Malice.

Malice: a short story.

"This is how the rumour mill starts: A young man known by the cognomen, "Beaker", is beaten to death less than ten yards from my front door, turning the spot, just by a lamp-post, into a permanent floral shrine. His mother, father, his brothers and one baby sister all gather around this spot and read aloud the messages left with the floral condolences. Messages asking why, how, and when would it all stop. Another victim of the cycle of violence and hatred between the divided communities of you know where. Already, before the blood dries on the tarmac, he's canonised, he has the status of "victim", he is a candidate for beatitude. What was supposed to be a "punishment beating" for some disloyalty to the Loyalist cause turned into the manslaughter of Barry William Smith, twenty-one, the gawky, bare-forked offspring of Colin and Roberta Smith. A cycle of whispered canard and humming gossip is set off that sees half-believed stories bruited by workmates and school children, a rash of heated words which connote more than they denote transmitted through the pubs and playgrounds, the two most famous vectors for such derangement. Somehow, a series of rumours that were otherwise impossible to credit are hi-jacked by some malicious, calculating soul and transmuted into common coinage. I, it is said, am in part responsible for the boy's death.

With some ruthless vindictive hate as my animus, I somehow suborned the assault on young Barry Smith. Somehow I, a catholic, had the ear of the UFF and turned their paramilitary machine to my own bitter ends. How anyone could believe such idiocy, I've beaten my head to conceive. With the guilty man brought to trial and sent down for fifteen years, I am held responsible by the reckless mouth-breathers of Ballymena. And how, you might ask, did I orchestrate the arrest and confession of this man? Ah, here it becomes more subtle. Here, some vestige of fact is grabbed and bent to the ends of the story. It is said that I am closely connected to a catholic sergeant in the RUC who must somehow have beaten the confession out of the alleged killer, the twenty-five year old David Faulkner. Having arranged the hasty death of the young man at five o'clock on a winter morning, I pulled the strings of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to dupe the entire criminal justice system into jailing the wrong man.

The immortality of these myths, their maddening insistence on returning to haunt me in unexpected places, almost drove me to insanity for a time. I, the wronged one. Held in contempt by a bunch of mooncalves. I'd be in Eason's queuing up with a pile of books and the paper, and I'd sense it, the low murmuring and a subtle perusal, an occasional sideways glance from the girl at the till as she talks quietly with a familiar customer. Repeating the exact same telltale gestures, the exact cast of face and flight of the hands that they had learned from their gossiping mothers. Discussing yours truly, idly wondering what bloodlustful fantasies lay behind my glazed eyes. And it confounded me to absolute paralysis, until I finally caught a grip of myself, forced myself to sit still, concentrate and think it through. Then, the cause of it all, the single blank cause of it all, suddenly had a face and character. And I celebrated, moved to profound tears of joy, real joy, in the knowledge that I had unearthed he root of this weed. The answer was Roberta Smith.

This letter, look, this letter tells you all you need to know about the subtle stupidity of Roberta Smith. She hand delivers an anonymous letter with the most obscene slanders about me in it, takes it to maybe ten, twenty households at some dewy morning hour, but composes it in her own handwriting. To save herself time, she writes one and photocopies the rest at the local library. Doubtless, her fingerprints are all over it. Doubtless, her mug was clearly caught on the library's CCTV footage. Doubtless, if I'd reported this to the police as soon as I found it next to my other letters, they'd have discovered it was her and saved me several months of misery. But instead, I cowered in my kitchen, watching everyone who came up to the house through my net curtains. I expected repercussions, you see, violent revenge against me for my horrible act of robbing a woman of her son. Even when my reason revolted against these paranoid fantasies, I had a sense of doom and guilt, a tightening of the stomach and bowels. I had regular panic attacks. I awoke many nights with my throat dry and some breathless word on my lips, unable to find utterance. That is, until the face of Roberta Smith emerged to fill the void. Then, I carried out a few cursory investigations, truly cursory, and confirmed what I should have known from the start - that Roberta Smith, for reasons that will soon become manifest, was waging a sporadic campaign of hate against me.

I came to know Roberta by rumour and gossip. One ignores these things, as they tend to be the malicious lies of bitter old women in the hairdressing salons. Roberta was an untidy woman, a flabby, slovenly house-frau who stormed the streets in jeans and a stained white T-shirt, screaming abuse at her children and smacking their bare arses in public. Each pale, wobbling bicep was shot with blue veins and festooned with loyalist tattoos. I made a mental note to avoid her company, as one does, on the first day I witnessed her punching her five-year-old son in the face for crying. I thought her an unpleasant and foul-mouthed idiot, but ignored the stories of her malevolence and plotting. Stupidity, I thought in my naiveté, could not be cunning. Iago was a subtle conspirator against Othello, the Moor. Such hatred he had for the old warhorse that he placed all of his guile and intelligence at its service, and wilfully set out to destroy him by tearing him from the thing he loved most, Desdemona. He knew that Othello, like any proud male of that time, would be driven to depths of insanity at the notion that Desdemona would seek sexual gratification and love independently from him, would spiral into obsessive jealousy. Othello's self-exculpating speech at the end of the play has him plead that he is "One that loved not wisely but too well", when in fact his "love" was nothing more than the unquenchable desire to possess Desdemona in her entirety. Her existence as an autonomous person unbound to his patriarchal authority was a threat to his cock-sure manhood. Richard III was "subtle, false and treacherous", laying plots and dangerous inductions, stoking up internecine strife before and after the King's death, cleverly playing off family members so that he, by wily cunning, would rule England.

Characters of such Shakespearean grandeur are rare enough in reality, rarer still in the council estates of Ballymena. Fuscous brown brickwork and clotheslines dripping rain are not an adequate backdrop for extreme heroism or villainy. So, as I say, for months I ignored the tales that circulated in pubs and shops. So much tittle-tattle. Lisa and I had just moved into our house with the kids, a poky little affair with three bedrooms and a patch of overgrown grasses and weeds for a back yard, when I got my new job teaching at the Tech. Lisa managed the house well, she even had the children doing work around the house when they got back from school - nothing spectacular, just odd chores. I got back at about seven o'clock most days, then after whatever dinner was waiting, I had to spend about an hour or two marking essays and papers. A teacher's vocation, primarily, is to listen to, read and tolerate a constant tide of mind-rotting shite from students. Offering even purely constructive criticism is a great deal more than many of them can handle. Students always like to believe they are on the right tracks, and to think so is important for their confidence. I have learned a thousand times, in many different ways, that one cannot really win someone away from an idiotic opinion, no matter how carefully you present your case. It will always come across as patronising, and if young people loathe anything, it is being condescended to. The only thing to do is allow them time and space enough to work it out for themselves.

I know this isn't what you came to hear, but I'm trying to arrange all these thoughts and memories into some digestible form. How can I tell you what happened without providing a context? So, as I say, Lisa took care of the house, although she worked while the children were at school, a part-time job at a local bakery. The kids loved it when she brought back the scones and iced buns. Wee Kevin loved the jam-filled doughnuts, I recall, sugar-covered lumps of bread that Lisa would put in the microwave for thirty seconds so the jam inside would be scalding hot for him. I don' t know how he could eat them, but he loved it. And when the kids did their homework, Lisa would look over it and tell them where they'd gone wrong - whether it was long division or punctuation, Lisa had an uncommon mastery of this sort of primary school knowledge that most of us forget when we get out of High School. I know you call them Secondary Schools in England, but we cling to the American appellation. For a society so inward looking, there's nowhere in the United Kingdom that is more pro-American than Northern Ireland. People here love it when Bill Clinton takes a flight to Belfast and hugs some locals, spouting vacuously about "peace" and so on. When he came over in 1995 there was no shortage of media coverage devoted to adorning the man with a saintly aura. Jim McDaid, the Fianna Fail TD, described Clinton as having achieved miracles to outmatch Jesus. His visit, we were all told, was a defining moment in the peace process. That was before the Canary Wharf bombing marked the resumption of the IRA's campaign. But not a paper in the land offered even a crumb of scepticism, except a few hard-line unionists who thought he was a taig-lover. The sight of 20,000 Provos waving US flags - after some twenty years of bombings, kneecappings and assassinations in the name of anti-imperialist struggle - should have been an occasion for mass hilarity. Unionists, if they'd been smarter, should have gloried in the sight of these 'freedom fighters' cheering on the man who executed Ricky Ray Rector so that he wouldn't be 'out-niggered' in his election campaign. This is not to say that noone was cynical about it. These gullible yanks coming over to sort out our problems, thinking because some distant relative from the 1830s was Irish that they innately have a mythic connection with the island and a solution for all it's troubles - Troubles! That's a word that sets me off every time. What we are experiencing are Troubles, as if it was some kind of contagion. The most intensely political conflict in the most intensely politicised part of Britain is expunged of all political content and turned into some tribal rivalry between two apparently symmetrical sides!

Am I off again? Well, what can I say to you, I'm a professional cynic. So, with Lisa and me working ourselves like dogs to keep the rent paid and keep the children in mobile phone vouchers - frig, I hate those things! - we hardly had a chance to talk to the neighbours let alone sit down for a drink with them. But it was Frankie and Ruth, a pleasant couple from across the road, Catholics in an overwhelmingly Loyalist area, who took us in and introduced us to everyone. Ruth just stopped by one day when Lisa was making the children their dinner and invited the pair of us over for drinks. No problem with the children, she said, bring them over and they can play with mine. All the drink will be there, there's no need for you to spend a penny, she said. Of course, we brought a few bottles in the end not to look like we were cheap, but fortunately Lisa was pragmatic enough to stop me buying several bottles of spirits and a twenty-four pack of lager. I wouldn't drink the stuff myself, but you want to make a good impression when you're meeting people for the first time. That, I think, is why I allowed Lisa to handle my wages.

So we're sitting there talking about all manner of hateful bigots, as I recall a pub had just been shot up that day. The killers had just burst in with their balaclavas on, guns blazing, and said "Trick or Treat, you bastards!" before letting several rounds of live ammunition loose on drinkers. I suppose that sort of thing passes for dark humour in UVF clubs. And we're all having a nice drink and engaging in that agreeable fiction that "it's only a small minority of people ruining it for the rest of us". Everyone took the opportunity to be righteously angry and make pious observations about the state of the nation. But, for all that, it was a pleasant evening. We got chatting about what jobs me and Lisa did and how were we settling in. Oh, it's just grand, we told them, its a lovely wee house. When Lisa told them all about her job in the bakery, someone made the remark that she'd need to watch out for the children when they come into the shop. "Thieving bastards, the fucking lot of them!" He snarled, quite bitterly as I recall. He himself was a local shopkeeper, and so that was how we first came to hear about the Smiths, the local pariah family that terrorised the whole estate. The Smith children were caught so many times with their hands on stolen goods from the shops - it could be anything, pens, sweets, magazines, you name it. On top of that, it was said that Roberta was the one who sent them in to steal. I couldn't believe that - what parent would risk their children being caught and taken to the police station? But that's how easy it is to be completely wrong when you're always giving people the benefit of the doubt. Colin, the father of the house, was never at home. We were told he was a truck driver who transported goods all across Europe. People seemed to accept this, but if anyone had clapped eyes on the state of their house, the paltry possessions they had, the dire repair of the back garden, noone could have believed that. Either Colin Smith was pissing all his hard-earned money away, and true enough I never saw him sober, or he was not a truck driver at all. He was said to be a member of the UFF, which I found only too believable.

So, I'm sitting there in Ruth and Frankie's house listening to all these tales and gossip about how the Smith kids beat up the local children while Roberta watched approvingly. How they went round on the 12th July, bricking in the windows of local Catholics. How Roberta would go down and yell her guts out to the school headmaster any time her children got in trouble. The stories were limitless, some of them fantastic, some of them plainly false, but enough to make you wonder. In council estates, you do get this sort of scum. The empty-headed, humourless, abortive wretches. The most uncharitable, lazy, unimaginative people to have ever offended a person's sight. Perhaps you'll have known people like this, people whose heroes are mass murderers (Edward Carson in the case of the Smiths), who despise intellect, make excuses for Adolf Hitler, adulate the monarchy and abase themselves before the rich and powerful. The lumpen criminal element who belie any sentimental notion of the working class as the salt of the earth. And so I wondered how much of this was true and how much calculated to win people's ears and attention round the drinking table.

