"What you're going to do with it?"

"Yes."

"Whether you want to keep it or not?"

"Yes."

"What about the father?"

"Saul," She smiles, the entropy of the heart. "Saul. You'd like him. He's a solicitor, very desirable. He doesn't know. I'm not seeing him anymore."

"Would you think of marrying him?"

"Saul?" She laughs, a deep, cleansing, painful laugh. "Oh, he'd love that. He would. He's a born husband and father. He'd be a much better father than I would a mother. No, I'm not going to marry him. I'm not going to tell him. He would have me in a mental institution in five years, or up for manslaughter, pleading diminished responsibility. The girls at work, would you believe, passed the hat for me, in case I wanted to get rid of it and couldn't afford to."

"And will you?"

"I think so. I'm about seventy, eighty percent certain. I'll give it until I'm ninety, ninety-five, before I make a commitment."

"Oh, Enye..."

"Shit, Mum, everything is a mess. Everything is just falling apart and running through my fingers and I can't stop it." She crosses to the window, looks out through the blinds at the neo-Georgian house where the garden she had played in as a child once grew. She runs a thumb along her mother's record collection, selects a Mozart symphony, sets it spinning on the turntable.

"Ewan says you're sick. The way he puts it, you were at death's door."

"Ewan exaggerates. Ewan will say anything to get his own way. I'm all right."

"You look different."

"Older."

"How long is it?"

"Ten years."

"I couldn't wait to get out of the house as soon as I got that university scholarship."

"You look well."

"That's pregnancy. Every woman's supposed to look radiant. Tell me that when I'm a walrus."

"You'll look good then. Oh, Enye."

A pause, a space for Mozart to have his say.

"Mum, do you think it would be all right for me to stay here a day or so?"

She is given her old room back. All the posters, the books, the tapes and toys and things are in place. She cannot sleep. Who can sleep in the shrine to his memory?

They go to the big mall down by the ferry port. They pick things out for each other they know they will detest. They make shop-assistants' lives hell. They shop, they coffee and Danish, but it is only when they are back home again and Enye's mother says that tonight she really ought to put up the tree does Enye realize that Christmas has stolen up on her unawares. Her mother asks Ewan if he wants to help; he scowls across the dinner table at the two women. He has used every available excuse to take himself out of the house since Enye has come back. He, the one who so much wanted this reunification.

"I worried about him when he was small," her mother says. "His imaginary friends, always happiest with his own company, not fitting in at school."

"You never worried about me and I was the one who invented entire imaginary countries populated by rubber monsters."

"The doctors never said that you displayed symptoms of incipient schizophrenia."

"What?" Enye says, but her mother will not speak again on the subject. Enye senses that she may have already spoken too much.

They plant the tree in its bucket of sand and earth and set it in its immutable position by the living room door. The tiny, individual Christ lights are taken from their box, tested, repaired where necessary, and spiralled around the branches. Enye's mother goes up on the kitchen step stool to drape the fat, furry tinsel garlands.

"Why did you lie to us about our father?"

She does not falter on her step stool as she drapes the fat, furry garlands over and under and over. She has had ten years to prepare for this question.

"Because I didn't want you to be hurt."

"But I was hurt."

"All I had was a choice of evils."

"It wasn't as if it was one lie, it was lie after lie, years of lies, a lifetime of lies. I still don't know if you've ever told me one true thing about my father."

"You think you are God that no one may lie to you? You never lied to me?"

Without the least flavour of malice, or rancour.

"It hurt me that you thought I would never be mature enough to handle it."

"I knew you would come back when you were mature enough."

"And what is the truth?"

"I have lied to you, I admit that; but Enye, just let me hold this one thing, keep it mine and not burden another with it. Just let me take it down with me into the earth and let it be dissolved away and forgotten."

"Why? For God's sake? Can it be so terrible, can it be any worse than what I have imagined all these years?"

"It can."

She dreams of her father that night, for the first time in many, many years. For the first time in many, many years, she can remember his face. He is walking toward her from a very great distance across a great flat plane. His hands are held out, but they, like this face, like everything about him, are indecipherable. Concealed intent. Hidden spirit. As soon as he draws close enough for her to be able to reach and touch, he dissolves and reappears, an eye-blink of dust in the great distance, far, far across the great flat plane, approaching step by step.

The breakfast radio news has reports of people breaking up the wall between the two Germanies with hammers and kitchen cutlery, and of unspeakable barbarism from a land whose kings had once impaled their enemies on long wooden spikes. Two spoonfuls of yoghurt on the muesli, tea from a china pot.

"I reached ninety-eight percent this morning."

Her mother continues pouring the tea.

