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where her mother worked. Mrs Kelly might be safe, but she might not,
and had she any idea where her father might be? It was the wrong way round, she was only a child for God’s sake; it was one of the many things she would never forgive him for. For years she
would go over it in her mind, much to her annoyance, because she knew it was pointless, that she should’ve been getting on with her life instead of looking back and trying to correct the
uncorrectable. If Old Con had died that day instead, Lily would’ve heard first and broken the news to her daughter, her mother would’ve been there to comfort her, had she had a decent
father at any rate. Instead, there she was, at the age of fifteen, being dealt the worst blow of her life and in the same breath being asked to help locate her father. Did she know where he might
be? Yes, she knew where he was; hadn’t she done the rounds of all his haunts so many times that she could do it blindfold? Maybe not the exact pub, but she knew he was in a pub somewhere, and
she’d been right. Not that he was any good to her when he was found, he was out of his mind as usual, and the only thing he’d taken from Lily’s death was that once again Fate had
singled him out for tragedy. It gave him something else to sob about in the years afterwards. Oh, but he’d had a hard life, taken many knocks, and just why it should happen to him he had no
idea! That, she thought, was the single aspect of his character that she hated most, his morbid, self-indulgent belief that every event in the universe was aimed at him personally, and the
enthusiasm with which he embraced every opportunity to play the martyr. The worst disasters were intended to affect Con Kelly; add a liberal application of booze, as he always did, and the picture
was complete in all its nauseating horror. Sometimes, when he wasn’t to be found in any of his habitual locations, he would finally be tracked down to St Kentigern’s, sitting with his
back against the white marble headstone shaped like a heart – what else? – erected for his sisters and his mother, a bottle of Old Tawny cheap wine, usually empty, in his hands, and
tears rolling down his cheeks. He would be singing ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’, the name of one of his sisters and his mother, the name Kathy had been given along with
Aggie’s, her other grandmother. Ironic when you thought about it, seeing as it was always Kathleen taking
him
home, carrying him home.
    The maudlin melancholy of it repulsed her, so that from a very young age she became resistant to showing any emotion lest she remind herself of Con. She had mistrusted feelings all her life
because she couldn’t tell the real from the phoney; look where feelings had got her mother after all. The young Lily’s feelings for Con had been genuine at the time, she had no reason
to doubt that, but they were wrong; true but false, so how could you tell the difference? It was in the aftermath of Lily’s life that her need to be in control took a firmer grip, it was then
that she truly learned to compartmentalise her life. You kept the various strands totally separate, tied them off as quickly and tightly as you could without dwelling too much on any one part, then
you stored them in their allotted parts of your mind and got on with your life. That was it. Safe. If you thought about things too deeply you might let go, and who knew what would happen? Even
Lily’s death had remained inside a mental file, on its own all these years, accepted but never analysed for fear of the emotions analysis might release. She had died, that was all,
don’t go any further, don’t ask questions for fear of what the answers would be and how you might react. It went against her nature not to force every detail from wherever it hid, it
threatened her need for completeness, but her fear of falling to pieces was even greater, and what good would it do to fall to pieces? So in situations where