It was probably close to six months after that when I was actually lucky enough to meet this fine specimen of humanity, Roberta Smith. A charming lady, right down to the last belch. As I recall, she approached me as I was leaving the house, a big friendly smile on her face.

"Ach, hello there, Alex!" She said, as if we'd been friends for decades. An unpleasant smelling cigarette poked from between her fingers.

"Hello," I said, closing the front door behind me.

"What about ye?" She said. Her Belfast accent was still strong, although she'd lived in Ballymena for some years.

"I'm not bad, not bad," I said in that vacant way people have of dealing with stupid questions. "Yourself?"

"Oh, I'm getting on well. I can't complain, you know?" And my God, the woman actually tried to throw me a seductive look. There was no mistaking it; she thought she might actually get a rise out of me by turning on her unique physical charms. "But the reason I came down to talk to you," she said, "I'm cutting children's hair locally, I do it for a pound. Just some scissors and clippers, give them a crew cut, any length you want. Does any of the kids need their hair sorting out?" The cheek of her! I told her that unfortunately my wife preferred to do the kids' hair. "Oh, right. How is Lisa?" You want to see the look of sheer malice on her face when she said that. God, I was ready to laugh in her face. I suppose she thought she was hiding it well, and that wasn't the end of her conceitedness. Anyway, I gave her a few cursory answers and she threw me another look before waddling off down the street. I couldn't even get into my car until I'd finished watching her kick her child about the front garden for some wrongdoing. The sight was both comical and disgusting.

I must cut out an awful lot of in-between here, because unfortunately my life doesn't come neatly boxed up into plot points like that of a fictional character. I must cut out, for example, the times the kids were ill, the incessant arguments Lisa and I had for a year and a half so that we thought we may have to seek divorce, the death of my mother. While this might sound like the stuff of which great stories are made, my experience of them was of utter meaninglessness. The arguments proceeded as one might expect, with constant accusation and misunderstanding, frustration, each side trading the moral high ground, reverting to sly and shallow insults before coming back with some high falutin pompous statement like "you only ever think of yourself". Arguments of this sort are empty. You could take out the words and just leave the exclamation marks and you'd have the gist of it. Then the children were ill, so my wife had to take days off work and tend to them in bed. Then the funeral of my mother, a source of subtle torture for me because I was, and remain, emotionally constipated about it. I couldn't cry for her loss and so I had guilt instead of grief.

So, back to Roberta Smith and her exploits. I think 'exploits' is the right word for it. It's all too easy to caricature Roberta, for she was a caricature in so many ways. But not to be a fake liberal about it, she was a human being. I am not of the persuasion that the nasty people of this planet can simply be 'reformed' by some cocktail of therapy and education. I'm not a reactionary either, and one can easily concede the standard liberal argument that criminals are a product of circumstance, and that these circumstances must change if we are to make life easier for everyone. But great men and women are often products of similar circumstances. So, when I say that Roberta was a human being, I don't intend to convey the standard redeeming connotations that those words usually imply. She was a human being in precisely the same basic way that Adolf Hitler was a human being, with all the biological frailty that pertains thereto. I've sought to extend some sympathy to her, although it makes me physically ill. Roberta was a woman who had indeed tried in her life, and failed. She had emerged from a wretched childhood, stuck between a bible-thumping mother and a sexually abusive father, the two poles of sin and guilt defining her life from the second her vagina was elastic enough for her father to invade. She was not an achiever at school, this one. The emotionally disturbed rarely are, I've seen that even in my classes. One student in my Cultural Studies class - you're laughing? Well, remember that Cultural Studies was the postmodern nineties coup against philosophy and politics. I suspect the glamour of philosophy and politics coated in a sweet film of culture, coupled with the postmodernist invitation to be casually ironic about everything made the subject irresistible for many otherwise intelligent students. But a student in my Cultural Studies class, a female of spectacular aspect, seamlessly beautiful, insisted on peppering all of her essays with Jungian references. Not just in an analytical way, but obsessively and in the most inappropriate fashion. There was no cultural manifestation for her that did not signify the collective unconscious, the anima and animus or some other element on the diapason of Jungian thought. I reproached her for it, and she lost marks. But it turned out that Jung had saved her life. On the verge of suicide many times, seeking escape from a miserable home life and what she no doubt saw as a bleak future, she had found the obscurant mysticism of the man a useful anaesthetic for a miserable life. Pity about her, a real pity.

So, what was I saying? Roberta. So she failed miserably at school and eventually decided to give up trying. She started having fits in classes, ungovernable frenzies of rage. The headmaster would clobber her, then her mother would clobber her properly when she got home. Then she stopped going to school, and instead disappeared off to the shopping centres in Belfast to shoplift. Hopeless, of course, and when she was caught both her mother and father knocked fuck out of her. Punched, kicked, whipped with a belt, hurled down the stairs by her hair. How much of this is fact and fiction is hard to say. The dour Presbyterianism of the past would undoubtedly have made Roberta's parents harsh. But I have only the word of her friends and foes, her associates and contemporaries. At any rate, I do know that she went through some miserable dead-end jobs, got shacked up with a fella that used to get drunk and kick her cunt in. She eventually ran away from him and found Colin Smith, a young lad who worked on a milk round. A muscular man, a fiery young loyalist, but apparently quite docile with her. Never laid a finger on her. Wouldn't so much as reproach her during their whole lousy marriage. His way was to take off and seek carnal pleasure elsewhere when there was any disagreement between them. He certainly wasn't one for trading insults and dodging thrown plates. No, Colin never argued. He'd let her scream til her lungs were hoarse and then see if she was in the mood for a reconciling hump. If I take the rumours for truth, then Colin Smith had other, much better outlets for violence. In the UFF, he might have enjoyed the odd punishment beating, kneecapping, perhaps even a pub shooting if he was lucky enough. Perhaps he ordered taxicabs and murdered the Catholic drivers, as there was a spate of that sort of killing for a while. Fringe benefits might include random killings, the odd 12th July stabbing or whatever. I don't know. They say the discipline in these organisations was strict, that no one was killed but it was on the orders of the battalion chief or whatever pompous titles these political assassins gave themselves. Anyway, he could easily have had more than his share of sadistic violence and, what is even better, had it sanctified by an ideology that reckoned his victims as little better than vermin. Consequently, Roberta had carte blanche to do whatever she wanted in the marriage, including physical assault on the children, Colin would not fight her. I daresay he wouldn't have minded her taking a young lad on the side, but desperation will only carry young men so far, and not as far as her bed.

Roberta spent what money she got from Colin on drink and curries. The kids were often fed little more than a jam sandwich before bedtime, and their beds consisted of nothing but a few shared mattresses and blankets spread across the floors of their bedrooms. I suppose Roberta had long lost the ability to care much about the well-being of other people. And who can blame her? Children, to someone with a temperament like hers, are an unthinkable burden, only so much use as their mean frames lend advantage. So, the children were taught to bully the other children, to steal from them, to exploit everyone as best they could. They'd often come to me and try to cadge some spending money. They'd stand and beg as I tried to trim the hedge, expertly turning their eyes moist and asking if there was any odd jobs I wanted done. Fuck! As if I'd let them children into my house to scavenge everything they could find. I'd eventually cave in and give them some change. Lisa hated that. Any time our children had to do without, she'd bring that up - "how come the Smith children get the run of your pockets for the asking and our own kids do without?" She was right, of course. I had no business subsidising these future terrorists.

So, some context set, I suppose I'll have to presently get to the heart of the matter. Help yourself to some more drink. I'll not touch it, drink away."

"Before, I mentioned to you about the arguments between myself and Lisa. I called them meaningless, but nonetheless I wonder if they didn't fulfil a useful function. We knew a couple from when we lived in Derry - call it Londonderry if you wish, I'll not haggle over a name - the sweetest couple you could meet. Never a disagreement, never the slightest noise of argument from their house, a winning pair. And you have to know that in Derry, rarely a man and woman was paired but they didn't cut each other to rhetorical shreds in nightly volleys of abuse. If ever some politician required a perfect symbol for family values, that couple was the most serene advertisement for marriage alive. Well, so it seemed, for on their tenth anniversary, the blushing bride stabbed the glowing groom to death. Got married to him, thought that would be it, bliss for the rest of their lives. Thought he was infallible. But he was vain and flawed as most men, messed around and treated his wife like a housemaid. So she spent the last few years of their marriage suppressing her disgust at him. It's odd to think of those smiling moments in the sun, those two together, chatting amiably with Lisa and myself. To think of that woman harbouring some vengeful fantasy against her husband! So, my arguments with Lisa perhaps provided the vital safety valve that saved me from a similar fate. Only, I say this because it was much worse when she ceased to argue, when she simply shut me out.

Davina Brenton, a young lady in my class, tremendously alluring. Not a waif by any measure, not the sort of junkie figure that became fashionable in the mid-nineties - what with Trainspotting and heroin chic. No, she was a tall, rosy-cheeked brunette with hazel eyes and a sturdy figure. Shapely, but not elegant exactly. She wore jeans frequently with black platform heels and a thick woolly sweater that for all its mass couldn't conceal her stately breasts. I had to work hard to repress an erection when she was in class, especially when she raised her hand, her sleeve rolled up around a pale arm, to speak. She would make elegant expositions of the subject at hand, whether it be the films of David Lynch or the semiotics of advertising, her quick intelligence making ready use of the French philosophes of the Sixties, particularly Jacques Lacan. You know Lacan? A French psychoanalyst who re-made Freud in the image of French philosophy. Too obscurant for my taste, but this kid took all that impenetrable prose and set it to work. Watching her lips move as she exquisitely expounded upon "the Real as the limit of discourse", upon "the big Other as a fictional, but necessary, intermediary determining the rules of communication" and so on. Her eyelids painted a dark purple, her lashes elongated with that waxy mascara.

A teacher can never be thought a lecherous parasite on the student body. Particularly an older male teacher. Too easy to be tarnished with that 'paedophile' word, even though Davina was seventeen, a career disaster for any teacher in these unforgiving times. So, I imposed some heavy discipline on myself not to favour Davina over the other students, not to look at her obsessively, not to allow my lust to overpower me and make me do something stupid. She had a way, you see, of smiling at me ever-so-sweetly any time I approved of what she said, or even if I wheeled out one of those tired old jokes teachers learn to use with new classes. Well, if you insist. One of them I would tell is "What is the difference between Derrida?" You don't get it? Most of the students never got it either, but it made a good start to the lecture. Or, "I used to be a linguist, but now I'm not Saussure." Aye, you may well groan.

So, I believe it was March of 1996, just following the mock examinations for second year students, I'd given Davina a B and told her she needed to learn more about the history of English literary criticism. I had a hard time telling her that, me perched on my chair and her towering over me, throwing her hair back over her head with one hand and sighing. It was the end of class and she was asking me how she'd improve her marks - a pleasant surprise, students rarely ask that question. Her clothes were unusually glamorous for her, a thigh-length black dress with burgundy strapped high-heel shoes. Oh, the details. I could go on and on about the details. Her perfume and gold bracelets and a single gold-chain necklace with a crucifix. Her lip-gloss and eyeliner. These things I tried not to notice, or at least to hold in my peripheral vision. Smooth, ample legs, strong and supple. So, I made a few pronouncements on her test marks, gave her some friendly advice, her going "right, right" and "aha" throughout, careful to show that she was absorbing my sagely pearls. And then, as she was ready to go, I plunged. I made the fatal mistake I'd been resisting for one and a half years. I commented on her appearance.

"Going somewhere special?" I smiled, uncharacteristically lacking in words, my eyes running approvingly up and down her figure.

"Uh, yeah." Says she. "I'm going to a wedding party for Julie's sister."

"Oh. Good." I told her. I attempted a dignified smile, but I fear it went the way most such attempts go.

