I have just returned from burying my son, I think. I say that not out of certainty but defiance. What is beyond doubt is that I have returned from burying someone and he was very small and a blood relation. To me and my wife he was our only child, our son Francis, nine and a half years old. But that is a minority opinion. To the greater world there seems no doubt but that he was my father, also named Francis, an aged hero of the War of Independence. The old men who came up to me on sticks as I stood by the graveside were in no doubt as to the identity of the corpse. Grabbing me by the arm with their claw-like hands they spoke fervently:
‘I’m sorry about your father, John. He was the last of a breed of heroes. It’s a shame the way time passes.’ Or a variation: ‘I remember him well, John. We all looked up at him. He was an inspiration.’
I stood there on the graveside as the rain fell steadily, darkening the soil which the grave diggers were heaping on the coffin. I continued to receive this doddery procession of old men who made their way cautiously over the slippery ground. They shook my hand and offered their sympathies and I shook theirs and nodded in acceptance. But in truth I had not a clue what was happening about me. Here was the world, present on the twenty-eighth of March 1991, at the funeral of my father while me and my wife could have sworn that three years previous to the day we had buried him and now we were here at the graveside of our only son Francis.
My wife, surrounded by the emotional scaffolding of her brothers and sisters, is in the next room grieving. She does not have a clue either, we seem to be all alone in this horror. And it is precisely because of this aloneness that some sense has to be made of the whole thing, some sense no matter how small. It is this lack of sense which has me here writing.
Let me be clear. When I have finished writing I do not expect to have achieved some all-explaining insight into the unique horror which has held sway in our home for the last six months. That onus of explanation seems to me an almost intolerable burden to place upon any writer. Even before I start, I know I will never be able to write an explanation and even if by some miracle I were to achieve one I do not think that any written one would satisfy my heart. A written explanation, lying on a page, bloodless and incapable of making itself felt in my heart – the only place where an explanation has any validity – is no explanation. Therefore my task in this writing is more modest. All I hope to do is lay down the facts so that in these at least there will be some clarity. From the whole debris of this horror salvaging the facts is the least I can do for my wife and myself.
I will start with my father. The relevant thing about my father is that he was a hero of the War of Independence and probably of the Civil War also although he rarely spoke of this second adventure. In one of the few Risings outside Dublin in 1916 my father, as a very young man, commanded a small company of volunteers based in the Mweelera mountains above Killary harbour. From this redoubt they attacked and occupied the police barracks on Westport. In an incident which has gone largely unchronicled my father then stood in the smashed bay window of the station and read out a self-penned version of the Proclamation of Independence to the bewildered township who had gathered in its square. The occupation of the barracks lasted till the weekend when military intelligence informed them that a Royal Irish Infantry detachment with artillery back-up was being deployed from Galway military barracks to lift the occupation. By this time word had come through of the almost total failure of the Rising outside Dublin. There was nothing for it but to withdraw. In the dead of night the volunteers stole westward along the Louisburgh road towards Killary harbour and refuge. Rounding a corner somewhere between Westport and Louisburgh they ran through a British Army checkpoint but not before Father, a front-seat passenger in the truck, stopped a .303 bullet with his chest. Somewhere in the Mweelera mountains a makeshift medical post was panicked by a wound classed somewhere between serious and critical. When the torrent of blood welling from his chest had been stanched it was quickly realized that there was not one among the volunteers with the skill needed to remove the bullet. It was decided to cleanse the wound as best they could, bind it and hope for the best. In nervous agitation, an effort to kindle some hope in those about him, a young volunteer recalled how he had heard stories of soldiers who’d carried bullets and shrapnel in their bodies for the whole of their lives with only minimal discomfort.
It was as if the telling of this story acted as a template for subsequent events because this was exactly what happened. After lying in a fever for ten days, during which time he was to rise in his bed several times, screaming and flailing his arms in the air, physically fending off death, the fever broke and my father lay on his back with steel-blue eyes gazing into the sky above Mweelera. His first words were, ‘So where am I?’ He carried that bullet in him the remaining seventy years of his life until on the two occasions of his death when my wife found him in the room lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, his eyes calmed like blue metal.
