"I assure you, Miss Caldwell, your virtue is entirely intact."

"More's the pity."

"Tell me, what is your earliest memory? Think carefully."

"Let me see: I can remember being on a swing boat at the fun fair in Bray. I remember Daddy swinging the boat higher and higher and higher and Mummy telling him that was high enough, it was frightening me, although it was her that was frightened. I quite enjoyed it, I think."

"Anything before that?"

Concentration creased her brow momentarily.

"No. Should there be?"

"What age were you when you were on the swing boat in Bray?"

"Oh, about five: Yes, just five. It was my fifth birthday, I think. Yes, it was, definitely, my fifth birthday."

"And you can't remember anything before your fifth birthday?"

"No. Should I? Is that odd?"

I did not answer her question. Rather, I said, "Well, that, I think, will suffice for today. If you see Miss Fanshawe, she will make you an appointment for next week. Thank you, Jessica, it's been most stimulating."

The study door closed, followed a few moments later by the glassy rattle of the office door. I could detect Miss Fanshawe huffing and puffing and grumbling, grumpily, and needlessly rearranging papers.

Little frigger, indeed!

4.

TRIBULATION AND PERSECUTION. MORNING light saw the vicar striding Protestantly across his glebe meadows with dogs, gumboots, and his demand that the two unequivocally undesirable tramps remove themselves forthwith, tout de suite, chop-chop from his property. Failure to comply would result in the summoning, without one second's further delay, of an officer of the constabulary. Seemingly a conclave of fresh-faced young evangelicals would be descending upon his vicarage that very afternoon for a weekend of good, sound, factual Scripture teaching and happy-clappy chorus singing about the Pearls of Great Price to be found between the leather-bound covers of the B.I.-B.I.-B.I.-B.L.E. and he had no intention of their apple-cheeked washed-in-the-blood zeal being diminished by close proximity to two gentlemen of the road, read tinkers, read vagabonds, read tramps.

"'Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and overzealous piety,'" declared Gonzaga as they picked their way over dew-wet hedgerows to the main road. The shift from Nagmara to In Quotationem generally presaged the heightening of sensitivity before a bout of gyrus building.

Where the main road crossed the river by a picture-postcard, ivy-covered stone bridge, Gonzaga paused to lounge against the wall of the Irish National Foresters Club while Tiresias surveyed the mythlines.

"'Where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea,'" sang Gonzaga, disconsolately, then, galvanized into unexpected action like a pointer coming onto a scent, he plunged into a public litter bin on a lamppost and emerged with an empty Morton's Red Heart Guinness bottle.

Camp was established on a long sloping strip of land overlooking the lough known in the locality, so Tiresias informed his partner, drawing on the information stored in the mythlines, as Fiddler's Green.

"Legend has it the great Turlough O'Carolan himself, doyen of the blind harpers of Ireland, attended a fleadh in the village for which he composed a specially slip-jig, named 'Fiddler's Green.'" He hummed a few bars. Gonzaga lay back among the seed-laden grasses and looked out across the blue water to the Carlingford Mountains.

Gonzaga made flame with his firebox and brewed tea in his black iron pot suspended from a stick. The two tramps had long ago stopped being surprised by the fact they could survive, and even thrive, on the scraps and orts human society discarded. Both, however, shared a partiality to connoisseurs' teas they could not quite explain. Tiresias sipped the brew from a jam jar and contemplated the clouds.

"Galleasses, triremes, and feluccas asail upon the stream of consciousness," he whispered. Gonzaga had already slipped into his dream place; Tiresias's musings were for his own edification. "Two bastard nations," he said, sprawling on the sun-warmed hillside of one country, looking across the water at the hills of another. "And I fear the inevitable price of compromise will eventually be paid by every man, woman, and child of the pair of them. The tragedy of founding two nations upon nothing more solid than mythology. Myths, my dear Gogo. You cannot build a nation on myths, you cannot feed its children with myths, you cannot grind them out of its mills and factories. They will not shelter you from the rain; you cannot burn them to drive the cold winter away. They will not comfort you when you are old, when you are lonely, when you are afraid or in need. Yet they feed their children with them from their mother's breasts-Good King Billy on his white charger, remember. 1690, the Battle of the Boyne, No Surrender!; A Nation Once Again, the Harp that Once through Tara's Halls, Cuchulain chained to the standing stone, his enemies all around him, the martyrs of 1916, the Soldier Boy to the Wars has Gone..."