"Well," she laughed slightly, "see ya later." Her high heels clacked out of the classroom and down the hall. And with nothing more than her perfume left to remember her by, I mentally kicked myself for this faux pas. Worse than a faux pas, really. I'd given away my attraction to her, in the worst circumstances. Students need someone they can respect, not someone who turns to a drooling wreck at their every word or gesture. And I was married with children. And I didn't need to become fixated with a beautiful youngster in my class who might not appreciate my attention. I didn't need to engage in this reckless behaviour which, even if successful, could land me in trouble and cost me my career. How would my children receive news that their father had lost his job on some charge of harrassment? How would Lisa respond to an extra-marital affair with someone sixteen years her junior? Probably with that frustratingly dogmatic insistence on reasoning, on questioning me, on forcing me to admit in excruciating detail the depth beneath her to which I had sank. "And not a single thought of me ever intervened to stop you?" She'd ask. "If not me, what about the children? Did they cross your mind as you flirted with that girl? Even, for God's sake, self-interest? Your own career, did you not think of saving your career? If you couldn't bring yourself to care about your family, what about your own career? Alex, I know you have always found it difficult to place others above yourself, so how could you place this stupid pursuit of a young girl above your own career? How young could she have been to take your fancy? Sixteen? Fourteen? How young, even with a figure like that, would be enough for you to say no?" Too many men have followed their cocks to ignominy and disgrace. For so many reasons it was wrong. But desire doesn't reason and it isn't subordinate to reason - reason is subordinate to it, an alibi for transgression. It wasn't long before I invented some rationalisations for my slip and assured myself that I was merely being sociable and that Davina would have seen this. Perhaps she would complain, citing harrassment. Had there been anyone else present to witness my behaviour? I couldn't remember. I imagined a visit to the Director's office whereupon I'd be faced with her allegations, blasted with every politically correct shibboleth available, bludgeoned with every reason against my behaviour that I've just cited. I imagined being outraged, aghast, dumbstruck by the situation, pretending to be taken aback by such idiocy. How can a simple inquiry about a student's day ahead amount to harrassment? I would demand. Must a teacher restrict himself to formalities for fear of being lynched? I would plead. Ridiculously paranoid, I know, but it says something about my state of mind and about my real intentions at the time.

So, having thus slipped, I wondered how I would prevent myself from slipping further down that risky terrain. I remembered being jumpy, guilt-ridden when I got home. Lisa asked me if I was alright and said the stress must be getting to me. "Why do you let them burden you with this constant paperwork and form filling?" She said, leaning over me from behind as I sat at the dinner table, wrapping her arms around my chest and kissing me on the cheek. "Hmmm? Are you tired, love?" She asked and undid the buttons on my shirt, kissing me on the face and neck. I became aroused and, since the children were outside playing, allowed her to relieve me of my tension and guilt. Well, it may seem odd to be relieved of guilt while my wife fellated my erect penis and I dreamed of Davina, but that is how I remember it. Take that how you will, for memory, like history, has it's censors and revisionists.

I made a fair instructor at the Tech, so my ego tells me, fair-minded but firm, democratic but insistent when the need presented itself. Not so at home. I was simply unable to deal with the children with that distant reason I had with the students. I was either far too indulgent or far too restrictive. Too forgiving or too punitive. The trouble with Daniel began at that time. Three children, Kevin, Daniel and Lucy. Eight, thirteen and seven years of age. There's that 'trouble' word again, the same euphemism. Daniel started to bunk off school and steal from his mother's purse. Lisa would notice the odd pound or two missing. At first, she thought she'd been careless with the money. Because when Daniel began his thieving, he was very careful about it. He only stole from his mother's purse when the two of us had been at the pub, calculating that we would be lax with our spending with a few beers in us. A smart child, Daniel. But intelligence combined with alienation and anger is deadly. He was angry with us for all the right and wrong reasons - because we were too strict; because we didn't have enough money; because we expected too much of our children; because we'd spend money on beer and tell him we had none for his pocket; because he'd be doing work in the garden when other children were out playing. And finally, because we were his parents. I wasn't a liberal father, I used the belt when it came to serious punishment, believing sincerely that this would teach him to respect me and to behave himself. I fear, however, it only taught him to be more cunning, more intelligent and perhaps more callous in his misbehaving.

Lisa was soft, or so I thought. Maybe she understood better than I did, but when she wondered if we shouldn't be more permissive with the children, if maybe we shouldn't try other means than punishment, I would always come back with the unanswerable reply "and give succour to them for their misdeeds?" And when it came to Daniel, it was "I'm not giving in to that little bastard! Let him make cunts out of us? Get a grip, Lisa. He's out of control enough as it is." I thought it was about not taking shit, not giving in - me in competition with my own son! It's a ludicrous notion, but in the warped perceptions of family life, it seemed to make sense. He no less misperceived me, of course, but he has a better excuse. He was a child and all children accord their parents a legendary status. If I was a kindly god in his youth, I grew oppressive, cruel and distant as he entered his adolescence. And so he stole and bunked off and became sullen around the house. I'd reproach him, sternly, "knock off that attitude, kid, okay? Just cut it out!" "Or what?" "Or I'll put my toe in your arse!" "Aye, that's all you know how to do!" He'd yell and stomp off up the stairs. None of the other children ever answered back that way.

But the wallopings I gave him, by Christ, it chills my blood just to think about it. When we found out someone had been stealing money, we lined up all the children and asked them dead straight which one of them did it. Own up, we said, or when we find out who it is, that person will get their nose broken for being both a thief and a liar. Daniel just stood there full of bewildered innocence like the other two. But no, something else about it. I remember thinking him cocky, as if he didn't much care for me and my threats, as if he had better things to do than listen to the tedious accusations of his parents. Possibly it was my imagination, but that impression grew in me and took root. Then the school phoned one day to ask us in for a meeting with the headmaster. Lisa went in, for I was teaching, and as soon as she got in they hit her with a barrage of tales about our son's misbehaviour. They produced a penknife, a high-powered catapult that you could only get from the sports shops, a packet of condoms and an array of pornographic magazines - all of which Daniel had brought into the school and used for various misbehaviours. It was bad enough him doing all this, absolutely humiliated his poor mother, but he could not have afforded all that with the pocket money we gave him. It was obvious that Daniel was the thief, and that he had stolen from others beside his mother. So, as soon as he got home, I did the worst thing I could have done. I attacked him with the belt, laid into him, trailed him into the sitting room and kicked him around the floor.

"You wee fucking cunt!" I called him. "Thieving, lying, stinking wee shite!" And when he was sufficiently beaten, we had him sit on the sofa and explain himself. One question after another, accusations mounting up, the pair of us screaming our heads off. How could he steal from his mother? Your mother was cut to the bone when she got to the school and had this shite thrown at her, I said. How could you do this to your mother? And you frigging lied about it as well, told us barefaced lies like some poker-faced criminal! How much have you been up to that we don't know about? Who else have you stolen from? What was the penknife for? Did you use that to take money from the other kids at school? All the possible and actual crimes that this young man, my son, had committed inducing a torrent of bile and abuse that I don't think stopped for hours. A masterpiece of self-righteous fury that I was to pay dearly for in later days. After that, he was sent upstairs with no supper and grounded for two months. I couldn't speak to him for weeks, except to tell him what to do. He was cleaning the kitchen, hoovering the floors, scrubbing the bathroom, weeding the garden - anything that we could think of, he was at it for those two months.

Oh, dear Christ! How easily the obvious escapes one who is seeking the heart of some mystery. Why was he behaving like this? What could be done? It seemed no matter how hard we punished him, it simply got worse. Lisa and I argued more intensely than ever, for a while I thought the family was in a terminal crisis. Perhaps, I thought, divorce would be for the best. If I went my ways and left her to look after the children, maybe all that resentment the children had for me would dissipate, maybe Daniel would calm down and go back to being the brilliant student at school he had been. But why should I go? What should I be punished for? Daniel's selfishness and stupidity? His adolescent rage? The colossal chip he'd developed on his shoulder? I posited a number of reasons for his behaviour. I'd been too lenient, I thought, I never clocked him enough when he crossed the line before. He was entering that difficult period in his life, his hormones were running amok. I thought that he resented his poor upbringing, that he thought he deserved better, that our family was in his mind beneath him. That he thought he was too good for his vulgar parentage. Possibly some teenage infatuation was tearing him apart, the youthful romantic suffers a great deal of extremity.

To have been given a moment's breathing space then, to have seen from a distance as I see now. To have seen the big picture and not the magnified, distorted details that I kept puzzling over. If chance had given me that advantage then which I now enjoy all too late, I would have seen the obvious and stopped myself before it was too late. The problem was not him. It was me. I was the obscene father. You'd think all those years quoting Freud, using his works, teaching psychoanalytic criticism as part of the curriculum, I would have noticed its relevance to my own life. I was the violent father, imposing law, the awesome force of authority. I was the corrupt, obscene father enjoined to his mother, having my dirty way with her. I was Claudius and he was Hamlet. He, the wronged youth, driven to madness by the man who only knows how to put a toe in his arse. I was playing my role in this melodrama with all the unwitting aplomb that he required to sustain his part in it. And if I had only spotted this at the time, I would have closed the curtains on this poor dress rehearsal.

Forgive me, I shouldn't cry. I don't mean to embarrass you. The telling of it has touched a yet raw nerve in me. Excuse me for just a minute, will you?

"In August, later that year, I remember a big hullabaloo about the Apprentice Boys march in Derry. I know you, to your credit, don't follow the activities of such irrelevant gnats. These loyalists wished to march through a nationalist area of Derry, across a section of the Walls that overlooked the Bogside. These marches are known for being provocative, to choose the mildest expression, often degenerating into violence when they try and march through a Catholic area. Catholic houses would find stones flying through their windows, would find their doors being battered down. In return they would turn the hose on the demonstrators, or block the roads to prevent them passing. Garvaghy Road, only a few weeks previously, being an instance in point. So, as the Bogside's Residents Group had petitioned for this part of the march to be banned, the eternally keen of mind Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Patrick Mayhew, decided to avert the possibility of violence and close that one part of the march. Mayhew was a Tory and a full-time patrician Unionist, but he was pragmatic enough not to incite the locals to too much wrath, ere it come crashing down on him. This, remember, was a man who upon being told of yet another mass murder following his evening at the opera told reporters and camera crews, "well, I go into the Opera and everyone's asleep, I come out and everyone's dead!" Stellar wit on that man, a truly spectacular humour.

Anyway, the catastrophe was averted this time, but I remember that whole summer being one of constant chaos and disorder. The evening of the 8th July had been a mass of vandalism, hi-jackings, roadblocks, arson, burglary and violent mayhem. Cars were being hi-jacked, buses, transportation vans, haulage lorries, you name it. Loyalists were rioting because the Catholics didn't want them to march down the Garvaghy Road and the RUC, on the orders of the Parades Commission, were having to join with the army to prevent the march. Catholics had been forced out of their homes in mainly loyalist areas of Belfast. I heard the bloody rioters from my own bedroom window, just up the road they were breaking into a Renault car dealership. Around the same time, some child in the Greystone estate of Antrim had his bedroom petrol-bombed by the Orange Omnipotents for engaging in provocative sleep activity. The various loyalist terror gangs produced statements denouncing the violence, although several of their senior local members were arrested in connection with it. I believe elements in the loyalist movement were growing uneasy at not being allowed to kill the croppies for the sake of some spurious peace agreement, so that was part of it. Because of all this, the loyalists had finally been allowed to march through the Drumcree area, and through the Lower Ormeau Road. All in the name of a fake "cultural heritage" that was invented by imperial ideologists to secure the loyalty of local Protestants to the British Empire.

Why do I go on about it? Because it irrupted so suddenly into our lives, because Daniel decided he would sneak off and join the rioters when our backs were turned, because we wondered if bricks would fly through our window any night soon. None of the neighbours knew ours was a Catholic household, because we weren't religious and didn't advertise our views. That's why Daniel could go off and join bigoted loyalists on a joyous carnival of destruction. It's exciting, given the impotence of most of these young men who were tearing the country apart, to be involved in your actual history, in something that will change the course of the future and make the news. Every broken window or burned out car that turns up on television screens, it is a buzz to be able to say, "I did that". But I think Daniel just did it as a less-than-subtle Fuck You to his dear parents.