Up to the sudden change which took place in him six months before his death, nothing distinguished my son Francis. When he was born over nine years ago it seemed the right and symmetrical thing to do to name him after his grandfather. Now I ask myself was it here, in his naming, that the damage was done? As I have said, the child was ordinariness itself. Small, with his mother’s blond hair, he had the energy and cheer of any child his age. He was admired by visitors as a dote and spoke easily with them, never cheekily and even if so only to the extent which could be passed off as childish spiritedness. He was bright but not exceptional and his interests were similar to those of any child his own age and to the same degree: his bike, football, sweets and mischief. Up to those last six months he was a child like any other and we loved him as only a single child can be loved. I say that so no one can accuse us of having given our child reason to reject us. As you shall see – and remember I am putting down the facts – his change never consisted in a rejection of us. Never once did he accuse or express dissatisfaction. In fact, in a more world-weary way, he seemed as happy with us as he had ever been.
Lastly, before I speak of the change, I must talk of his relationship with his grandfather. It was quite simple. To Francis, Grandfather was a hero of some distant and, in his young mind, awesome conflict. He saw him as a solitary giant, a war hero who partook in great adventures, a treasure trove of great stories. Night after night he would sit at his feet and worry him with incessant questions till bedtime. In this he was the envy of his school friends. It also pleased my father. ‘He’s a good listener,’ he would say fondly. I ask myself again, was it here in the avidness with which he was listened to that my father found renewal? I do not know but as we shall see he did find a renewal of sorts.
About the change. Despite its surreal banality the incident itself is easily remembered. Six months ago we sat here in this kitchen eating. At this point I am tempted to speak of the weather, the time of day, the type of meal it was and so on in order to mark the incredible incident against a background of particular detail. But would that explain anything? I do not think so. It will suffice to say that the three of us were in the kitchen eating and Francis was carrying his mug from the table to the sink where my wife was preparing to wash up. As he approached the sink the cup slipped from his grasp – it will be the last time in this account that I will call him child with any certainty – fell to the floor and spun to a stop before the sink. My wife turned, on the verge of telling him to pick it up, but was struck silent by the intensity of the gaze with which Francis was looking at the mug. She would describe it later as a mixture of amazement and agony, the composite reaction of an old man who has seen many such troubled things in the past and the incomprehension of one to whom it was all totally new. My wife opened her mouth to speak but Francis took her forearm as one would a passing child and, in an unforgettably leaden voice, as if the memories and fatigue of a lifetime had come to rest upon him in that moment, he told her to ‘Bend down and pick that up like a good girl.’
In that moment and with those astonishing words he changed the whole complex of relationships in our house.
My wife, seconds before having been a mother on the verge of rebuking her child, was changed in an instant into a woman worried about the health of this old man. It is a measure of how complete and successful this reversal was for her because she picked up the mug in silent awe and handed it to him. After depositing it in the sink he returned to the table, and lowered himself gently into his chair, one hand on the table, groaning heavily, his bones apparently suffused with stiffness. A look of horror and astonishment passed between my wife and me. Despite ourselves we sensed some momentous change in our fortunes, some new beginning. Francis had resumed eating with a slow thoughtful relish far beyond his years. I decided to venture a question into the incredible silence which now reigned in the kitchen.
‘Are you feeling all right, Francis? You’re not sick or anything?’
‘A man of my age is always sick,’ he replied drily.
Again it is indicative of how completely he had changed that I did not dare rebuke what I thought might be left of the child on this now old man – one does not reprimand someone for saying something that is in all probability true. I had not a clue how to handle the situation. In fact it took all my powers of concentration to recognize exactly what was happening. The child Francis in outward appearance was still recognizable before me but his deeper identity had been supplanted entirely by the character of an old, jaded man. For a dread instant I toyed with the notion that there were actually two people before me. My wife stood at the sink, her mouth slung open and her eyes staring wide. Francis, or more correctly whoever it was that was now within Francis, sat spooning up the last of his meal, apparently heedless to the great change which he had brought about in his house. I realized instantly that for him there had been no change – one moment had been perfectly continuous with the previous one, there had been no slip sideways into someone else. It would therefore be ridiculous to start asking him what had happened. In any case he put an end to my thinking at that point by speaking grimly.
‘You’re right, I am tired. I’ll lie down for an hour. Wake me up when it’s time for the news.’ He walked stiffly from the room.
My wife broke immediately from her trance and began to sob hysterically. I went to her and held her in my arms.