"'Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue,'" Gonzaga murmured.

"Ah, Monsieur Le Due de la Rochefoucault had it right, Gogo."

When the night had advanced onto the mountains and into the forest, they left their camp and climbed the sheep path to the stone. This close to the nexus, Gonzaga's more intimate senses came into their element. His nose led them up the hillside through grasses and twilight butterflies and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry conifers. On the flat summit of the hill stood a massive perched boulder, a glacial erratic, Tiresias postulated, deposited on this mountaintop when the ice sheets retreated across Ireland.

"An Clacban Mor." Tiresias picked the name from the mythlines. "The Great Stone, Anglicised to Cloughmore." Gonzaga scurried around the stone, touching, smelling, lifting pebbles, dirt, and leaves to taste them. Two late-evening walkers, plus a Sealyham terrier, paused at the stile on the tree line and, seeing the tramps, reconsidered their twilight constitutional.

Gonzaga emptied his haversack on the ground and picked through the malassortment of odds and sods-a brass button with an anchor crest; a chatter of gulls' feathers bound together with twine; pine cones; sea-smoothed stones; a packet of Navy Cut cigarettes ("it is a less commonly known fact than it should be that the sailor in the front is actually Charles Stewart Parnell."); snail shells; a piece of old car tyre; a lenseless pair of spectacles; seemingly far too many things for one small knapsack to hold. He weighed each item in his hand and either returned it to the sack or laid it carefully on the grass. The assemblage complete, he pressed an ear against the stone and worked his way around, tapping it with a silver thimble on the end of his right forefinger. Tiresias polished his glasses in the light of the rising rebel moon and listened to the voice of the wind in the wood. He could feel the phaguses close, gathering, present, massing on the borderlands between Mygmus and Earth.

Using a ball of string as a triangulation tool, Gonzaga began to mark a series of locations in relation to the stone. Some were underneath the overhanging bulk, some well below the tree line. Clouds rose from over the water to race across the face of the moon. Tiresias slipped on his newly cleaned glasses and the hilltop came alive with mythlines, the paths and patterns ten thousand years of legend had impressed upon the landscape. The mythlines flowed and eddied around the stone, numinous silver rivers filled with drowned faces, the phaguses, the differing manifestations of the basal archetypes of local story and song. Gonzaga moved through the river of faces, planting items from his collection at the junctions of the marker strings-four carefully piled pine cones among the trees, the Morton's Red Heart Guinness bottle by the stile at the entrance to the forest walk, a small dolmen of sea-polished slingstones here, a fossil belemnite here, a spiral of snail shells and cigarette ends there, here a feather, there a feather, everywhere a gull feather. Midnight approached, passed; dawn became an insistence on the edge of the warm early summer night. A pattern was emerging. Gonzaga was wrapping the balancing boulder in a complex of cycloids and endocycloids, a gyre of spirals and curves. Through the spectacles Tiresias observed how the mythlines were being frustrated, turned in on themselves, directed into fruitless whirlpools and eddies and woven into a cocoon of lights and faces.

An Clachan Mor stood in darkness unbroken at the centre of a shining wheel. Tiresias came to join Gonzaga at the heart of the gyrus. Gonzaga produced the Free State penny from his waistcoat pocket, held it up.

Tiresias removed his glasses, nodded.

Gonzaga inserted the penny into a crevice in the rock.

A sudden breeze stirred the trees, tugged greasy locks and clothing, rattled the barbs of the gull feathers. Flickers of nervous light, petty lightnings, ran fretfully along the curves and spirals of Gonzaga's weaving, lost themselves in the predawn darkness. Mist gathered around the perimeter of the maze, knotted into a face, many faces in one, features melting and reforming-old man young man wise man fool.