August was also results time for my students, and I made sure I was there when the students came down to collect their results slips and wish them all good luck. Most of them came away pleased, although I suspected there were one or two I would see again for one-year revision courses. I shook one or two of the boys' hands with heartfelt warmth when they showed me their As and Bs and explained what University they were off to and what ambitions they had. And a few of the girls hugged me and laughed when they saw that their results would, after all, enable them to climb out of the disintegrating chaos that was Ulster. Most of them were off to England to study, many to London. They'd love it there, I thought, away from all the bigotry, with access to all those magnificent shopping areas and theatres. They'd walk streets that didn't have murals and flags painted everywhere and had more than a few different coloured faces in them. A teacher lives through his students to some extent. And to witness all these young people on the verge of life, brimming with exhilaration that they had escaped council flats and McJobs, was genuinely moving.

I was there to wait for Davina, of course. I had, during the months before the examinations, taken the time to speak to Davina's other teachers. She was taking three 'A' Levels; Cultural Studies, English Literature and Philosophy. I believe her aim was to go on and study Philosophy and the Humanities at the University of Central London. I caught up with her Philosophy teacher, Geoffrey Hargreaves, a formidable, ebullient man, full of wit and passion. He could have taught anywhere, so for the life of me I don't know what he was doing at Ballymena Tech. He sat across from me in the staff room, listening patiently as I outlined some concerns about her progress.

"She's an excellent student," he said, pouring a soupcon of whisky into his coffee - not an uncommon practise among teachers during break-times. "I never had anyone in my class so keen with the abstract, so at her ease with the excessive jargon of metaphysics or existentialism. Most of my students, remember, took philosophy because they thought it would be a soft option, because they thought it would be all that pedantic Greek shite, because of some Eastern 'wisdom' they'd absorbed from the movies. Some pieties from Marcus Aurelius quoted by Hannibal Lecter, or some worthless prose from the mouth of Socrates on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. They took it to be, 'now look here, Crito, logic shows it justice for me to drink this hemlock', etcetera. One or two of them have read Nietzche or Marx and get by adequately with those tools. But to most of the class, it's a second language they're having to learn. And how could it be otherwise when they've had no prior preparation? But Davina takes to it, and she doesn't just absorb formulations to regurgitate at exams, she penetrates. You should ask her to show you her essay on Heidegger. We've barely looked at Heidegger, and she's away into the nuances of Dasein and thrownness. Her performance is always supererogatory, always above and beyond what is called for. If she doesn't get an A, I'll complain personally to the NEELB."

I hadn't spoke to Davina beyond the remit of my duty as a teacher since that slip. Perhaps, I thought, I had over-compensated. Perhaps I'd remained too distant, perhaps I'd seemed cold. The injustice of turning a cold shoulder on so sweet and charming a young girl could hardly be missed. And so, I was there to greet her, to wish her well, to see her off with a warm smile, knowing it would be my last chance to do so. I stood there in the hall long after most of the students had come and gone, long after the gallery of joy and disappointment had all but ended. I sat on the chairs and tried to read the paper, but I could not bring myself to concentrate on the current economic difficulties of Germany or the latest cabinet re-shuffle. I exchanged some idle banter with the registrar, a pleasantly old-fashioned woman who peered over a pair of half-moon reading glasses in classic librarian/school mistress fashion. I was ready to leave for the umpteenth time when Davina and a few of her friends came in to collect their results. They were all dolled-up, evidently ready to celebrate. None of these girls expected failure.

"Ach, hello, Mr Connolly!" She said.

"Alright there Alex, son?" Justine winked, with that genial over-familiarity of hers.

"Hello, girls. What happened to 'Sir', by the way?" I said.

"Aye right, like we ever called you 'Sir'. You know what Davina used to call you behind your back - " Justine began, only to be interrupted by Davina ahemming. Her face was bright red.

"Shut up, Justine!" Davina said. I raised an eyebrow to indicate amused curiosity, absolutely dying to know what she called me behind my back.

The girls presented their student cards and collected their result slips. Most of them did alright, although there were one or two 'F's in there, but luckily not from my class. Davina, God love her, had three 'A's. They all laughed and hugged each other, hugged me as well. Davina kissed me on both cheeks.

"See, yous did well. None of you got an 'F' out of my class."

"Aye well, we can but hope," Justine said. Cheeky wee thing.

"Well, where are you all off to now?" I said, appraising their get-up.

"We're away to the pub," Davina said.

"You're not old enough," I said. Not that this would prevent them. Davina could have passed for eighteen when she was still in her adolescence.

"I am today," she said. "It's my birthday."

"Oh, happy birthday," I said. It occurred to me that a few of them had been drinking already. Who could blame them?

"Sure come down to the pub with us," Davina said.

"Aye, sure we've never seen you pissed before, Mr Connolly. Come on out with us and we'll get you paralytic."

"Do you not think it's a bit early in the day?" I said.

"Ah come on, Alex, it's my birthday," Davina said. My brain was working ferociously, looking for a dignified way to accept the offer.

"One drink," I said. "Then I must get home to the children. They're looking me to take them up to Cushendall for the day, so I'll need to be able to drive." Even as I said this, I was thinking of ways to call home and get out of it. I'd tell Lisa I had some unexpected work to do or something had come up. No, she'd smell the drink on me. I'd just have to call her and say some of the students invited me out to the pub. What was so wrong with that? I could invite her down, I thought, with no chance of her accepting. That would be a perfect alibi. And I wondered where Daniel got his deviousness.

As soon as I'd bought the first round, I rang home and told Lisa where I was. She was perfectly relaxed about it, told me to stay out and enjoy myself. I subtly neglected to mention the gender of the students. Sure, come down yourself, I said. Not at all, sure where would I put the kids? Leave them with Ruth, she'll not mind. I can't do that. Sure I wouldn't know what to do with myself anyway, they're your students. You stay out and enjoy yourself, not too many mind. I want you fit and ready when you get back. Okay, I told her. See you later. All this without the slightest quiver in my voice, without the slightest shadow of guilt in my mind.

I spent the next five or six hours knocking back pints and listening to these young women, no longer my students, talk about what courses they were going to study, what Universities they were going to. About their Mas and Das who wouldn't get off their backs. About what a relief it would be to get away and study away from home. Bitchy gossip about friends I'd never heard of and that mad cackling laughter you start to hear when a table of women has had enough drink. I sat there in silence for the most part, taking it all in, offering the odd contribution when the conversation turned to something I knew about. Two of them were arguing bitterly about some petty squabble they'd had months back, and the other girls had to intervene and calm the pair of them down before they started punching each other's lights out. Davina threw me the odd rueful smile as I sat there growing bored.

I felt slightly old sitting there with this strange breed of person whom I couldn't communicate with. I was only thirty-eight, but that distance of age brings with it subtle differences of culture and values as to make the one incomprehensible to the other. Listening to their conversation I noticed a bluntness, a cruel directness that was apparently taken for honesty, but which I thought was simple rudeness. People who'd grown up in the Eighties and Nineties, I noticed, often had this casual disregard for the feelings of others. I stayed, for the sake of hopefully having a private chat with Davina when the other girls had drifted away. But they were tenacious drinkers these girls. Ladettes, to use that nauseating expression. Eventually I decided it wasn't worth waiting any longer. I would have to get home to Lisa and the children. I put away the last of my lager, bid the girls goodnight, and headed out into the mellow evening. The sky still glowed with light as from some candle held just below the horizon. I was ready to hop in a taxi, leave my car sitting outside the Tech for the night, when Davina came running out of the pub with my brief case. Had I left it there on purpose? I couldn't say.

"Here, you forgot this." Davina handed me the brief case. My fingers brushed against hers as I grabbed the handle. "Are you away home so soon?"

"Aye, I've had a few too many. I must get home to L -." I stopped. "I must get home to have some dinner."

"Okay, well, I'll see you. You were a good teacher." She smiled, and hugged me.

"Well, good luck," I told her, suddenly swept up in my own sincerity and the intoxicating bouquet of her perfume. "And happy birthday."

"Thanks," she said. She appeared to let me go. I don't know if it was her initiative or mine, but we kissed. I thought perhaps an innocent kiss, a farewell to a treasured student. But it lasted too long for that, and I soon felt her tongue caressing mine. How does one describe such a moment? It was like the first time I'd ever kissed Lisa. It was that overwhelming. When our lips parted, I held her in my arms for several minutes, looking into her eyes. How many teachers have to watch a gem like this slip out of their reach?

"Will we take a taxi?" I said.

"To your house?"

"No."

"To my house. Okay."

""Sit on my face", I begged her when we were finally up there, clamouring naked in her bedroom. I'd spent the last hour or so becoming acquainted with her ageing parents, a determinedly respectable woman who wore a white blouse and a long, floral skirt, and a lean, muttering father who would rather have been watching the boxing. Her mother's face was caked in that chalky make-up that old women wear and her appearance, like that of the house, was matchlessly neat, scrupulously maintained. One got the opinion that she would be embarrassed to the point of suicide by the slightest flaw in either her living body or her living room. The whole front room was polished, hoovered, every ornament neatly laid out, every picture frame wiped clean, free of dust of any sort. There was a faux-mahogany cabinet with optics lined up on one side, Encyclopaedia Brittanica lined up on the other. On the walls were photographs of various family members, paintings, an A3 portrait of the Queen and a mural featuring the Red Hand of Ulster. The television, which had been switched off as soon as Davina brought me into the sitting room, was adorned with various little ornaments on top of it. The spotlessness was clearly aimed at impressing any neighbours that might pop over. As I remember people saying in my childhood, "this is a good, clean Protestant house".

I answered their suspicious questions for about an hour, desperate to try and find some innocent looking way to disappear upstairs with Davina. They asked family questions, things about my background, what job I did. I lied through my teeth, naturally. They didn't ask about my religion, as one never did in polite circles, but I did my best to indicate that I was a Protestant. I referred to Londonderry, the Waterside, the place where I'd grown up. Asked about my job, I said I was a lecturer at Coleraine University. They told me about their family, mentioned a few embarrassing things about Davina - "you wanna seen her when she was a child" - that sort of thing. How did I meet Davina, they wanted to know? Ah, sure we met in the library, that was a safe bet. The library next to the Tech, Davina must have been down there studying and I bumped into her. Then, Davina just said:

"Come on upstairs, Alex, I've something to show you." So, I followed her upstairs, realising as I did that Davina's parents could hardly have missed the wedding ring on my left hand.

It was exhilarating, standing there begging for her to lower her crotch onto my face. Whether because I was being submissive for the first time in my sexual life or because I knew the couple downstairs were most likely listening for every creak, every moan. Davina's room was a jumble, a layered mixture of past and present. Her bookshelves were neatly lined with novels, plays, screenplays, books about film and books with authors like Anthony Giddens, Alex Callinicos, Slavoj Zizek and various others. But at the same time, she had a box full of dolls and Bunty comics. There was a mirror on her wall lined with pink ribbon, plastered with little stickers depicting luscious lips, sunglasses, ice lollies, or just words like "Cool!" or "Hi, Boys!". Her dresser was covered in revision notes on one side and a clutter of make-up and perfumes on the other. Her walls were plastered in posters depicting young male heartthrobs, old and new. Bros. and Take That sharing the same wall. It was like a geological excavation, with all the layers and strata of Davina's life exposed.

Taking in all these details as we pulled our clothes off and our mouths pressed together, tasting Davina's breath, her moaning as she kissed me, closing her mouth over my bottom lip and sucking. And as we did this, running our hands over each other's bare flesh, already groaning with the excitement of the first triste, I wondered how I could possibly compete with all these teen heart-throbs on her walls, with all those teenage loves she had broken her heart over, all those infatuations that had taken over her life for weeks at a time while she matured. I realised, of course, that I couldn't. This was not why I was there. I was there because I was an older man and I had sexual experience. Young men either seek to satisfy themselves, or if they do try to please, they try too hard and drain the thing of its passion. I was there because I had a wife and children and I had been her teacher. I had first mastered her, and now she was mastering me. In no more than a few weeks, she would leave for London, and I wouldn't have her again. I was a temporary affection for her, she would depart and not think of me again.