"I'll be going today. I'll take the evening sailing."

"There are places here will do it."

"Back-street chop-shops, I want it done properly, and legally. I owe it that much. The girls have given me an address. It would seem I am not the first cycle courier to have needed an abortion. My God, I cannot believe I am talking like this..."

By correctly identifying the voice of a well-known country-and-western singer, Mrs. Marion Doyle of St. Brendan's Avenue, Coolock, has won herself a Radio One KRTP-FM sunstrip for her car.

Her mother comes with her as far as the ticket barrier. She presses an envelope into her daughter's hand. "If your mind's made up, your mind's made up." Then she turns and walks away and in a dozen steps is lost among the press of passengers surging into the boarding tunnel. In the brown envelope are one hundred bills of small denominations.

"God. Mum! Mum!"

The surge and press of passengers and suitcases and baby buggies and luggage trolleys sweeps Enye before it into the great white ship.

She wakes in the night, in her coffin-narrow berth. The other passengers with whom she shares the cabin sleep on, a topography of breathings. It is 2:33 on the little portable alarm clock. What? Not a change in the steady vibration of the engines, or the hum of the air-conditioning, not the dull thud of a mid-Channel floating something banging the hull, nor the change of attitude as the great white ship crosses a sea current. Not a presence of anything. No, an absence.

She has it now.

The glow at the base of her skull has gone dark and cold. The sense of presence which has for so long been an integral part of her Enye MacColl-ness, is gone. She has moved beyond the outermost edge of the web of mythlines of which her consciousness is a part, into new and unfamiliar geographies.

It strikes her with almost physical force. An end to the war, to the walls of secrecy that daily grow higher around her-the light long since shut out-an end to the schizophrenia of days riding the streets of the city on her eighteen-speed flame yellow ATB and nights stalking those same streets pursuing the spectre of unspeakable, unending violence. An end to fear, to a responsibility that is crushing the life from her like a great falling moon. To simply walk away, to be able to live and love and work and play and be human, to be the Enye MacColl Enye MacColl had always intended Enye MacColl to be. To have relationships in which she can afford to care, can afford to be spendthrift with her emotions. All by the simple act of walking away.

And she knows, in that berth in the belly of the great ship beating across the currents of the cold northern seas, that she cannot do it. She must see it ended. She must heal the sickness once and forever so that it will never again threaten her soul. She has responsibilities. She cannot walk away.

The late winter dawn finds her on the deck as the great white ship enters a wide estuary. Docks and piers, warehouses, lights, buoys and beacons, the monolithic flanks of bulk carriers with names like Neptune Amethyst and Trans-global Challenger. Kilometre after kilometre of cranes and piled cargo containers slide past her on the shore. White gulls hover over the white wake, raucous and greedy in the dawn light, hunting for morsels thrown to the surface by the twin screws. The air is cold and damp; it smells of sea and oil, it smells of morning. A middle-aged man in a blue track suit is jogging around the deck. Ten laps equals one kilometre. He nods to Enye each time he passes. His breath steams. They are the only two people on deck. The great white ship passes through a series of locks and moles and ties up. Police check the passengers as they disembark. Everyone from Enye's country is automatically under suspicion. They alight on a young man with a dark complexion who has not had time to shave this morning. He looks like their idea of a terrorist. A taxi takes Enye into the city. It is still too early for the clinic to be taking bookings. She finds a cafe open for breakfast, which, for the people of this city, seems to consist wholly of toast. Every two minutes a waitress with a whining voice shouts "Toast's ready!" and deposits a plate on a customer's table. Enye eats all the toast she is capable of looking at after a midwinter sea crossing and it is still not time for the clinic to open. The address is near one of the city's famous cathedrals. She thinks it would be silly to have been here and not seen the sights. As the first Beatles tour is not for another two hours, she opts for the cathedral.

Immersed in drowning in embedded in: light. Rainbow coloured like God's covenants. It might be heaven. Christ Triumphant enthroned in primal light receives the glorias of saints and seraphs casting their crowns upon the glassy sea while the dead summoned from their graves are caught up in rapture to receive beautification or damnation. Christus Omnia Vincit; the Last Trump sounds, in shafts and columns of light Michael stoops like a hawk upon the Great Worm; the pit of fire opens its maw to receive the Deceiver and those he has deceived. Light. Primal light overwhelms her. Cantos from Klopstock, the inspiration to Mahler for the final movement of his Resurrection Symphony, resound in her mind.

Ich bin von Gott und will weider zu Gott!

Mit Flugeln, die ich mir errungen.

In heissem Liebesstreben, Werd'ich entschweben Zum Licht, zu dem kein Aug' gedrungen!

