Everything quiet on the William Street front. Somebody was singing round a corner somewhere as we negotiated the scattered bricks and stones. Yellow Submarine. He could sing whoever he was. Better than the Beatle that sang it anyway, the drummer was it? Ringo Starr. Others joined in each time he came back to the chorus but they weren’t so good.

“You wouldn’t think there was a revolution going on,” said Aisling. Her shoulder kept touching mine as I walked between the two of them.

“I heard it was like that in Paris,” Frances said. She moved heavy in the black Crombie that covered her shapelessness. There’s money there. Unless of course she got it from some penitent capitalist via the Saint Vincent de Paul. “People would be sitting eating and drinking at tables outside restaurants and round the corner it was all happening.” She really had an unfortunate voice, falsetto nearly, expressionless, awful. The sound of her would have annoyed me even if I hadn’t thought she’d been lying with Aisling. “Margarita was telling me that time she came back. Margarita was there for the whole thing you know.”

I felt a tingle every time her shoulder touched mine. Halos round the lights of the lampposts, frost in the air everywhere, excitement pulling at me.

Funny thing about the sky that night, you could still see stars even with all the streetlights. I was looking up as the dyke was talking, trying to fix my mind on something else, and there was this particular star above the trees in the cathedral grounds that kept winking away. Stellar something they call that. It was on The Sky at Night but I can never take in half of what Patrick Moore is saying because his face distracts me. He’s talking about gases in the atmosphere and stuff and I’m trying to understand but I’m looking at him staring at me with one mad eye and the hair everywhere. Stellar constellation, that was it. To do with turbulence and I don’t know what else. The nearness of what could happen quickened my heart. And above the trees the spire pointed skywards, reminding, sentinelled over the city.

“Watch yourself,” said Aisling and gripped my arm. Christ that was a near one. Bloody bricks.

“You could break your ankle here if you’re not careful,” she said and held my arm the rest of the way up to her flat. Above the trees the steeple pierced the blackness pointing skywards. My heart quickened, soaring.

“She was arrested,” explained Frances, “and when the judge asked her name she said Rudi Dutschke, you know the German student leader that was shot, and he says That, miss, is a man’s name. What is your real name please? And she says Janek Litynski and the judge thought she said Janet and so did the clerk of the court and the clerk wrote it down.”

“Jan Litynski that led the Polish revolution there in January?” Aisling was laughing. “They never heard of him?”

“Never heard of him,” said Frances.

Did you ever feel you couldn’t relate to what people were talking about? You could understand what they were saying but you couldn’t relate to it? Well the way they started going on then Aisling and your woman obviously felt they’d some kind of kinship with these ones in Berlin and Paris and Warsaw is it, whatever the capital of Poland is. Not that I cared mind you, I was too busy trying to keep my heart in order. But I remember now it was Pearse went on to me one time about how the situations in these places weren’t like each other at all and weren’t like here either. Difference of night and day, he said, these doctrinairians are making an artificial connection. Why would they do that? I asked him. Because they’re wankers, he said.

On the other hand, if you listened to Eamonn McCann you’d start to wonder, although the same guy could probably convince a lecturehall of academics that the nineteen forty phone directory for Dublin was the first draft of James Joyce’s unfinished masterpiece. I heard him one night in the Gweedore Bar coming out with some weird stuff, weird but plausible that is, everything McCann says sounds plausible, about six degrees of separation and this middle eastern philosopher boy called Oz Moses. At least that’s what I thought he was saying and it was only when I said to Pearse What do you reckon about Oz Moses? and he said Osmosis? Yeah, interesting concept, that I caught on it wasn’t a man at all.

Pearse knows a lot, probably he knows too much and that’s what’s wrong with him, too much knowledge being a dangerous thing as I heard a Redemptorist priest saying one time he came to give a retreat in the cathedral. Osmosis is supposed to be, he said, Pearse that is, about picking up information without realising you’re doing it but there’s a whole lot of hooey talked about it too of course, like you and the world combining and crap like that.

“Would you like to come in awhile?”

We’d got to outside her flat and we were standing there looking at each other and Frances must have felt a bit out of it. We were looking at each other and I couldn’t read her face because it was in shadow but I’d say she could read mine with the light of the lamppost behind her shining right on me. I don’t know what my expression was but whatever it was I would have gone up those stairs on my knees if she’d asked me to.

“May as well,” I said.