I put this as far out of my consciousness as I could, and thought only of how to perpetuate this affair in the here and now, only of how to gain time away from Lisa and the children to spend with Davina, who already consumed me, who already had most of my waking attention whether she was present or not. Strangely, I found myself even more sexually active with Lisa, although I imagined it was Davina's body I was holding, loving, possessing, while Lisa smiled and wondered if she was ready for another child. Elementary logic would have told me to stop before the stopping became unbearable for me. But I didn't. I found ways to disappear to Belfast for a day, picking up Davina on the way. I'd claim I had a student who'd not been sent his results and who was trying to get into a University that required 28 points minimum, I'd pretend to be Batman off to rescue some poor little Robin, then take Davina up to Larne and go shopping. I even made the most fundamental mistake of paying for several items myself. Clothing, mainly, things I wanted her to have - or more accurately, things I wanted to see her in. She was wonderfully indulgent, allowing my impassioned excesses and kissing me sweetly for my gestures. She would make terrific conversation about books or films, using all those conceptual tools she'd so readily applied in class. I was, you'll have guessed, in awe of her.

If one can expel any sense of guilt from one's consciousness, the betrayal and deception involved in such an affair can be thrilling. I was easily arrogant enough to see off my guilt, finding several surprisingly easy rationalisations. Why should I live in a prison just because of a ceremony that took place in a registry office fifteen years ago? Couldn't a man's life change? Why should I masochistically deprive myself of this unique opportunity for happiness, however transient? What harm could it do anyone, provided I took precautions? And wasn't I making life easier for those around me by the fact of my newfound happiness? It's true. I was more relaxed around the house, more pleasant to be with. The tension lifted from the household in a dramatic way. Lisa noticed it, and attributed it to the relief the holidays had brought. Perhaps if I could find a way to keep the stress at bay, the family would survive Daniel's melodrama and Lisa and I would avoid all the constant arguments. I casually agreed and suggested cheekily that perhaps I should see a masseuse.

"You do and I'll break your legs," she said.

I did not break off the affair soon enough. Davina sensed that I was becoming attached and continually referred to the fact that soon she would be gone, and I would once more have to make do with my wife and children. I nodded my head sincerely, delivering all verisimilitude of having understood, but in reality I could not allow such understanding to sour my ecstasy. Shakespeare uses the word ecstasy as a term to describe the manic fits of madness, "blasted with ecstasy" and so on. But again, isn't that what love is? The suspension of the known universe of laws, the giddying sensation of floating on air, sustained by nothing more than one's own hubris? It's madness, this fixation, this desperate need to possess another person. Why do human beings elevate this state into something holy and serene when it rarely does more than debase and destroy a person?

For a month, or thereabouts, I experienced nothing but bliss, absolute joy. I'd awaken with a rare enthusiasm, I'd play with the kids and amuse them - much the way I used to amuse Lisa with my antics when I was still a twenty-three year old adolescent. The ordinary day to day shit that people have to take, that cumulatively grinds us down and makes vanquished cows of us all, why it simply bounced off me. I was invincible, impenetrable, an indomitable force. Lisa and I took the children up to Portrush for a week, and I made sure that in the middle of that week I had to drive home and get my camera, having conveniently forgotten to bring it. I met Davina, drove her to our house, took her up to the bedroom and we fucked noisily for a few hours. She wanted me to pee on her, I remember, to pee on her in the bath. It was disconcerting to notice that as she lay there in the tub, my arc of urine splashing all over her breasts, belly and vagina made her groan in delight in a way that she had never done with me in bed. But I was proud to have made her orgasm so powerfully. And then we fucked again under the shower, and with her moistened skin rubbing against mine and her lips dripping hot water into my mouth as we kissed, she had me under her spell more powerfully then ever.

I should never have travelled to Belfast City Airport on September 17th to see her off. She had no idea I would be there. In truth, neither had I until I got in the car and went. This was my last chance. I'd think of some explanation to fob Lisa off with. I got there early, and waited in the Departure Lounge for an hour and a half before she arrived, trailing several large luggage bags. Her parents were there, kissing her goodbye, while I sat watching from a cafe table behind a copy of the Belfast Telegraph. I rarely read the Northern Ireland newspapers, but I'd absent-mindedly mistaken it for the Guardian. So, I watched, on the verge of heartbreak, as Davina turned away from her parents and trailed her luggage up through to security checks. Since her mother and father had turned and left, I threw down the paper, ran up the steps and called after her.

"Oh my God!" She said, dropping her bags. "You scared the shite out of me there! What are you doing here?"

"I just came to see you off, you know? I didn't want you to go without saying goodbye."

"Oh, Alex," she said, and gave me a wonderful smile. "I'll miss you. Come here." And she hugged me, and we kissed for several minutes. I think she would have been kinder to have walked on, to have told me to forget it, she was away to London, to get back to my family and stop acting like a fool. But I don't think she could have done that any more than I could have just turned away. Maybe - who knows? - she'd been hoping I would turn up.

"Don't go," I said. Fucking stupid thing to say. The most idiotic thing to say, and I came up with it right there with no effort.

"What?"

"I don't want you to go. Stay. I'll leave Lisa, I'll look after you, you can study here. You don't need to go to London. Stay here with me. Please."

"Alex, I can't. I have to go. In less than an hour, I've to get that plane and I can't miss it."

"But you want to stay with me, don't you?"

"I want a life, Alex. I want a future, and you're a lovely man, but I don't have a future here with you. I'm sorry, I can't stick to be in these dismal six counties for any longer. You should know better than this." She hit me with that, her eyes pleading that she wished she'd never had to say it. She was right. I did know better than this. I was reaching for the impossible and if I'd retained even a hint of that old cynicism, I would never have got in that car and turned the key. So, I did the only thing I could do. I didn't reach to hug her or kiss her one more time. I just smiled and waved.

"Good luck, then."

"See you, Alex. I'll be back at Christmas for a couple of weeks, okay?"

"Goodbye, Davina." I turned and walked away.

"Kierkegaard says somewhere, I think it was in 'Works of Love', that the best love, the most perfect love is that for the dead neighbour. Love thy neighbour was a demand insufficiently applied by the poets and romantics. Their love was for a specific person, it was infused with, in Kantian terminology, 'pathological' interest. And so as an intelligent theologian, he wants to find a perfect love, a Christian love. He concludes that, since death erases all distinction, the perfect love was that for the dead neighbour, for whom one could no longer harbour desire or hatred. He makes this out like it's something terribly difficult, requiring an immense exertion of moral and emotional effort. But I think Slavoj Zizek has it right when he suggests that the perfect love is actually that which says 'I love someone in spite of', the really difficult love is that which loves someone in their irritating concrete idiosyncrasy. He says it is actually very easy to love someone in the abstract, as a representative of some essence of humanity. How to love those whom we find annoying, who anger us, who rile us to distraction. That is the trick. I'm an atheist, but I think this is an aspect of Christianity worth preserving. With one proviso. It is important to recognise the cut involved in humane love. One cannot love Adolf Hitler and the Jew equally. One excludes the other. Chaplin's Hynkel and the Jewish barber are played by the same actor, perhaps showing how arbitrary one's social position is, how irrelevant it is to one's subjectivity, but they are not on the same moral standing. This is what is false in Kierkegaard's notion of loving the dead neighbour. How can one love, even in death, someone whose life represented the destruction of millions? There are many cardigan-Catholics, and polo-neck-Protestants who are willing to say 'I forgive' when speaking of the terrorists who murdered their loved ones. Wonderful, but I wonder how far forgiveness stretches? How many Jews could look back on what Hitler, Hess, Goering, Goebbels and Mengeles did and say 'I forgive'?

I'm rabbiting on again. Forgive me, but this is what people who've lived a few decades tend to do. I meant to explicate this notion as an example, as an intellectual reasoning behind my love for Davina. It was too easy to love Davina - what was unlovable about her? The real difficulty would have been to succumb to the marriage syndrome and try to love Lisa. Davina sent me regular postcards. Always addressed to Mr Connolly at the Tech, never referring to our affair. Just some former student keeping in touch with her teacher. What could be wrong with that. One or twice a letter came, the pages were perfumed, and she had kissed the bottom of the last page next to her signature. I took the page, reading it on the toilet, and kissed the mark where she had kissed, leaving a lipstick shape. If she had been an acolyte of the Marquis de Sade, I doubt she could have come up with anything more cruel. To keep the embers of my desire burning but deny them any chance of satisfaction.

I descended into deep depression, into a sort of lunacy. This longing stayed with me, persevered through several bouts of extreme alcohol intake, through classes, through days out with the children. Nothing could put it to rest. You know the old saying about how you drive a nail into a plank of wood, take the nail out and the hole is still there. Well, so it was. Except the hole was already there at the beginning, the lack, the ontological gap, and it was Davina who made me aware of it, by filling it and then by deserting me. A bloody devilish bargain this - alone, a human being is insufficient. Together, two human beings are too much for each other.

Meanwhile, I discovered that Daniel was now hanging about with the Smith children. Christ knows what sort of stupid behaviour he got involved in. I couldn't deal with it, so I let Lisa punish him. And as a special bonus, he got his wee brother Kevin into it as well. They went round the estates robbing, vandalising, and shoplifting. And they bullied the other children as well. I suppose it was inevitable, really. My teaching job yielded precious little income. We couldn't afford a mortgage to move somewhere better, and the place wasn't exactly bursting with amenities. So, the children made their sport from other people's misery, and I was too debilitated to stop it. What would I have done anyway? Kicked the pair of them black and blue, grounded them for a while. That was beginning to look futile, even to my disciplinarian eyes. I tried joining the two boys up to the Air Training Corps, much against my better judgement, hoping this would knock them into some shape. But they hated it, and they stopped going. I'd have hated it as well, all that yelling "uh-Left, uh-Left, uh-Left-Right-Left! Turning about, about turn!" Marching to this tedious anthem and fretting over whether your shoes are shiny enough to please the Flight Sergeant. They took the money I gave them and went to the Arcades, played those Tuppenny Nudger machines. You know the ones? Three berries gets you twenty pence, three pears gets you forty, three plums gets you eighty and three bunches of grapes gets you the grand sum of one pound sixty. The jackpot, with three melons, was two pounds forty. I found this out for myself when I went up town to get some things from the shopping centre and found the pair of them with the Smiths standing about in the Arcades with no money, watching the other kids play. I suppose they were trying to cadge money off them. I marched in there and trailed the pair of them away, told them to get into that fucking car or I'd fucking hammer them. The Smiths just stood their smirking, calling me a wanker and telling me to suck their cocks. One of them spat in my direction and I swear it took some self-restraint not to smack his ear. Sure his mother had probably given him more of a beating than I could ever countenance.

Daniel slouched sullenly in the back seat, Kevin's poor wee body was hunched over in fright on the passenger side. I suppose he expected I'd take the belt to him when we got back to the house.

"You can wipe that scowl off your face as well," I told Daniel. "I'll not have you hanging around with scum like that. Fucking wee bastards. I suppose you were planning to go out fucking stealing with them? Eh? Daniel, don't you ignore me. You were fucking going out to shoplift with those thieving, bigoted little cunts. Weren't you?" I screamed at him. Kevin started to cry.

"Aye," Daniel said. "We were off to rob the fucking Post Office." The cheek of him shut me up for a few seconds, knocked the wind out of me. It was all I could do to keep driving.

"Daniel," I said with an affected menacing calm that often worked with children, "you be careful what words come out of your mouth when you speak to me. You just be very careful."

"Or what? You'll hit me? Keep that up, Da. Only see when I'm big enough I'll kick your balls up into your throat." He said. And he glared at me in the rear-view mirror with pure, distilled hatred in his eyes. I felt my stomach drop at that. Was I being threatened by my own son? He'd got this from somewhere, he'd learned this posture from - who? The Smiths? Those wee bastards? He was thirteen, turning fourteen soon. All those usual parent-thoughts started spinning in my brain. The hormones, I thought, it's the hormones. Or he's been rejected in love. Or he's picked on at school and seeks the protection of the Smiths. They taught him this rage, this unquenchable, ungovernable hatred of his father. It was all them. And if it wasn't all them, it was him. He was a selfish, spoilt brat. I'd been too soft on him in younger days when his mischief seemed harmless and even a little loveable. I'd ignored the parental duty to discipline him, to set him straight. And now he was sitting in the back of the car glaring at me, no doubt inwardly gloating at having silenced me. The little James Dean, the sultry teen heartthrob, the cool, handsome rebel kicking back against the system. A cocky child stirred to pugnacity by testosterone. Or was he ill? Was he disturbed? Was he taking drugs?