Classical Remix Kultur.

The trumpets of resurrection reverberate as she passes from window to window: the Gates of Eden sealed and guarded with a sword of flame, the Deluge thundering down upon the unrighteous; the covenant going up at Carmel with Abraham, coming down at Sinai with Moses. Gaude te, gaude te, Christus est natus, ex Maria Virgine, gaude te. Voices join with the primal light to fill the vault. She has come at choir practice, doubly blessed she. Signs and wonders, bread and wine, loaves and fishes, lion ox man eagle, alpha and omega, YHWH, I Am What I Am, INRI XPI.

By the ancient lights God reveals Himself to Enye MacColl contemplating abortion. Handel now: And the Glory of the Lord. A sense of numinous awe she has not known since childhood days of Cloud-gathering enfolds her. She knows herself to have been touched by the finger of God. A tree, by being a tree, is...

She walks from the cathedral through the wakening city down to the waterside, takes a fat, bustling ferry across the wide river, meanders with the expectant aimlessness of the true explorer about the town on the other shore; discovers delights and delicacies of Victoriana and Edwardiana; wrought-iron and glass, pavilions and piers and esplanades and boardwalks; the autumnal tranquility of a seaside resort permanently out of season. She buys ice cream from a pastel-pink clapboard booth, the sole booth open on a promenade of windswept flapping Japanese paper lanterns.

The ferry takes her back to the city. She buys a pizza with a little of the money her mother gave her, goes to see an afternoon movie: a Polish film. The posters describe it as "The Deeply Disturbing My Bath and Hat." She is the only member of the audience. They still run the film. Would they have run it for an audience of zero? Old Bishop Berkeley again-does The Deeply Disturbing My Bath and Hat play if there is no audience to see it?

The early night of year's ending falls across the city. She makes her way down to the ferry port. She cannot explain why she did what she did, why she did not do what she did not do. She had gone to the cathedral to kill time before having a foetus cut out of her with chrome-plated tools. She had not expected, much less wanted, to encounter God. She stands by the rail in the bitter cold and wind and watches the lights of the foreign city fall away behind her and become churned up with the waters of the estuary to white froth by the propellers.

She keeps herself awake until the great white ship crosses the borderline between geographies and returns her to her familiar mindscape of mythlines. The presence, the subliminal whispers in her spirit, are familiar friends, the dim glow at the base of her consciousness the comfort of a child's night-light that watches over sleep. She sails in with the dawn on the great white ship into the city that is her home and the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

And if the bells ring now, they ring for the soul of Mr. Antrobus. Heigh-ho. Heigh-ho. Slipped away in the grey in-between days, heigh-ho heigh-ho. Saw too much, did Mr. Antrobus of twenty-seven L'Esperanza Street; saw the shape of the coming decade while still a formlessness on time's horizon and knew that it would have no place in it for old, tired men with Proclivities.

Enye would like to think he died of unrequited love, heigh-ho heigh-ho.

Alas, poor Antrobus.

When she had knocked and received no answer she had first thought it an old, tired man with Proclivities's pique that she had not come on Christmas Day with her traditional gift-something warming and pourable that they could share over whatever new recording she had been given. She had spent Christmas in the house behind the green gates with her mother and her brother, to explain to them and to herself why she had done what she had done and why she had not done what she had not done. And to touch the city with her mythoconsciousness to draw out the oscillations and turbulence patterns of the Lords of the Gateway. In vain.

After dark she had come knocking again. In vain. The scratch and wail of cats confined against their will had alerted her. She had knelt down and sniffed at the underdoor gap-adequate draught-proofing had never been one of Mr. Antrobus's priorities. Cat shit and urine. She had called the police.

As they broke down the door, a wave of cats bolted out and ran into L'Esperanza Street.

One glimpse, and Enye fled upstairs.

He was seated in his favourite chair. He was wearing headphones. Red LED level meters danced on his radio-cassette; it was still tuned to the Final Station. The fire was dead clinker; in the hearth lay half-burned scraps of glossy poster paper. The topless towers of Ilium, burned.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

On the day of the funeral, which is the penultimate day of the year, a lugubrious parade enters L'Esperanza Street. It is headed by a trio of musicians-three elderly, toothless gentlemen in crow-black suits and bowler hats making music upon accordion, sobbing clarinet, and arthritic fiddle. In time to their doleful music steps a motley bag of similarly dressed aged aged men, some adorned with black bowlers; some carrying tightly furled umbrellas, though the day has the electric blue clarity of bright winter days; some weighed down by medals they have won in a dozen campaigns in as many countries. Some wheel black bicycles as old and decrepit as themselves. One carries a Bible on a purple plush cushion trimmed with gold braid; another with white gloves and cuffs holds, upright, a naked sword. A third bears a flag; not the flag of any nation, more like the flag of a society or sodality. At the very rear, a man with his trouser legs rolled up (so much gooseflesh on such a cold, clear winter day) leads a goat on a piece of string. The parade processes with weighty dignity up L'Esperanza Street with the patient steps of aged aged men. Enye recognises the trio's music: a stripped-bare and mutilated variation of the second movement of Haydn's "Clock" Symphony.