‘What’s happened?’ she cried. ‘What has happened?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But he’s changed,’ she protested. ‘One minute he’s my son and the next I’m his daughter. What caused it? What do we do?’ Her voice was climbing higher, nearing a thin note of hysteria. Something frantic was moving within her like a current. I tightened my hold on her.
‘Let’s wait and see,’ I said. ‘Maybe when he wakes it will be all over.’ These words were solely for her benefit. I did not believe for an instant that something which had come upon us with such resoluteness and completion would not end in some disaster.
He woke from his nap a few hours later and entered the kitchen, his eyes glued over with sleep. He asked for tea and when it was brought to him he supped fervently at the table. Previous to this Francis never drank anything but milk.
‘Is the news over?’ he asked presently.
‘Yes, it’s over,’ I replied. ‘There wasn’t much on it.’
‘What did it say on the weather?’ He was seated by the window, looking out at the sheets of rain that hopped in the tarmacked yard.
‘It said there would be no change. It would be like this till the end of the week.’
‘I suppose there’s no use going for a walk then. I was going to go to town for fags.’
This was incredible. Could he really be so oblivious to the change that had taken place or to the silent turmoil which roiled about him? I could see my wife at the sink and the almost superhuman effort it was taking her to keep from breaking down was visibly marked on her face. Francis sat at the table, fair-haired and smooth-skinned, but with all the mannerisms and fatigue of an old man. He seemed to be the still centre of a small cyclone which was rampaging silently through the room. Now I was sure that he saw nothing different in himself. To him there had been no change: he was as he had always been. But to me he was my son turned in an instant into an old man. And there was the problem. I was already willing to admit that he was now an old man but who exactly was this old man? I decided to wheedle his identity from him gently, to proceed with caution. I feared that waking him suddenly to the change would plunge him also into a crisis. At that moment two crises in the one room was more than enough.
‘When did you take up smoking?’ I spoke very gently.
‘What do you mean, when did I take up smoking?’ he repeated testily. ‘You know very well that I’ve smoked since I was twelve, smoked all my life except for twice at Lent when I couldn’t go the distance and was back on them inside two weeks. Thirty Woodbine a day and nothing less.’ Looking out the window he changed tack slightly. ‘I can’t go anywhere in this rain.’
As I listened to these words a dim germ of horror and recognition began to flower within me. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Have one of mine.’ I proffered a red box with one fag extended towards him.
‘John,’ my wife hissed, ‘you can’t go giving the child cigarettes.’
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’
This was brave talk indeed for in truth I hardly dared recognize what I was seeing come ever clearer into focus before me. Francis took the fag with gentle ease and raised it to his mouth. With one movement he bit off the filter and spat it into the fire. He took a light from me and angled his face backwards for the first drag, tipping the lighted end into the air. With his eyes closed he drew fearlessly on it as if he’d been doing it all his life.
‘That’ll do,’ he said, picking a scrap of tobacco from the tip of his tongue. ‘A bit weak but it’ll do.’ He sat and smoked the rest of the cigarette, sunk in such silent contentment that my wife rushed from the room choking back sobs.
‘So the weather’s going to stay like this. It’s just as well then we decided against planting spuds. They’d be washed out of the ground with this rain.’
He talked on like this into the evening, taking an avid interest in the news and most particularly a current affairs programme which dealt with the BSE scare which had affected so many cattle in the west.
‘The price of cattle will go to hell,’ he declared solemnly, twitching his nose. ‘We won’t get a pound a kilo by year’s end if this keeps up.’ Despite his youthful looks he spoke with the certainty of one who was laying down the law and anticipated no dissent. ‘It will be the end of the small farmer,’ he pronounced. ‘Only the big ones will be able to afford quarantine and the small ones like ourselves will have to sell off at below cost price. Isn’t it always the same?’
I could take no more, I staggered from the room in a daze.
The following morning we had our next big shock. He appeared in the doorway of the kitchen done out in a perfectly fitting black suit and a black hat that scooped down over his child’s face. Across his waistcoat was slung a watch chain. He stood in the doorway, framed like a portrait, consulting his watch with eyes that were surely failing.
‘Not that a man of my age has much business knowing the time,’ he concluded grimly before turning to me. ‘Has the post come yet?’
‘There’s no post on a Saturday,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ he conceded, ‘I completely forgot, the memory is going on top of everything else.’