Yes, these were my actual thoughts. If we "see through a glass darkly" in our daily commerce with others, the phrase goes ten times for father and child. Layers of misrecognition stand between a man and his son, warped in the heat of the kitchen as it were, now concave, now convex. Layers, like lenses, blurring and melting reality out of figure. By simple induction, from a distorted perception of reality, I drew erroneous conclusions. And later that evening, I drew the erroneous conclusion that a number of wild strokes with my belt, cutting into the back of his thighs, would humble him and deflate that tumescent ego. This was my lowest point. Lisa stood in the door repeating "that's enough, Alex. Alex, stop. That's enough!" She had to rip the belt from my hand. Daniel, his legs swarming with red welts, a little blood pouring from a cut on his left leg, simply stood up, pulled his trousers and underpants up to his hips, sat back on the sofa and clicked on the television with the remote control. Not a tear. The child was the picture of impervious resistance. I had that image surgically removed from my memory for many years because all the rationalisation in the world couldn't convince me that I had behaved like a father.

And that is when it set in, what I like to think of as the Great Freeze. Daniel refused to speak to me or even look at me when he could avoid it. He came down to collect his dinner when it was ready, and stomped back up the stairs with his plate. He brought down his homework, as I still insisted upon seeing it, tossed the handbook or worksheets into my lap and sat watching the television while he waited. He ignored my comments about his spelling or grammar. He'd come to collect his pocket money, couldn't open his mouth to say please or thank you. On one occasion, I told him that if he didn't have the courtesy to say thank you when I handed him his money, he wouldn't be getting it. He nodded his head, turned and walked out of the room. I thought this would last for some weeks, possibly months. I tell you, it lasts to this day.

Through school, college and university. And not a single bend in my direction, not a single concession to the fact that I was his father. Christmas, birthdays, holidays. He would accept presents graciously and thank me with the minimum effort he could get away with. I had him do chores, for why should he be set above the other children because he'd decided to take an extended sulk? He did everything he was told without complaint. His performance picked up again in school. Everything I had wanted from him, everything I had demanded with smacks, with cajoling, with lectures and harangue, he gave me. I wanted him to work hard at school? He did. I wanted him to do his fair share around the house? He did. I wanted him to cease his bouts of lunacy, his stealing, his dishonesty? He did. Somehow in that clever wit of his, Daniel had calculated that he could give me everything I wanted while depriving me of everything. Lisa talked endlessly with him, begged him to call off his feud with his father, to allow an easy atmosphere to exist in the house. It was unnatural, she assured him, for the sitting room to be crackling with tension every time he entered it. He had to share a house with his father, and it was silly to allow this ongoing display of histrionics to turn his everyday life into a battle of wits with the man who'd given him life. To no avail.

I await the dramatic thaw, the moment some little Kruschev will take control of his brain and decide to restore diplomatic relations. But I'm kidding myself. Why should he be interested in me? He's attained complete independence from me. He showed it that day when he turned away and walked out of the room without any pocket money. He needs no father to make a cripple of him. He is free of me. I freed him. With each wild slash of the belt, I chopped through some of the tangled, knotted emotional ties he had with me, hacked them to pieces. Venom, to thy work, indeed.

"For all the brutal excess of drama in Northern Ireland during the final quarter of the 20th Century, there was very little to show for it. Culturally speaking, Northern Ireland was, and remains, bereft. Especially in contrast with it's myth-shrouded big sister to the South. If Ireland had spent the last few centuries exporting culture, providing much of England's best-loved novelists, playwrights and philosophers, Ulster had largely imported culture - first from Britain, then, like everyone else, from America. I thought for a while that this had something to do with the fact that the state was founded upon the constitutional domination of the Protestant population, a mainly Scottish bunch who looked back to the mainland for their cultural heritage. But if the giants like Harland and Wolff represented the mining of the rich industrialised North by the UK, their decline surely represented the culmination of a half-century period of decline. Without a strong economic base, with the destruction of manufacturing - which hit as hard in the North of Ireland as it did in the North of England - there was not the surplus necessary to sustain an artistic elite. Hence, we have only the comic novels of Colin Bateman and a few mediocre comedians to argue over the meanings of a battle that pathologised this little sub-state for thirty years.

It is axiomatic that everyone in Northern Ireland wants peace, that everyone is held to ransom by small groups of extremists. At least, that is the pseudo-liberal line. The other line, the more conservative one, is that "the divided communities of Northern Ireland" are cleaved in twain by "sectarian hatred". The so-called "peace activists" did nothing to help this state of affairs. There was a conference back in 1992 called "Beyond Hate" staged in Guildhall. All the modern-day saints were there - Nobel peace prize winner Mairead Maguire, Brian Keenan, Terry Waite. All these doubtless honest people congregating to dispense with unctuous pieces of wisdom, bishops, public sector trade unionists, even the hallowed John Hume lumbered his tubby body in to utter some sanctimonies from his morose little gob. Delegates thanked one another for their "humility and humanity" and promised to "take further counsel" on issues raised by others. Even the phlegmatic Martin McGuiness spoke simperingly of "the Christian way to proceed", although he possibly calculated that this display would be enough to send the Ulster Unionist Party into paroxysms of rage. The Reverend Ian Paisley would doubtless have bellowed that the Christian way to proceed was to proceed nowhere.

Neither the liberal nor the conservative lines are sufficient, for they both presume a symmetry between the "divided communities" that doesn't exist. Noone in Northern Ireland seriously believes that there is equivalence. The Unionists believe the IRA is an unpardonable affront to a legitemate, democratic state, while the UVF is merely a problematic extremist fringe of the majority current. Republicans believe the IRA are fighting the good fight, exerting their best energies to expel the imperialist colonisers who have oppressed the Catholic people for so many centuries and are clinging to their last outpost in Ulster. I know many otherwise reasonable Protestants who are driven to a venomous rage everytime Gerry Adams appears on television. What, for the residents of Ulster is a passionate political struggle is too important to be left to smug ITN reporters and priests and bishops. Religion, with its emollient unctions for every atrocity, didn't help the war and it isn't going to help the peace. All these thoughts coming to me now because I'm thinking about Jimmy, my laconic brother-in-law.

I took Lisa and the children down to see my sister in Randalstown that November. I was just beginning to overcome the sense of desolation that Davina's departure had opened in me. So, as it was a lovely winter weekend, we took the twelve-mile drive down to cosy little Randalstown, a very old mainly Protestant town, very conservative. The small businessman was the respected local, although there were few small businesses to speak of. There was one tiny supermarket, but there were probably five or six pubs - the correct order of priorities in my assessment. The police station shut at 7pm. The houses were almost baroque Victorian affairs, many with three-storeys and five bedrooms. There were new flats and apartments built next to the old, but the over-riding aura of the town was of an ancient parochialism, a lost spirit of community, a nostalgically sleepy place with the modern taking second place. Not far off was the Lough and forest. Shane's castle was nearby. Oh, not to idealise it, because closer than Shane's castle was the Esso petrol station and a cheap furniture store.

So, we arrived in Randalstown and parked in a dilapidated little patch of tarmac, took a stroll by the River Main before heading up to Siobhan's house. A flesh-coloured blur moved behind the frosted pane of glass on her front door, and a high, nasal voice demanded to know who was ringing her doorbell. It's me, Siobhan, I've brought the kids down to see you. And she yelped with delight. Oh, she loved the children. She spoilt them rotten everytime we brought them down. Ach, come on in, I was just making some dinner, says she. In we went, into her poky little home, where her husband, Jimmy, sat at the kitchen table smoking rollies and reading the sports pages. Jimmy, twenty years Siobhan's superior, nevertheless looked strong and virile in his age. Behind his string vest and tight curls of greying hair, a knot of muscles, chest and abdomen, bulged.

"Aright there, Alex? Ach, it's Lisa and the wee'uns! Here, children, away into the scullery and get yourself some biscuits." He says. The scullery? That's what you might call a larder. So, the children loved to get tucked into the Jammie Dodgers and Ginger Nuts and whatever else he had in his biscuit tin. I sat down at the table with Lisa, and I realised that Siobhan was talking, and had been for some time, on the subject of her life since I had last seen her. She liked to keep me updated, just in case she should die and I'd wonder what she'd been up to all those years. She was like any person who kept a diary, in that the main reason one keeps a diary is cognition of one's own mortality.

I shook one of Jimmy's work-worn, calloused hands and looked at the paper he was reading. The Belfast Telegraph.

"Is that not a bit of a left-footer for a Trimble voter like yourself, Jimmy?" I teased. Jimmy was that odd combination you got in Ulster, a Unionist with socialist principles. A man who'd been a trade union rep for the latter half of his working life, but voted for a middle class Conservative who marched in a bowler-hat.

"Ah, there's some not bad columns in there," he said, and started coughing wildly. "That Eamonn McCann's a quair writer."

"Sure he's a Republican, Jimmy. He supports the IRA."

"Does not, he's a fuckin socialist!" Jimmy muttered, reaching for his Rizla papers and Drum tobacco. "Fuckin makes more sense than that evil bastard Adams."

"Sure, he's not evil, Jimmy - "I began.

"He fuckin is! The bastard devotes his energies to legitemising the murderous actions of the IRA. What else do you call that if not evil?"

"And Paisley doesn't legitemise murder -?"

"I never liked Paisley. He's a fat fuckin gobshite with an ego on him even more bloated than his fuckin belly." He snarled.

"Jimmy, for God's sake, stop swearin all the time!" Siobhan chided, sticking her fork into a pot of boiling potatoes. "There's children in the house."

"What are you talkin about, Siobhan, sure the children are away in the living room watching TV. Sure the children probably know more curse words than I do, what with this and that rapper teaching them all manner of cunts and motherfuckers."

"Jimmy!" Siobhan banged the fork on the sideboard.

"She's on her Red Sea cruise," Jimmy said, leaning across the table conspiratorily and winking at me. "You know what I mean?"

"Now stop that, Jimmy," Lisa laughed. "You wanna hear what he just said about you, Siobhan."

"Aye, if he keeps that up he'll have no dinner. I'll kick his balls up into his mouth for him to chew on." Siobhan said. I swear to God, Jimmy had a way of raising his eyebrows at me just then, I cracked up laughing.

Jimmy and me just talked away, him cackling away and often reducing me to tears of laughter. A Protestant and a Catholic fraternising, brother-in-law to brother-in-law. And it makes me realise that all this talk about 'hate' is just shite, for although Jimmy and I each held our convictions as powerfully and potently as the other, we were never less than friendly. No sectarian machinations, just friendly caachinations at the dinner table. So, we enjoyed dinner, a soggy mix of spuds and vegetables, some nice stew-pie and a heavy dollop of brown sauce. And you know those marrowfat peas? Disgusting green blobs. And the children were given ice cream and peaches for desert. Jimmy suggested we retire to the living room to watch a video or some TV, but Siobhan grabbed my arm as I made to follow the others out of the kitchen.

"I want a word with you, Alex Patrick Connolly." She said, in that mockingly stern tone she'd learned from our mother. Our mother would stand on the steps of our Derry house, awaiting our return from school. If she was in a mood, if we'd done something wrong, she'd be batting her broomstick rhythmically against the step, and she'd say 'I want a word with you...'.

"What word do you want?" Says I. "And how many syllables?"

"I'm not joking, Alex." Her eyes informed me that indeed she was not joking. "There's a student of yours lives down the street, and you need to set her straight for she has the notion, and she's been telling everyone else, that you had an affair with one of your students."

"Is that right?" I said. How my face betrayed me at that point, I don't know, but the look on Siobhan's face said she knew I would have no business setting anyone straight. "I suppose people will gossip as people do."

"Don't be flippant, Alex. What if Lisa was to hear that? How would she know who to believe?"

"She'd believe me, I hope. Look, I'm not a fool. I'm not going to risk a perfectly healthy marriage, my whole family and my career on a fling with some bloody student. Who's saying these things? Probably some malicious little turd who didn't fare well in the exams. Who?"