"Struggling for quotidian expression," muttered Tiresias. "Must be a more powerful local phagus, running through its incarnations in an attempt to find one relevant to the contemporary subconscious." The changing faces yelled and screamed silently within the wall of mist. Gonzaga pressed his face to the stone, stroked the Mourne granite with his fingers, his lips. Under his touch as tender as a priest's first experiment with love, the rock softened, melted. The Free State penny was absorbed into the substance of the stone. For one instant it glowed there, in the heart of the rock. By the light of a straggling, ragged dawn, the two men watched the signs and markers of the maze grow insubstantial and be absorbed into the soil; snail shell, gull feather, brass button, Guinness bottle.

"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, And all that beams, all that wealth e'er gave, Await alike the inevitable hour, The path of glory leads beyond the grave,'"

Gonzaga dolefully consigned the sailor-suited Charles Stewart Parnell to the soil.

The bubble of mist and faces dissolved in the memory of a wail as the promise of dawn was fulfilled behind Slieve Martin. Tiresias sighed, expanded his birdlike chest, and breathed in the light.

"A grand and glorious day, my dear Gogo-a grand and glorious day altogether."

"'He that hath light within his own clear breast, May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day. But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thought...'" Gonzaga left the quote half finished. Tiresias was standing, head cocked, nostrils flared, as if scenting something on the wind.

"Strange... strange. It feels like... No. Nothing. Sorry to have troubled you, old friend. Felt for the briefest quantum of time like... but no, tiredness, dog tiredness. We are not as young as we used to be. Come Gogo, and let us partake of blessed tea, if we can squeeze another pot out of those leaves..."

5.

SCENE: THE GLASS TOWER rises out of a silver sea, sheer-sided, smooth-shouldered, unscalable. The sea is dark and storm-tossed-waves crash and break about its base.

The Dublin Bay Wave No.7: Hey me boys, ho me boys, up and at 'em, up and at 'em, no resting no slacking no slouching no skiving no sick days holidays holy days fair days feast days, famine days, no Christmas Easter St. Paddy's begorrah begob be-jaysus, it's up and at 'em, up and at 'em, we've got to get all this ground down to sand before the turn of the millennium, me boys!

The Sandman: Excuse me, but I would just like you to know that I play no part in this dream sequence whatsoever, thank you.

Sea gulls with a lot of swan in them, or swans with a lot of sea gull, fly around the tower. They are chained together at the neck by collars and links of red gold.

Sea Swans/Swan Gulls: Squadron to tower, squadron to tower, bandits ten o'clock high, ten o'clock high- tally ho, chappies! NyyaaggHHRRRUuuummm...

The GLASS TOWER hums in the wind, exactly as if you had wet your finger in a wineglass and rubbed it aroundroundround the rim.

The Wineglass: Ooohhhmmmmm ...

Fierce clouds crowd around the GLASS TOWER, like supporters at the All-Ireland Football Final at Croke Park.

The Football Fans: We're the boys from Tipperary, Up the Pope and the Virgin Mary!

Though the storm is all around and all about and the black clouds hang low about its sides, the summit of the GLASS TOWER is lit by a single shaft of pure sunlight.

The Carol Singers: While shepherds washed their socks by night, All seated round the tub, A bar of Sunlight Soap came down, And they began to scrub.

Upon closer inspection you see that the top of the GLASS TOWER is constructed in the fashion of a sundial. Upon the dial is a garden: fountains, mazes, pergolas, gazebos, Italian gardens, living statues, nymphs, fauns, satyrs, bambini, orreries, roses, wine, etc. In the centre of a small lawn stand two trees. One bears buds, blossom, ripe fruit, and leaves both green and brown. The other is divided root to crown, one half green with leaves, one aflame.

The First Tree: All seasons in one And one in all seasons, The green leaf, the brown, The blossom, the bud, The ripe golden fruit The bare winter branches The seasons of life All in one season All the days of one life Life in a day.

This to the accompaniment of massed choirs of nymphs, fauns, satyrs, living statues, bambini, water organs, Aeolian harps, songs of birds, grunts of pigs, mechanical orreries performing the music of the spheres.

