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presents at the winter solstice, not Christmas. Crappy presents, too.
    “What do you know about Noah?” Dad asked, his eyes narrowing with skepticism.
    “Well, uh, he got all the animals, right, in twos and put them in an ark, they ended up in Turkey,” I said.
    “That’s about it, rain for forty days, forty nights, the floods covered the highest mountains, a dove brought back an olive branch showing when the rains had subsided. They all lived happily ever after.”
    “How did the olive tree survive under all the pressure of water?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Covers highest mountain, Everest. That’s almost thirty thousand feet of water pressure, that’s going to crush an olive tree to bits.”
    “Yes, I see,” Dad said.
    “All the forests would be wiped out. Osmosis would kill the sea creatures. Also, too many animals to fit.”
    “Alex, I get your point,” Dad said wearily.
    “It’s unlikely is what I’m saying.”
    “But I agree,” Dad said, concern in that wrinkled brow and those eyes like dried-up wells.
    “Look, Alex, what’s the matter? Are you depressed? Not upset about the police still?”
    I was suddenly pissed off.
    “Dad, I’ll tell you what is depressing. It’s depressing hearing the same questions day in and day out. I mean, do you want me to move out? I’m going to have to. If you keep this up it’s going to drive me mental. I mean, how about a moratorium on the words ‘police force,’ or ‘are you ok,’ or ‘maybe you should go back to university,’ you know, one week without any nagging, how does that bloody sound?”
    “Sorry, Alex, I’m tired…. Look, do you want some tea?”
    “No. Oh, wait, I’d love some.”
    He boiled the kettle and made the tea and gave me a mug. He took off his glasses, smiled.
    “One time Noah got so drunk, he was rolling about naked in his tent and one of his kids came in, saw him naked, and got really upset. The Book of Genesis. There’s a whole racial dimension too, ugly stuff,” he said.
    “Sounds like an interesting book. Probably I’ll read the Bible, rebel against your atheistic ways and become a rabbi or a minister or something, it’s always the case,” I said.
    “I’d probably deserve it,” he said with a little laugh.
    I was feeling conciliatory and guilty. Da looked old and tired.
    “Sorry for yelling, it’s just, well, it’s just my life’s very complicated at the moment.”
    “Your life’s complicated? You’re unemployed, you’ve nothing to do all day.”
    We sat in silence. America. Of course you’d die of a mugging in America. You grow up in Northern Ireland, schools and trains being bombed. You go to America and you get mugged, killed. I watched the moon through the window. A trapdoor of green light in the cold, unfathomable night. Clouds came and obscured the sky. I shivered, stood.
    “I’m going for a walk,” I said. I could wait no more.
    * * *
    There is a place, a quiet place where the drunks go, or the boys out sniffing glue, or girls with their boys, or people with kids or dogs. Or people alone. In the dark, behind the railway lines, at Downshire Halt where the tracks have come, ten miles out of Belfast, to be near their reflection in the water. Night is the time. When the trains have stopped. And it’s quiet and you’re in the place, on the compacted sand and grass, and before you is the still lough and everywhere is lights.
    Behind you, Carrickfergus. And in front. Left to right. Bangor, Cultra, Belfast in a curve of silence and color giving up their presence to the brooding of the black clouds and the yawning sky and the stars.
    And you sit there in the cold and you boil the heroin and take a nip. And it’s moving. The whole of the Earth. Everything rotating about that one spot. The city. The houses. The ambulances and cars. The water itself. And no one knows.
    But you.
    The cold of the ground working its way through your jeans and your boxers and the sandy grass under your fingertips. Birds