"Her name is Linda MacIntyre, and keep your voice down. I have spoken to her and politely asked her not to tell people these things. She informed me that you were an extremely good teacher and helped her to get a B, so don't go flying off the handle. If she's mistaken, then contact her and tell her, courteously, that she must have been misinformed. Reason with her. She doesn't want to cause your marital breakdown, so just explain and be careful not to get angry or cajole. If she's not motivated by any malignity now, you don't want to give her reason to try and ruin your reputation. The problem with mudslingers is that they always win. Even if she can't prove what she says, it's very doubtful if you can disprove it, and once that connection is established in Lisa's imagination, you'll never erase it." Siobhan had her hand on my shoulder, her eyeballs staring into mine, her sincerity mocking my guilt. Oh, she was every bit as locquacious as I could be, but nowhere near as pompous. Both of us excelled in English at school, although she repented by later learning to speak Irish. Linda MacIntyre. I remembered her as a keen student. Into Wagner and Schopenhauer, a severely misanthropic person. I met her family once, and I still say I can't blame her.

"Okay," I nodded. "I'll get her number from the University, I'll speak to the registrar. Call her up and tell her to keep her yap shut." Siobhan frowned. "I'll reason with her. I'll flatter her youthful vanity with such unction she'll never utter a slandering word in public again. Okay?"

"Don't patronise me, Alex. I'm doing you a favour."

"Right. Okay, I'll do it. Just don't bring it up again, okay sis?"

And we joined the others in the sitting room. Lisa was sitting there with Lucy on her knee, bouncing her up and down, wee Lucy was laughing her head off, her wee arms flapping wildly. And on the television, the titles of a Sunday soap omnibus were sliding down the screen.

"How I made the call is, I went into the University and explained to the registrar that Linda MacIntyre was in need of a new certificate to display her 'A' Level results. She gave me the number from the files and I went off to a public payphone to call her house. A meek, elderly voice answered.

"Hello?" I explained who I was and asked if I could speak to Linda. "Oh, Linda, it's yer master callin for you. Linda! Get down the stairs, yer schoolmaster's callin on the telephone. Gawd, she's on her way now, professor, she's only out of bed. She should be ashamed of herself, half past twelve and she's only out of bed. Come on you, you lazy wee bitch ye, get down these bloody stairs. Gawd, professor, forgive my swearin, sure we're all not as educated as you." And the old lady rabitted away for a while until Linda came on the phone.

"Ach hello there, Professor!" She said, cheerily.

"Knock that off. What are you telling people about me and Davina?"

"Fuck, you're a charmer, I thought you were callin to see how I was doin."

"I know how you're doing, Linda, and I truly am glad for you. Now, why are you tellin people these things about Davina and I? What could possibly have inspired this bout of rumour mongering? Only, please tell me Linda, what is it that makes it worthwhile ruining my marriage? I know it's a common form of entertainment in the backwoods areas like Randalstown, but can I have done something to deserve your bitchy gossip?"

"You're a lyin bastard, Mr Connolly. D'you think I didn't see you and Davina sticking your tongues in each other's mouths?"

"First of all, that's none of your business. Second of all, is it not possible you misunderstood the situation? Do you not think its possible I let the situation get out of hand in my drunkenness and ended it there? What makes you assume I would allow a stupid mistake to wreck my marriage and my career, Linda? And why, even if it were true, would you think it justifiable to tour Hicksville with this story? Was I not a good teacher to you? Do you want to wreck my marriage? Do you want me to be sacked?"

"I wasn't the one that was tellin' everyone, you thick bastard!" She hissed, outraged. "I fuckin heard it from somebody else and they asked me what I saw. Do you think I'll make a liar out of myself for you? You fuckin took that wee tramp everywhere, do you not think someone saw you?"

"I took her nowhere!" I snarled, immediately impressed by my own furious sanctimony. That natural authority that comes with being a teacher hadn't abandoned me, even when I was seen straight through. "You're believing rumours, lies and stupid schoolgirl gossip. Linda, honestly, I took you for one of the intelligent ones. You've known me for two years, do you think I'm ready to throw aside my career and family for a brief fling with a pupil. Catch yerself on!"

"I know what I saw."

"What you saw was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened, it went too far. But, Jesus ... I never took it further. I had the cab drop her off at her house and I went home to my family. Honestly, Linda, I can't afford to have my life ruined by these silly rumours. One mistake, surely that shouldn't be enough to undo a man? You want to go after a male chauvinist, go after someone with power. There could be a rapist in the Whitehouse, I'm a college lecturer with a family who made one mistake. If you're not impressed by me, then consider my family. My wife ... she'd be heartbroken to think that something like this was going on. Just think about it. I'm not telling you what to do, just think about what you say."

"Okay." She said. Not acquiescing, but ready to wonder. I'd sowed doubt in her mind. Perhaps that would be enough to prevent a knife-edge situation unravelling into catastrophe, I thought as I hung up the phone.

"And that's how naive I was. The young are tricked into believing in something called 'maturity', some magical age at which they will achieve Zen-like calm and a stoical wisdom that enables them to see things in their true proportions. If only the young knew what chaos reigns in the minds of their elders, what blunders we are truly capable of - of just what little our cowed cynicism and so-called worldliness amounts to. I could use my training and years of reading to penetrate any human situation except my own, and not for lack of self-involvement. Naturally one's sight proceeds from near to far, but never in the precise way that enables a truly accurate perception of one's own life events.

Oscar Wilde said in "De Profundis" that, "every little act of the common day makes or unmakes the character, and that therefore what one has secretly done in the chamber, one has some day to cry aloud from the housetop." I took this at the time to be typically Wildean. Only Oscar would like to shout from the housetops about his sordid adventures with rent-boys. This is, after all, a text in which Oscar, while ostensibly offering some apology for his behaviour, actually elevates it to a cosmic significance. Refashioning Christ in his own image, he comes out once again as "standing in symbolic relations" to his culture and times. This is his resurrection. As George Bernard Shaw caustically remarked upon reading De Profundis, Wilde came out the same man that he went in. The man who has changed so much, only to remain the same.

"When Lisa had her first stroke, all it did was make her left leg judder seriously for weeks on end. She couldn't leave the house, so I had to go down the shops and pick up the groceries, go down her work and pick up her sick pay, go down the bank and deposit her sick pay, go down the local shop and get her tampons. The second one was also blessedly slight in its impact. It robbed her control of her left arm and messed with her speaking a little. For example, if she wanted to say "Alex, can you set the oven and put the chicken in after eight minutes?" she would say "Alex, will you be setting oven and chicken for eight minutes?" with the usual stops and pauses in between words. Everything else about her conversation was perfect. She didn't slur her words, she hadn't suddenly become stupid, her tone was correct and, broadly, she could still communicate much as she had before. But the grammar was like that of a nine-year-old. That's what the second stroke did.

What happens, when a blood vessel bursts in the brain, or a small clot lodges in a blood vessel, it deprives a certain part of the brain of the necessary oxygen supply, thus destroying the cells in that area. But it doesn't stop there. No. Then you have "ischemic reaction" to contend with. A chemical reaction is set off that destroys more cells, and proceeds in its destruction so rapidly that there is only a six-hour window of opportunity to save the patient. You have to be aware of the symptoms to stop it. Do you get sudden, inexplicable headaches? Have you lost control of a limb or body part for a period of time? Have you suddenly found yourself confused, unable to utter an intelligible sentence? I got all this stuff from the leaflets the doctor gave me. These leaflets, they have stern descriptions of the "three myths about stroke", which consist of the notion that stroke is unpreventable (it is preventable), that stroke only affects the elderly (it can affect anyone), and that stroke sufferers recover after a period of months (they're recovering for the rest of their lives). This information is supposed to be helpful, but I found it immensely dispiriting. Who can spend the rest of their lives "recovering"?

So, in order that her lifelong recovery might at least be comfortable, I sat with Lisa well into the early hours of morning. Goodness, three, four am? Easily that. Sometimes, it would turn to dawn, and I'd go out for a walk in the early morning sun. There is something so refreshing about wandering about the early morning streets in a tired daze, searching for a newsagent and a bakery, so I would forget all about Lisa and her sudden limitations and her new found distaste for the trivial. What I loved in those years was triviality, but Lisa - now that she'd communed with her future, now that she'd realised that death was all anyone had coming to them - decided it was time to set aside childish things and concern herself only with that which was holy and profound. From the library I brought her the all the big God books, the Celestine Prophesy (I know, I know) and some Wodehouse novels. She wouldn't touch the Wodehouse novels. Didn't want to know about upper class horseplay. Didn't care for phrases like "soused as a herring" or "my darling cauliflower".

"What do you want? What can I do for you to make you more at ease?" I'd say.

"At ease? Try dying like not bad man, try pissing out my life like not being here." She would retort. She would crease her face up and hiss these words at me, seemingly berating me for my shallowness, for my failure to understand the mind-shattering things that had been revealed to her by her condition. Perhaps the loose compounds of blood and destroyed cells really had produced some new perceptions. I would quietly explain that she could have anything she wanted from me to help her cope and she would constantly recommend suicide. Perhaps she realised what a bad husband I was. I am not built for feeling deep things about other people. I can't attach myself to others in the way that certain masochists can. The exception that constitutes the rule is Davina, and it is a matter of personal pride that I pulled myself out of that emotional rut some months after she was gone. So, perhaps Lisa suspected that I was less than destroyed by her trauma.

The children had settled down over the years, and perhaps I had mellowed somewhat. The country had mellowed too, if our six counties could legitimately be called a country. Northern Ireland had said a big yes to peace in whichever form it took. As it came, it was packaged in the golden aureole of a new Labour government and power sharing between the North and South. Concessions made to the so-called 'nationalist community' were of the constitutional sort that would have produced yelps of delight from Eddie McAteer and his Nationalist Party back in the Sixties. The Nationalist Party were more or less Tories in a green, white and gold flag, decidedly Roman Catholic, reactionary and obscurantist. At a time when the Catholic birth rate in Derry was outrunning Sicily, birth control was seen as a Unionist depravity or a communist incursion. Their politics were steadfastly anti-Unionist, and they made no attempt to appeal to Protestants of whatever persuasion. That said, they were always strategically timid, always the last to fight over any issue. Remote from the material concerns of the working class, they restricted themselves to calls for the spiritual and political unity of Ireland. Typically, this was a future assured by the divinity of the Church. And so, if McAteer had been offered a tenth of what we were offered in 1998, he would have wept in his characteristic way before wiping his eyes on the tricolour, another trademark of his. Yet, after thirty years of fighting, it seemed anti-climactic to say the least.

I recall ever so well my years growing up in Derry. For most of my youth, the place was free of political excitement. The unions were timid, as they might well be with unemployment typically at 30%, and politics was run by the church or the nationalists. It was mainly a depressing affair, long walks to and from school, through dirty streets, watching men furrow their brows outside the bookies with a copy of racing pages, studying form, deciding which way their social security or meagre wages were going this week. There was this oul man who sat there on the same stony grey steps every day, head in his hands, stinking of piss, and he just sat muttering to himself. Occasionally he prayed - much good it did him. Our family was one of those lucky enough to have a house. The houses were allocated by the Derry Corporation, a Unionist-run gerrymandering outfit. Since only households were eligible to vote, the Unionists were careful about who got houses and who didn't. If you waited a decade, you might be lucky to find yourself holding the key to a stony hovel with rats as involuntary pets. My mother, like most other matriarchs, prided herself on maintaining a scrupulously clean household, and would stand outside on the steps with her broom, gossiping with the other neighbours about all manner of dirty people, proud defender of cleanliness in a sea of squalor.

What people generally recognise as the crisis which sparked almost thirty years of war in Northern Ireland descended gradually, over years, with small protests and stunts by tiny groups of revolutionaries and republicans slowly gathering force and momentum, until the six counties were rocked by wave after wave of protest. Demands were made for equal political representation, for housing rights and so on. I remember one time there were hundreds of boys came home with stitches, broken arms and whatnot. Ah well, I think we've all had enough. Time to pack it in and make a compromise. Perhaps that's what we mean by the term "maturity" after all. Giving up a losing struggle, making peace with reality and reclining into a docile senescence. My youthful contempt for old age pragmatism has been replaced for some time by dread of the alternative.