The people of L'Esperanza Street are drawn from their windows and doors to watch the parade. The children leave their plastic fantasy figures and computer games to run from their gates and gardens and fall in alongside the marchers. Their feet cannot match the rhythm of aged aged men-they are too full of impatience and energy. The parade arrives at the palings in front of number twenty-seven and arranges itself, quite naturally, without any prerehearsed signal or instruction, into a semicircle. The trio falls silent, the accompanying children also. They can sense the sacredness of the moment. The talent has not yet been educated out of them.

Two old men in black bowler hats carry a large wreath of lilac and white flowers. Enye in the window wonders how she can have failed to see it; it is so large the two aged aged men can barely carry it, and it is not so very great a parade. Accordion, clarinet, and fiddle strike a chord. Hats are doffed, held over hearts. The wreath is laid by the side of the gate Mr. Antrobus only ever went out once, and that once horizontally. The man with the white gloves and cuffs raises his sword above his head, then brings it down smartly in front of his face. The flag is likewise raised high but the wind is too light to stir its heavy velvet folds so that its legend may be read by the people of L'Esperanza Street.

For one minute, there is stillness and silence.

Sword and flag are lowered, the trio resumes its abuse of Haydn, the parade reforms in the same reverent silence and, closed up by the man leading the white billy goat, proceeds on down L'Esperanza Street. A small cortege of delayed traffic has built up behind it. The expressions on the drivers' faces are hard to define. The expressions on the faces of the people of L'Esperanza Street are hard to define. The children run back to their parents and presents; the procession is gone, a momentary diversion from the grey limbo of in-between days. The parents take them indoors to watch the Disney channel on satellite TV.

Heigh-ho heigh-ho.

Poor Antrobus.

Question: Is it the last great party of the old decade, or the first great party of the new decade?

(Truth is, the new decade doesn't start until the Year One of any ten-year period, as one smart dick points out, only to get himself bounced by the gorillas on the door for being a pedant and party-pooper).

Answer: Both.

One of those magazines that likes to think it is indispensable to the street culture of the city has hired out an architecturally (and ideologically) sound warehouse down by the old docks and fitted out the entire second floor with five trucks' worth of sound and vision. And to breathe spirit into their five-trucksful, they have hired half a dozen of the acts they think will be germinal in the next decade.

Elliot, it would seem, is germinal.

He thinks this sounds kind of dirty. Then he realises that the offer is in deadly sincerity, panics, and needs the combined diplomatic efforts of his work mates to prevent him from throwing all his accumulated years of equipment out his window into the street.

All the city will be there, the magazine says.

"God, they better not be," says Elliot.

The organisers think it will be good for his karma if they bestow upon him a fistful of complimentary tickets so he can at least fill the dance floor with friendly feet. One pair of which belongs to Enye. Two hours to go and she has run out of human resources to settle his nerves. Certainly, the great acoustic barn is filling by the minute with the Bryghte and the Bootiful and the Mandarins of Fashion (who are predicting that This will be The Decade When Fashion Goes Out of Fashion) and the Socially Credible. "Could you lend me one of those swords of yours so I can quietly fall on it?"

The organisers have declared that this is to be a Theme party, though they have neglected to broadcast what the Theme is. The Theme seems to be Be Your Own Theme. Enye has come in a short hand-print yukata and a pair of black and gold shell-suit bottoms, slung her swords across her back, and rooted out a papier-mache Kabuki mask which, at the moment, is pushed up onto her head. "Urban ninja," she says. "Knight of the Neon Lotus." Elliot is in combat pants, Jimi Hendrix "Are you Experienced?" T-shirt, Hawaiian shirt, and helicopter-pilot mirror shades. The My Lai look, he calls it. One forty to go and he checks and rechecks his equipment, checks and rechecks and re-rechecks. He has hired a Linn programmer and two black girls in the mandatory black leather microskirts to help him and he hasn't seen any of them in over an hour.

"'Next day on your dressing room they hang a star,'" says Enye. "Me go mingle. See what's happening out there. Back before long." She kisses him. He tastes surprisingly good.