As on the previous day he lowered himself gently into the chair beside the table. I was glad my wife, who had not yet risen, was not there to see him. Despite the almost comic contrast between the clothes and his face he seemed even older in essence than the day before.
After breakfast our neighbour came in on an errand. I was glad to see her because with her by the hand was her daughter Anne, one of Francis’ classmates. My immediate hope was that he would recognize some kinship in her that would snap him out of this terrible persona. But his first words crushed any such hope. He put his hand out to ruffle her curls.
‘You’re getting bigger every day, Anne. What class are you in now?’ An immense weakness came over me as I heard him speak.
‘I’m in second class,’ she simpered, pleased to be the centre of this old man’s attention. Her mother picked her up into her arms.
‘You’re looking well yourself, Francis, getting younger every day. This damp weather must suit you.’
It was now his turn to simper. ‘It’s a good job it agrees with someone,’ he said. ‘This country will be washed out from under our feet if this rain keeps up.’
‘When it hasn’t been washed away in all these years it’s not likely to happen now. Say goodbye to Francis, Anne.’ She turned to me. ‘We’ll be on our way, John, it will soon be time for the dinner.’ And they left.
And so I knew the incredible truth. The change in Francis had taken place only before our own eyes: for the rest of the world nothing at all had happened. Worse than that, my neighbour had spoken to him as someone she had known all her life. By now my own recognition of him was beginning to take fuller shape and that night I decided to test it to the full. As the nine o’clock news ended I suggested we go into town for a drink. My wife’s mouth fell open in disbelief but I frowned aside her silent protest. We travelled in my car and he sat beside me in his black suit, his young features heedlessly radiant under his black hat. If at this point I could have overcome my horror at the dawning recognition which was now nearing a certainty I would have been able to see the Chaplinesque comedy in our situation; I was definitely able to see the horror.
I entered the pub behind him and immediately my recognition was confirmed. The three or four men leaning over pints at the counter turned around and saluted Francis as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
‘Evening, Francis. It’s a wet one.’
‘It’s always a wet one in these parts,’ he replied drily.
‘What will it be, Francis?’ asked the barman, throwing aside the damp cloth.
‘The usual, two pints of Guinness,’ he replied with a certainty that was fast becoming the mark of his character. He was even sure of what I drank.
And the night went on like that. On the one side, between him and his friends, a complete and unsurprised recognition of each other; within myself, a descent quickened by alcohol into a deepening pit of despair. Talking back and forth among his friends that night Francis left me to flounder in this pit. Only once during the night did he turn to me.
‘Cheer up, son,’ he said. ‘It could be worse.’
I had not a clue what he meant.
That night when he had gone to bed I stayed up alone sorting through all the documents which had made their way into our home. By the early hours I had two separate piles on the table. On the left, among others, there was a pension book, a will, a death certificate and a coroner’s report. All these testified to the existence and death of my father. On the right, in a much smaller pile, there was a birth certificate, a christening cert and a small collection of school reports. All of these spoke the existence of someone who at one time had been my son. Yet now I could neither be sure of my father’s death nor of my son’s existence. Now the only certain thing was that in some ghastly way they were both present in the one person at the same time, my father’s character in the body of my son whom the rest of the world seemed not to remember. I felt the room beginning to reel about me, becoming a vortex, pulling me down. What was I going to do? In my confusion and misery I had a wild notion of taking my shovel and driving into the night towards the graveyard and digging up that documented and three-year-old corpse. I could see myself already in the graveyard, the rain suitably pissing down as I dug furiously, a decent and honest man driven to hideous deeds by some presence in his life which he is neither responsible for nor capable of making any sense of, a character in a cautionary tale, a black and white movie illustrating how the dark shapes of the unspeakable rise up to shatter our lives. I dismissed the idea with a groan. This was no black and white movie and after all, what would it prove to dig up a skeleton which I would never be able to identify?
My wife, red-eyed and sleep-dishevelled, entered the room. She sat down beside me at the table and I noticed with alarm that she too seemed to have aged. But would this disaster not age anyone? I put my arm around her, as much to comfort myself with her solidity as to steady her now that I had decided to tell her what I knew. I turned her face towards me.
