1983

Our house starts to burn.

I step over dead body of Martin Laws -

Into red rain, white floodlights and police lights blue.

My shoes gone, I walk barefoot into garden.

Head bobbed and wreathed, I drop knife and raise shotgun.

Chapter 61

There were no sirens, only silence -

No lights, only darkness.

We parked under Millgarth. I did not go upstairs -

Angus would be waiting:

More crimes and more lies, more lies and more crimes.

I walked through the market. I walked through the dawn -

Thursday 9 June 1983.

I cut through the backstreets. I ran up the Headrow.

I turned on to Cookridge Street.

I opened the door into the Church of Saint Anne.

I staggered down the side aisle.

I fell before the Pietа.

I took off my terrible glasses. I closed my tired eyes.

I prayed:

‘Lord, I do not understand my own actions.

I know that nothing good dwells within me, in my flesh.

I do not do what I want, but I do the very things that I hate.

I can will what is right but I cannot do it.

I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.

When I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.

Wretched and damned man that I am!

Will you rescue me from this body of death?’

I opened my eyes. I looked up at Christ -

The wounded, dead Christ.

I was crying as I stood -

I was crying as I turned to go -

I was crying when I saw him.

He was sat among the Stations. His head shaved -

He was dressed in white, bleeding from his hands and his feet.

There were children sat around him -

Little girls and little boys.

‘Jack?’

He smiled at me.

‘Jack?’

He stared through me.

‘What?’ I cried. ‘What can you see?’

He was smiling. He was staring at the Pietа-

‘How can you still fucking believe?’ I shouted. ‘After all the things you’ve seen?’

‘It’s the things I’ve not seen,’ he said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘During an eclipse there is no sun,’ he smiled. ‘Only darkness.’

‘I don’t -’

‘The sun is still there,’ he said. ‘You just can’t see it.’

‘I -’

‘But in your heart you know the sun will shine again, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Faith,’ he whispered -

‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’

I turned again to the Pietа. I turned back to the wounded Christ -

No other name.

There was a hand squeezing mine -

A ten-year-old girl with blue eyes and long straight fair hair, wearing an orange waterproof kagool, a dark blue turtleneck sweater, pale blue denim trousers with a distinctive eagle motif on the back left pocket and red Wellington boots, holding a plastic Co-op carrier bag in her other hand.

I looked down at my hand in hers -

There were no bruises on the backs of my hands.

‘He was not abandoned,’ smiled Clare. ‘He is loved.’

Chapter 62

Thursday 9 June 1983-

D-Day:

Flat 5, 28 Blenheim Road, St John’s, Wakefield -

Heart lost.

You can’t go to sleep; you can’t go to sleep; you can’t go to sleep -

The branches still tapping against the pane -

Everybody knows;

You are lying on your back in your underpants and wings -

The branches tapping against the pane -

Everybody knows;

You are lying on your back in your underpants and wings, black with his blood, black with all their blood -

The branches banging against the pane -

Everybody knows;

You are lying on your back in your underpants and wings, black with his blood, black with all their blood, that terrible tune and her words in your head -

Everybody knows; everybody knows, everybody knows and -

The branches cracking the pane.

You look at your watch. You see it is time:

2.25 a.m.

You get out of bed. You walk across the floor upon your knees.

You switch on the radio. The TV too -