn. I didn’t know which end was up.

The light outside was pinched and mean at half past three. The familiar voice of the commentator soothed the afternoon like a drug. The world pressed in tightly on all sides but in simultaneous motion it opened out – this was a kind of breathing – and Maurice Hearne was nineteen years old. Out of nowhere and the London sky a wonder goal occurred at Highbury – it was a flying volley, an educated volley, from thirty yards. His father, without thinking, rose to his feet and applauded. Maurice smiled but he did not like the look of this move one bit. His father sat down again with a grimace. Maurice was already watchful of his own moods and changes, and he knew that this was not in itself a good sign. A tang of sibling absence inside was something not quite available to words. Out of nowhere and the winter sky came a statement from his father that cut to the muscle of the thing –

You’re not like my crowd at all, Maurice. You’re like her crowd.

He recognised the generosity in it, and the reassurance – he did not buy them.

And you’re nearly as well off, Moss.

A few weeks later, Charlie? We hadn’t seen Christmas out and the man was on a locked ward again.

Harsh, Maurice.

Smoke-grey bricks. Relic of Victoriana. The Bughouse. The green corridor that held three centuries’ pain and misery as deep. Maurice wasn’t allowed onto the ward itself. He was led to a visitors’ room that felt like an interrogation unit. The dampness and the peel; the intense hatred of civic Ireland. He waited and smoked. After a while a heavy male nurse brought his father in, shuffling. His father wept at the sight of Maurice. He was cut with small nicks where they had imprecisely shaved him.

Ah, stop that, Da, would you?

He reached across the table and made to touch his father’s arm – Jesus fuck – but something caused him to desist.

(Something? The land, the air, the sky; our church, our sea, our blood.)

Who the fuck’s after giving you them slippers?

Bigfoot, his father said.

The nurse brought a mug of tea and custard creams for his father. He ate them cheerlessly and quick, as though it were a penance, and the tea was gone in a few big farmer slurps. He was a country boy with his wires twisted all wrong. He should have never been let near a city.

Mam’ll be out to you tonight, I’d say.

There was an enormous clock on the wall and it slowed the moments remorselessly. He could ask his father how it had been for him but something would not allow it. He felt no fear as he looked across the table at the bombstruck man. His father had heard all the consternation of the heavens and he was still able to suck down custard creams.

Are you getting any sleep, Da?

Ah, I am, yeah.

I don’t think you need to be worried about me ever, Da. You know that, don’t you?

His father could not speak but nodded.

I wouldn’t be able for this, Maurice said. You’re stronger.

He walked back along the corridor with his father and the nurse. The afternoon traffic of the corridor. These poor blasted men in their stained pyjamas. The weepers and the chucklers. The moon-pale arses hanging out the back ends of them. The Martian glances. Whoever was shaving the poor fuckers had a sensational dose of the shakes.

His father opened his wrists in the bath two days after he got out. He left a note cellotaped to the bathroom door to the effect that she should not enter. Call 999.

And that’s the way it goes, Charlie.

First they takes your money, then they takes your clothes.

*

The boats have been queued and now another arrives in – there are kids with dreadlocks, and broken packs, and burnt skin, but Dilly Hearne is not among them. It is late afternoon at the Algeciras terminal. With a shudder Maurice Hearne reaches sharply for his upper back and shows a glance of fear –

Did you ever get a whistling-type pain out the left lung, Mr Redmond?

Is it one of those sinister-type pains that you’ve never had before, Mr Hearne?

’Tis, yeah.

Give it time, it’ll be like an old pal to you.

Maurice leans in to his friend, and he speaks with fear and very quietly now.

I’m fifty-one years to fucken Jesus, Charlie.

You rang the bell, Maurice. Whatever happens. You got more out of it than I did.

That’s true.

I’m a tragic case.

Ah here.

Charlie Redmond? I’d bring a tear to a glass eye. I mean I stood up in front of my mother a bright-eyed little boy. Angelic? You could have stuck me on a holy picture. The mother thought she had the Lamb of God on her hands. And did you know that I was a stepdancer, Maurice? As a young child?

That I did not know.

I took medals for it. I could have pinned ’em across my chest, one side to the other, and halfway around my back. Tears of pride running down the mother’s little jaws. The woman nearly passing out from the pride. Until she tipped backwards off a balcony in Rosscarbery after three quarters of a bottle of Cork dry gin. Which was another mark left on me. But my big problem was energy.

Who’re you fucken telling?

I was a case of too much energy. It had to find its outlets. And you know where it found them.

Energy is tricky, Charlie. For the males. You know I even gave up on the self-abuse? On account of energy concerns.

As well off. You had the shoulder hanging out of its socket, Moss.

I went cold turkey. I put it in a jar altogether. Thinking it would restore the essence in some way.

How’d you get on?

Poisoned myself. I was going around the place with the eyes on extensions. There wasn’t a woman aged seventeen to seventy wasn’t taking the lairy glance. I was drooling like a dog, Charlie.

Self-abuse can’t be left aside lightly, Maurice. It can be a necessary release for a gent at any age.

Strange the way it don’t get mentioned in adult life. And we’re all at it.

Hammer and tongs. But why’s it strange we keep quiet? What are you after? Analysis of technique?

I’m fairly set in my ways at this stage, Charlie. Being honest.

So you’re back at it?

Oh, God, I am, yeah.

Mother Fist and her five daughters.

That never once let me down.

*

The darkness again is falling – it drags its covers across the Straits in a slow, moving tide. There will be boats on the water tonight, but not for a while.

At the café bar, in the terminal, the fans whine and the note has a glassiness or brittle taint, and there is a low babble of Spanish and Moroccan voices for an undertow.

Maurice and Charlie take to the high stools at the bar and decide, in silent consultation, on an order of brandies.

What’s it in the Spanish, Charlie? The brandy?

Hennessy, Charlie says.

It might put a tune back into us?

Might well do, Maurice.

He calls for two of the Hennessy. As they are poured, the moment seems to flicker and glow, and the past becomes unstable. It shifts and rearranges back there.

As he slowly turns on his barstool, Maurice Hearne is dialled back to a time almost two decades past, a time in his life of unnatural disturbances, a time that almost brought his girl to her end.