‘He’s come back,’ I started. ‘I don’t know how or why but the Francis we have now is my father.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know. I’ve known since the moment he started talking about smoking.’ She began to sob. ‘Where is our child, John, where did he go?’ I held her towards me and made some useless comforting noises. Presently she pulled away from me. There was a sickly gleam in her eyes.
‘John, what if we’re mad? What if the whole world is right and we’re wrong? What if our son never was?’
‘That can’t be,’ I retorted quickly. ‘How are all these documents explained, birth certs, christening certs, school reports? Where did they all come from?’ I drew to a halt suddenly, aghast at what I was saying. My hands clutched my head. ‘What the hell am I talking about? Forget these documents, forget these school reports. Remember the child, remember the things he did. Christ, we still even have his things.’
This was true. His school bag stood in the hall by the hotpress piled high with his clothes; at the end of the hall was a room decorated with posters of football teams and motor bikes, a small boy’s room. Earlier that day I had noticed his bike in the garage. More correctly, I had woken from a reverie, aware that I had been standing and staring at his bike for a long time. But it was a spell in which I found no clue where my son was nor even where to start looking.
These were the first days of the six month horror which dominated our lives like some waking nightmare. And as the nightmare continued it fleshed itself out, became more complete as the days went on. That following Monday, as he had expected, a new pension book arrived for him in the post. His friends began to call on him as if he had never been gone and one day a student came to interview him as part of the research he was doing on the history of the Rising. He spoke most often of the past, his military adventures, departed comrades and even, in glancing references, of his marriage. More and more of his speech became prefaced with remarks like, ‘I remember when’, or ‘In my day’, or ‘God be with the days when’. It was a unique horror to see this young face reaching down into an impossible reservoir of experience for these memories and then lay them there before us blithely like dead things. But the worst of it was that, while in our eyes he retained his child-like looks, his manner became so jaded and crotchety that a time quickly came when it became difficult for us to summon up the image of our son Francis. One day, walking into the garage, I found my wife running her hands absentmindedly over his bicycle. She had been using it as a prop to try and prompt her imagination. I knew it because more than once I had come to my senses in his bedroom, staring in the same way at his pile of toys in the corner, trying desperately to visualize our child playing with them. Once Francis, or whoever he was, happened in on me as I sat there.
‘You don’t want to spend too long staring like that. Life passes you by quickly,’ he said. That day in the garage my wife looked at me with her eyes brimming. ‘I’m losing touch with him, John. I can’t see our child any more.’
The child Francis was receding from our imagination like a story told to an infant, a small boat drifting away on an infinite sea of loss.
What was our attitude towards Francis during those six months? Did our initial horror and confusion turn to outright hatred and bitterness? Did we treat him as we would some monster in our midst? Hand on my heart I can say that we did not. There was a continual hope in our heart that our son Francis would one day reassert himself from out of this composite being, one day emerge completely from beneath the character of my father, shiny and new like a small, eclipsed moon. Built upon this hope was a genuine attitude of concern that this Francis be nurtured. As long as he lived there was a real chance that our son would return.
In the month before he died a real bitterness entered into Francis. There was a political reason for this bitterness and although I have said I will confine myself to the facts I would like to speculate that the reason for his recurrence was a simple, unbelievable vanity.
It was the run-up to Easter and this was the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Rising. As we remember, the celebrations this time were contentious. Over twenty years of bloodshed in both nationalist and unionist communities in the north had put paid to any idea of repeating the innocent pageantry and procession which had marked the fiftieth anniversary. In those years the IRA had stepped forward into a political void claiming to be the true heirs to the legacy of 1916. And in those twenty years no one had been able to completely discredit their claim. But now that the commemorations were coming around again a new tactic was devised by those who wanted to deny the historical legitimacy of the IRA. The tactic amounted to a tacit denial that 1916 had ever taken place at all. Prudence, caution and sensitivity was counselled by our revisionists as a pretext for not offending the northern, unionist tradition. Deep down, however, more than a few people suspected that some massive denial was taking place. It was easy to believe so: anguish and embarrassment hung everywhere like a curse. Francis was incensed.
‘Have we lost our nerve altogether?’ he raged. ‘Are we that afraid of ourselves that we’re going to allow the birth of our nation be held ransom by a crowd of thugs?’
And as the time of the commemoration drew near it became obvious that the celebrations would be only a token affair. Francis’ disbelief turned to rage.