The Second Tree: Fire! Fire! Dingalingalingalingaling! 999! 999! Hello, what service do you require-Fire, Police, or Ambulance? Fire! Fire! Fire! Call for Moses! Call for the burning babe the burning bush the bush in the bulrushes the babe in the bush the burning bulrushes the burning baby help help help!

Enter FAERIE QUEENE dressed head to toe in ermine 3 3s 6d per mile from Arnott's sale second floor Haberdashery. Her crown is an oversized Carting Black Label bottle cap, inverted.

Faerie Queene: Jessica! Jessica! Jessica!

Music tinkles, like ice clinking in whiskey glasses.

John Jameson, Old Bushmills, Paddy, Powers and Companie: Oi've been a wild rover, Fer manys a yearrrrr ...

And oi've spent all me money, On whiskey and beerrrrr ...

The FAERIE QUEENE smiles, revealing Dracula teeth ...

(The Dublin Dentists: Twice a day, twice a day.

Up and down, up and down, Till they're clean and sparkling.

... glistening with blood. She wipes her slavering mouth on her hand, notices the blood. Embarrassed, she wipes her hand on her ermine cloak (3 3s 6d per mile, etc) which has by now grown to hang off the edge of the sundial garden and down the side of the GLASS TOWER.

The Arnott's Ermine: Those drops of blood, oh those drops of blood, Those drops of blood, upon the midnight snow ...

Faerie Queene: Jessica, Jessica, please, Jessica, I love you, Jessica, I love you ...

JESSICA awakens, head pounding, heart racing, soaked in sweat.

Voice of the Alarm: Ting a ling a ling! Ting a ling a ling! Half past eight on a bright and sunny Saturday, half past eight, time to be gay, be light, be shiny and bright, half past eight in the morning, oh!

Light streams through the window, a lattice of shadow on the counterpane. Without, the sounds of the streets-picking, clicking heels; the jingle of horse harnesses; the grumble of trams; the slam of letterboxes. From within, the thunderous gurgle of the plumbing and the joyful incense of bacon frying.

Jessica: Jaysus, what a dream I've had!

The definition of a Super Saturday (that is, of Superness as opposed to Saturdayness) was that it was one of those rare calendrical occurrences when the timetables of the Wesley Hospital, Dudgeon and Gowes, Ltd., Chartered Surveyors, and Mangan's Family Restaurant all meshed to give the three girls the same day off. Super Saturdays were events anticipated and grimly enjoyed with the determined enthusiasm of a family holiday: rain, hail, civic unrest, they would wring every last second of their Super Saturday dry.

One does not so much travel on a Dublin tram as voyage. All that brass and wood, that heady top deck exposure to the elements, that seaside ozone spritz from the overhead wires, you are reminded irresistibly of piers and steam packets; you expect bunting on every telegraph pole and lamp standard. In the backseats on the top deck, the conversation turned toward boys. Jessica was telling Em and Rozzie about the man she'd seen on the tram.

"So, what I told you at Rozzie's was a lie, but he wasn't; this is true."

"Like that time you swore on the Bible you saw Clark Gable getting out of a big car outside the Shelbourne Hotel?"

Jessica's father held the belief that to swear on the Bible was a vain thing, demeaning to the Holy Scriptures, which gave his daughter all the license she needed to abuse the Testaments for her own ends.

"Up your bums, repeatedly, with a sharp implement."

The tram deposited them outside the Bank of Ireland before crossing the Liffey into the cold and ill-spoken districts of North Dublin, where, according to Charlie Caldwell, they called the things you wear on the end of your feet Bewits, thus proving, if proof were needed, the superiority in every consideration of South Dublin over North Dublin. The girls lunched at a restaurant slightly more expensive than they could justify; being called Madam after a week of calling other women Madam was a gratifying luxury to Jessica. Then up Grafton Street, past the pricey glitz of Switzer's and Brown-Thomas's, to Gaiety Green.