Lisa took a turn for the worse just before the Christmas of 1999, because some part of her brain that related to her parasympathetic nervous system had been affected. Her breathing became strained at times, and she found she couldn't control her bladder or bowels. Daniel had finished his studies and was in training to be a policeman. I was, I hope, sensitive in not mentioning how proud I was of him. Kevin was working in a semiconductor plant, never the brightest one of the children and never headed for anything great in life. Lucy was still at high school, just flowering into a relatively calm adolescence. Daniel, having moved out, moved back into the house to help look after his mother. I told him it was okay, he didn't have to come back, but I was actually rather glad he was there. He had a way of making Lisa calm and even happy.

On Christmas Eve, we were all sitting in front of the television, arms folded, drinks at our feet, not saying a word to one another. I noticed, though at first it didn't forebode anything, that Lisa was gazing at me intently. Her dark brown eyes looked without moving beneath heavy eyelids. As one side of her mouth was lopsided since her most recent stroke, it almost looked like it was twisted into a snarl. I ignored her for a moment, then paused, reflected on it, and slowly moved my head around to meet her gaze.

"What is it, love?" I said. She didn't answer, but her eyes flickered. Something in there I didn't like, something cruel, something malicious. She moved her head slightly and told Daniel to "go do off the teevee, Danny, teevee off". Daniel sighed, expecting that his mother was just sick of whatever was on, and clicked the remote control. Kevin looked up, suddenly alert, as though he had been in a daze. Lucy pretended not to notice that anything had happened and continued to look at the television screen. The room was silent, and tense. Lisa met my gaze again, and slowly set her mouth to working. She was carefully choosing and pre-editing her words, ensuring that she put everything in perfectly competent English sentences. She was making her words count.

"What's up, love?" She asked me sarcastically. "What's *up*?" Her voice croaked slightly with emphasis. "I know, that's what's up. I know. I've. Always. Known. I. Know."

I stared at her, feeling a cold knife of dread rise up in my gut and begin slowly churning. I knew what she knew. But I maintained as placid an expression as possible. For one thing, not in front of the children. No. Not in front of the children. She was being selfish. Bringing up something from the past, years ago, to showboat in front of them. Who did she think she was? I decided I would brazen it out, and subtly imply that mummy had gone a bit cuckoo.

"What's up, love?" I said, ersatz concern dripping from my vowels.

"I. Know." She said again, with greater emphasis. "About your wee affair."

That was enough to get everyone's attention. Kevin's eyes darted about, confused. Lucy gasped. And Daniel - well, his eyes swerved suddenly onto me, and he stared with... what was it?... astonishment but also triumph? He smirked, the wee get. He smirked.

"Lisa, I think you need to get to bed. Come on, kids, let's get her-"

" With a student," she contined. "Davina. Ten years ago. I. Know. I've. Always. Known."

"You stupid, stupid man," Daniel said, the delighted, malicious smile growing on his face. "You stupid fucker."

"Danny!" Kevin cautioned, but more because he was frightened of a scene, and because this was confusing him, than out of loyalty to me. I looked at Kevin. There was something more to confusion in his eyes. He was sensing a crescendo, before he was ready for it. He had things to say too. Why wouldn't he? Everyone had things to say to me. He wanted to say to me, I knew, that he resented the fact that I looked down on him, that I considered him less than bright, that I condescended to his chosen career. He resented that my expectations of him had limited him, and that I cited those limitations as proof that my expectations were justified. He resented that I couldn't just be happy for him in his chosen career, and that I spoke ill of his wife who - I must admit - I had called 'fuck ugly' to her face after one particularly regrettable drinking session at his wedding reception. He had plenty to say to me. But he was holding it back.

Lucy, for her part, would say what she always said: "I'm fuckin sick of this family, I'm just fuckin sick of it!" She wasn't lying either. If she had been old enough to leave home, or if she'd been able to get up the stick, or take up drugs, she would have done just to wave it in our face as a fairly large fuck off to us all. I adopted my calm "I'm-the-daddy" expression, and said to them all:

"Look, clearly there's some issues we need to discuss, but now is not-"

"You fuckin hypocrite!" Daniel shouted. He was no longer smirking in his rage, though he still reeked of ecstasy and triumph. "You always had the fucking gumption to be on your moral fuckin high horse. How many times did you lecture me? How many times did I get the belt for failing to live up to your exacting standards of morality and etiquette? How many times did you punch me or kick me for giving you lip or being just the wrong side of cheeky? And all that time, you were getting your end away with some hoor!" He spat the last word out. My instinct was to get angry with him, but he was too big to take on these days. And I was disturbed to realise that I was mainly angry about his insulting Davina. What could he know?, I was subconsciously thinking. How dare he?

"Danny, please!" I begged. I really begged. "This is not the time-"

"What do you mean, not the time? It wasn't the time to go dicking around with a student when you were married with children, but you did it anyway!" Funny thing about Daniel. As a dutiful father, I had imparted to him a kind of moral absolutism that I never took all that seriously myself. No wonder he became a peeler.

"Danny, it's not that simple," I said. I struggled for an answer, for one of the many rationalisations that had occurred to me at the time. "I was... your ma and me... it was difficult. For a long time we thought... divorce. Why the hell should I be stuck in a prison just because of a ceremony in a registry office fifteen years before? Why should I masochistically deprive myself of my one shot at happiness just because of you fuckin kids!!" I almost screeched this last, my eyes crinkled shut and watering, my mouth curled into a terrible gurn, but my lungs failing to sustain my voice so that the last few words came out as pathetic gasps. I regretted it as soon as I had said it. I didn't mean it. I had never meant it. It was just a cheap lie I had told myself, part of that cheap cynicism with which I had purchased some fleeting pleasure and a dream of liberation. I had let myself believe that arrogance and ego aggrandisement somehow empowered me, enabled me to escape the guilt, the consequences of my actions. But that risible fiction was exposed as I fell to the floor, on my knees, weeping uncontrollably. I tried to look at Lisa, tried to look her in the eyes, and all I could see was her cold revenge. It wasn't just about the affair. It was about everything. It was about the fact that I was a bully, a hypocrite, a shit husband and a shit father, a small-time teacher in a small-time technical college who nevertheless preened himself, showed off his intellect, talked down to everyone, lectured everyone... the neighbours, our friends, our relatives, my brothers and sisters, my whole family, most of my students, all thought I was a ridiculous, pneumatic, selfish, self-important braggadocio.

"You're a fuckin hypocrite," Danny was leaning over and murmuring in my ear. "A fuckin hypocrite! You should be in a wheelchair, not mammy. You should be suffering the way she's suffering, because that woman is gold and you're nothin but shite!"

Lucy ran out of the room bawling, screaming about how, well, how she was fuckin sick of this fuckin family. I tried to yell after her, but couldn't. I felt Kevin grip me firmly by the arms, haul me up and take me out of the sitting room and up the stairs. I couldn't look at him. I just wept, pathetically, self-indulgent to the last.

Lisa was taken to hospital after another stroke that evening. The ischemic reaction wiped out most of her motor function, and she could speak no more. On New Year's Eve, she passed away with Daniel at her side, gripping her hand, as if holding onto her very life. I was at the pub and, predictably, the last person to be told. I started drinking from the night Lisa told me she knew about the affair, and didn't stop until weeks after the funeral, where I had been barely tolerated. And when I did stop, I broke down for weeks and weeks. Lucy had to move out of the house. She went to live with Kevin, Daniel being far too consumed with fury and malice to be tolerable company for a teenager. Lucy occasionally came round to keep me company or get money once I'd got back my sanity. But neither of my sons has seen me or spoken a word to me since.

Last year, Beaker, Barry Smith, was beaten to death not far from my front door in a punishment beating gone wrong. His mother, Roberta Smith, bears some responsibility for this, for having encouraged her son to be a bigot, a criminal, and a loyalist volunteer. She personally profited from the money he brought back from racketeering, actually, though all she ever did with the money was get more booze and order in more Chinese deliveries - aye, she'd buy Chinese food, but her and her bigoted spawn hated the Chinese community in Northern Ireland, and I'm sure Barry played his part in some of the loyalist race riots that left three 'Chinkies' dead. But Roberta Smith knew a few things. The first was that I was a Catholic. That she had found out one night four years ago, at a barbecue thrown by Lisa to entertain some of the neighbours. She had come round, with a 24 pack of Harp lager under one arm, a face full of fake bonomie. We could hardly tell her to fuck off, though I would have dearly liked to. She had got pished, absolutely rat-arsed, pickled out of her mind. She had picked fights with everyone, and tried to get us all singing the Sash along with her. When we quietly explained that we didn't wish to sing bigoted songs like that, she had become belligerent, slabbering on about "awe aye, what's the fuckin score here, like? What's the fuckin score? Are you all Provos, like?" I finally got pissed off with her asking, and blurted out "yes, I'm a fuckin Provo, Roberta, now will you be quiet or leave?" I had to physically eject her in the end. She never spoke to me or Lisa again, though we did get our windows bricked the following 12th July.

The second thing that Roberta knew was that my Catholic son was one of the few fenian peelers, which she thought shouldn't be allowed, and which she - knowing her views about the Papist conspiracy - would have interpreted in a manner that attributed to my son all manner of powers above and beyond those few he actually held. The third thing that Roberta knew was that her son could have done no wrong, had been set up. She believed that Protestants didn't kill their own kind lightly, and that the UFF never harmed the head of one innocent person - all that stuff about innocent civilians, aye right, they're fuckin fenian bastards happy to live off the welfare one minute then start killing Brits the next. But Roberta's conclusions about what had really happened to her son sounded like the demented ravings of a lunatic if spelled out, actually spelled out in their full logical detail. Her booze-addled paranoia would not have got many people interested, least of all her contacts in the UFF. So, as I say, she proved cunning. She wrote something that insinuated, that - if you were inclined to gossip anyway - piqued your interest without being so specific as to set off your bullshit detectors.

When I received my copy of her letter, her "j'accuse", I briefly fell off the wagon. I had, since recovering from my wife's death, attempted to stop drinking altogether. The amount I drank in the weeks before and after her death was just short of a lethal dose, and at some point I decided - I don't quite know why - that I was worth keeping alive, that there was still something in it for me. So, I had stopped drinking, retired from teaching, and started driving a cab to make my living. I made more money doing that than I ever had in the college. I had even held it together when an old couple had solicited my cab and asked me to take them to Belfast International airport. I recognised them as Davina's parents, though mercifully they did not recognise me throughout the journey. Again, a sign that my instinct for self-preservation was still kicking was that I did not wait around, or try to spy on their reunion with their daughter in the arrivals lounge. I took their money and their miserly tip and drove off, and never gave it another minute's thought. But as I read Roberta's letter, something snapped again. It was the idea of public shame that did it. It evoked the terror I had of being exposed, of everyone suddenly being aware that I was an imposter, that I had always faked my way through life, pretending to be a teacher, a family man, a citizen, a husband, and a father, when all I really was, was a calculating, callous murderer. Yes. Murderer. J'accuse. I am a murderer. I as good as killed my wife. Not when she had her strokes. Years ago when I had an affair that I did not conceal. Years ago, when I married her. Years ago, when I took a young woman's life, drew it into my web, injected it with venom, and consumed it whole through the possessive ritual of marriage. Everything she might ever be was finished at that point, from when she was merely doomed to manage a failing family wilting under a tyrannical, conceited patriarch.

I thought to myself - yes, I am a murderer. Yes, you've found me out. Now everyone has found me out. Now it won't be long before I'm righteously lynched by my affronted Protestant neighbours, whose respectability I had leeched off. Now, I await the first brick, the first petrol bomb, the first bullet, the first stab in the dark. And at first I really didn't care who had found me out, just that I had been found out. And when I did start to think who it could be, I thought of everyone whose respect I had vaingloriously imagined I had previously enjoyed. I thought of everyone who could possibly have been momentarily taken in by my facade of being a decent man, only to be disillusioned. I avoided everyone I knew, and was terrified of the gaze of strangers to boot. I hid in the house. When that wasn't enough, I hid upstairs. When that didn't work any more, I locked myself in the bathroom with the paper.

I am no longer that terrified man. I will be okay. I will make amends with my sons, and my daughter. I will live.  And I'll kill that fat miserable cow that did this to me.  So I will.

The End.