‘What the hell are we embarrassed for? Can you imagine this sort of thing happening in any other country of the world? Christ, the French or the Americans would never stand for it, and damn right too.’
But beneath the bluster and anger a deep undercurrent of betrayal was affecting him deeply. And it was this undercurrent which eventually sucked away his health and resolve. On Easter Monday we watched the televized ceremonies from outside Dublin GPO. Despite the presence of the Taoiseach, the president, a few foreign ambassadors and a handful of wheelchaired veterans, the ceremony itself lasted little more than half an hour. It was a craven, threadbare affair. When it ended I knew something vital had been drained from Francis. He seemed paler and sunk even further into his chair if that was possible. His voice came from a long way off.
‘Is that it? Is that all there is to show after seventy-five years – embarrassment and a government policy of amnesia?’ His disappointment filled the room like smoke.
How ludicrous is it to say that it was for these celebrations that Francis had returned? How ludicrous is it to say that the chance to relive his most glamorous moment had proved too big a temptation for his restless soul? Did he have it in mind to step forward and take one last bow even if only in the privacy of his own imagination? Whatever the truth, the fact is that the next day Francis was late in to breakfast. After looking at me, my wife went to his room where she found him dead, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling in the same attitude of repose he had worn on the morning of his first death three years previously. She returned to the kitchen, confirming in a quiet voice what I already knew.
Now that the great event was upon us we were at a loss as to how we should react. On the one hand a horror had been lifted from us and we were free in all respects to continue with the rest of our lives. We could refer to the whole thing from now on as a mutual nightmare. On the other hand, a death is a death and a family death calls for some form of grieving, particularly so now that the return of our son was obviously impossible. It was this confusion then which dictated that we put grieving on the long finger until some indefinite point in the future when we had it clear in our mind what it was exactly that had gone from us.
Our reaction then was one of stunned efficiency. We telephoned the hospital and although it was irregular they said they would come and take the corpse away for an autopsy. Two hours later as the corpse was being lifted into the ambulance my wife’s fortitude collapsed. The driver, no doubt meaning well, turned and sympathized with us, told us that death was always a trial but wasn’t it great that someone so old went so peacefully? It was at this point that my wife broke down. She started to pummel the man’s chest and shriek:
‘He was my son, my son, do you hear?’
The driver took an embarrassed step backwards as I tried to restrain her. ‘Death is always a trial,’ he finished lamely.
Later that evening I went to the hospital to finalize details on the removal of the corpse. I received the autopsy report from a middle-aged man dressed in what looked like butcher’s overalls. He got to the point briskly.
‘A thrombosis. Your father was killed when his blood flow was hindered by a foreign object coming to rest on his cardiovascular system.’
He held out a small, shapeless mass and placed it in my hand. It was surprisingly heavy and its true shape was barely discernible.
‘A bullet,’ the coroner confirmed simply. ‘A very ancient one too, he must have carried it in him for the most part of his life because nowhere on his body can I find any scar tissue.’ The note of amazement was obvious in his voice. ‘In fact, but for the bullet, there is no reason to believe that he would not have gone on living another fifty years. He was in amazingly good shape.’
So this was how he’d died. The coroner’s report on Francis’ first death stated that he had died from a deterioration of his whole organism; old age in other words. There had never been any mention of a bullet anywhere. Walking from the hospital I was aware that I was still clutching it in my hand. I threw it in the nearest bin, I wanted nothing more to do with it.
So this is how it ends, the physical substance of the horror passing on but leaving in its wake the pure essence of the problem itself. There is absolutely no doubt but that Francis existed. But who was he? Was he my father or my son? How could he be both at the same time? Is it possible that in some way I could have had a hand in the birth of my own father? If he was my son how could he have so resembled my father? All these questions and there is no doubt but that they are the real residue of the last six months. My mind is a whirl.
But now, even though it is just over two days since he has died I can sense an idea taking shape in my wife. On the night of his death as I held her in our bed she spoke quietly.
‘John, maybe we could start again. Maybe we could try for another child.’
I had an immediate sensation of falling, the feeling of some unyielding surface rushing up to meet me at a terrific speed. I shut my eyes and clenched my teeth till my temples ached. I eventually managed to speak.
‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’
But I don’t know. I’ve got to get this sorted out before I can have another child. I keep wondering to myself, how can a man bring a child into the world when he hasn’t a clue who he is himself?