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cleaning stub, you’re to pick up our suits tomorrow while I’m in Belfast,” Dad said.
    “Suits…. What are you talking about, did somebody die?”
    “Didn’t I tell you already, don’t you know?”
    “Victoria Patawasti,” I said, aghast.
    “Aye. America, it was a mugging that went wrong, a Mexican man or something, I heard.”
    “Oh my God, she was murdered? I went out with her, you know.”
    “I know.”
    “For, for two months. She, she, uh, she was my first real girlfriend.”
    “I know. Son, I’m sorry. Are you ok?”
    I wasn’t ok. Victoria had been more than my first girlfriend. She’d been my first real anything. A year older than me, a year more experienced. At the time I thought that I was in love with her.
    “Jesus Christ, Victoria Patawasti,” I said.
    “I know,” Dad said glumly. Scholarly, bespectacled, he looked a little like Samuel Beckett on a bad day.
    “I saw Vicky’s dad just yesterday,” I said.
    “Well, someone said that they thought the funeral would be at the weekend and I figured we should get our suits cleaned just in case,” Dad said.
    “She was mugged in America? Was she on holiday? No, she was working there, wasn’t she?”
    “I don’t know,” Dad said, shaking his head. “They told me in the newsagent’s. I don’t know any more. Alex, I’m really sorry, I thought I told you.”
    He got up, patted me on the shoulder, sat down, waited for a decent amount of time, stared at his flyers again.
    “Alex, I don’t have my slippers on, will you lock the garage?” he asked after a while.
    I said nothing, took the key, and went outside.
    The stars. The cold air. Victoria Patawasti. Bloody hell. I wanted to walk down to the water, to my place. I had my ketch now. But that would be the thing a junkie would do. I was in control.
    I’d known Victoria since I’d gone to the grammar school. Our sixth form was so small: thirty boys, thirty girls, you couldn’t help but know everyone. Victoria Patawasti. Jesus. She was head girl, of course, captain of the field hockey team, beautiful. We’d gone out for a couple of months. We had gone on maybe seven or eight actual dates. To the leisure center cafeteria, to the cinema in Belfast a few times, and sailing in Belfast Lough. She’d taken me out in her dad’s thirty-two-foot cruiser. She knew what she was doing but I’d never sailed before. God. I remembered it all. I knew why we were really going out there.
    I’d been nervous. Small talk. I asked her about Hindu mythology and on the lee rail in the middle of Belfast Lough she’d told me a story. It was about the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu. In the Hindu pantheon Brahma was the Creator, Vishnu was the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. Vishnu repeatedly comes to Earth to help mankind, the first time as a fish to tell some guy there’s going to be a big flood and he has to get all the animals and people into a boat. I told Victoria that a fish would be the last person to be concerned about too much water, but she said that the guy bought the yarn and thus saved mankind. I bought it too. There’s a similar story in the Torah.
    And then. Then she took me down below. And we took off her clothes. Not the first time for her, but the first for me.
    Victoria.
    I went back inside the house. Dad still there. I didn’t want to think about her but I wanted to talk. Clear my mind. Anything would do.
    “Dad, what’s the deal with Noah and the flood?” I asked him.
    Dad, of course, had studied it in Hebrew but he and Mum were old hippies and had kept my brother, my sister, and myself from such superstition. Mum and Dad were both from Belfast’s tiny Jewish community, but we’d been raised with no organized religion. They’d felt, with abundant evidence, that religion was the cause of most of the problems in Ireland, Western Europe, Earth. So we were taught Darwin and Copernicus from an early age. No bris, no bar mitzvah, no Shabbat, Passover, or Chanukah. Nothing. We got