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lecture would work quite well, paid out evenly, steadily, he discoursing on all those other histories, the ones that never made it into the history books, the silenced, stifled voices whose stories are lost for ever; and they listening – yes, sometimes actually listening, taking it all in until the bell clanged above their heads.
    Yes, sometimes it worked out nicely.
    Of course, he thought now, such discourses should always have worked out nicely. How, in theory, could they fail to work out nicely, such an idea in such a city, in such a country as this, where certain histories see the light of day and some do not? Where history is a sort of football, kicked around from morning to night? This kind of history should be bread and butter to the whole lot of us. It should be devoured with gusto. So Patrick thought.
    But there it is: he knew that sometimes students – not only students – were lumpen, cloddish. One might as well save one’s breath: so he had said, in conversations innumerable in the staff room over the scant few years of his employment. But now, here was his story: and what an irony it would be if he now set out to press the delete button. Honour the living and the dead, he thought: and the dead most of all.
    He knew where it all came from: this interest in the living and the dead. It came from his father – who would turn in his grave if he knew how selectively Patrick had applied it to his own life. It came from his father. Patrick could even pin it down to a time and a place. He could remember the season, the weather, the view, the clothes, the car the family had at the time.
    On the beach at Kinnagoe, on a sea- and salt-smelling Donegal day in 1960 or thereabouts, Patrick aged six and Margaret eight, and the sand warm under his bare feet and the ocean green and blue and ice-cold, and a picnic waiting.
    As precise as that.
    Have your swim first, said his father, and then we’ll have our picnic.
    Patrick ran into the water: the ice of the Donegal sea, the cold of it; no wonder he remembered that day so well. He swam and then he was towelled dry, his father calming down after his anger, his shock, enveloping his son in their great big red towel. Margaret was second with the towel: it was damp by then – but no complaints from her; she was quiet, abashed, aware that something had happened, that a moment had been witnessed. That something significant had just taken place. Young as they were, they both felt it.
    Their mother? – Sarah was sitting on the sand, with her face turned up to the sun; and Cassie was sitting too, fiddling with a sandal, maybe, or simply looking at the waves.
    He was first into the water. He beat Margaret to it. She was speechless with rage. Older, two years older, but second, this time. Speechless. Goaded beyond bearing. She might have drowned her little brother that day. Instead, she realised how much she loved him. He saw it all now, with the benefit of hindsight.
    *
    Patrick waded a little deeper. The sand on this beach shelved steeply, a little too steeply. This was why they seldom came here. His mother and Cassie preferred the beaches on Lough Swilly, with their gentler slopes, their warmer waters, and all twenty minutes from their front door in Derry. Cassie got anxious: she’d been anxious even sitting there in the back of the car, being brought out to this unaccustomed beach; she’d wriggled and shifted in the back seat, her sharp hip bones digging into him.
    He waded a little deeper. He knew why it was Kinnagoe, today. His father took a notion. His mother usually made the choices – about beaches, about everything, taking Cassie into account – but today their father chose. A rush of blood to the head – though, what was that? He didn’t know, but that’s what his mammy had said. ‘You’ve had a rush of blood to the head,’ she said, before glancing into the back, checking on him, on Margaret, on Cassie. ‘We could’ve been in Buncrana in fifteen minutes. Why