Gaiety Green, me dearios, me cheerios, me fine and ducky queerios: to call it a flea market is to insult the fine and noble flea of which each and every one of the troglodytic stallholders is in copious possession. Call it a glass-roofed labyrinth, call it an Argosy with B.O. where the treasures of fabled King Solomon lie heaped and shimmering beneath blazing coloured light bulbs (for some reason, the blue ones are never working), where the air smells of hot fat and the urinous reek of shiny-trousered drunkards and the warm, oily stench of menopausal women, where cockatoos recite obscene limericks and within a dozen steps you can hear a dozen different musics, from the newest hep-hot waxings of Django Reinhardt and Louis Armstrong to the primal moanings of white-stubbled balladeers, eyes gas-blinded at Ypres but forever focused on the face of Fair Caitlin from Garykennedy, where pickpockets have their pockets picked and a policeman is as rare as an Orangeman in St. Peter's, and the voice of the stallholders and vendors do cry bargain bargain how do we do it how do we do it, five for a shilling, five for a shilling, unrepeatable offer, one hundred percent bona fide genuine bargain, money refunded if not totally satisfied, the large print giveth and the small print taketh away.

Gaiety Green: where else in God's Green Universe can you buy a dozen gravy rings, the skull of Brian Boru when he was a boy, a three-pound note, a first edition of the Grimoire Verum, a portrait of the Sacred Heart with electric eyes, a secondhand frock from last year's Castle Season, an old Orange bowler, a brace of pigs' feet, a pair of magic blue knickers sixpence a pair (never heard of magic blue knickers? Part with sixpence and see if your dearest wish doesn't come true), a holy medal of Pope Pius XII, a bottle of holy Lourdes water, a sepia postcard of a woman engaged in an act of oral outrage with a Tamworth pig, your present, past, and future read by Madam Mysotis, Queen of Little Egypt, with the aid of an inky palm print on an old copy of the Athlone Gazette and a little cup of Cork Dry Gin (to liberate the spirits, you understand); a spinning top, a Claddagh ring, a tray of yellow-man pulled toffee that would give a mule lockjaw, with a hammer to break pieces off, a pair of boots that have walked to Tashkent and back, a brass spaniel, a bag of bananas, a hand-coloured postcard of Queen Victoria not engaged in an act of oral outrage with anything, a pound of Davy Byrne's prize-winning sausages for your Dublin coddle, a gallon of porter, a chest of Assam tea, a jeroboam of champagne, a hogshead of sack, and still have change from a shilling?

Jessica adored the place's vulgarity. Things found in dark corners, under cobwebs and dust, were endlessly fascinating to her. So rapt was she that she did not notice that somewhere in the little hell of sweating lights and the blue haze of deep-frying fat and grating brick-edged Dublin accents, she had lost Em and Rozzie. On a secondhand bookstall that had not seen the light of day in twenty years, she found a copy of The Scarlet Woman and The Many-headed Beast: The True Teaching of Revelation, by Dr. Edmund Zwingli Crowley, published by The Firebrand Press, 1898, price three pence, for her father. Calvinist theology was a hobby of Charlie Caldwell's that had never, thankfully, spilled over into an obsession. Having proved from diverse authorities that St. Patrick had been the first Protestant, he was currently engaged in a massive reinterpretation of the Book of Revelation in the light of recent Ex-Cathedra utterances from the Throne of St. Peter's and events in Stalinist Russia. She was about to part with her three pennies when a voice picked her out of the general din.

"Here, lovie, over here." A small woman, wizened and wrinkled as the original apple in Eden, beckoned her from behind a mound of junk jewellery. Jessica looked around for someone else the woman could be referring to. "Yes, you, love. Come over here, I've something to show you." The crowd parted, and Jessica was drawn into the vacuum. The tiny woman leaned across the trestle table and opened her hand. In her palm was a wrist torque, scratched and tarnished with age, but the unmistakable glint of gold could not be disguised.

"Pretty, ain't it?" said the tiny woman. "Look, it's engraved, see?" The torque twinkled under ten thousand light bulbs. Jessica could barely make out a Celtic knotwork pattern like those in her father's book on which she practised her draughtsmanship. It seemed to be a cow or a bull; something bovine. "Would you like to have it?"

"I couldn't afford that."

"Who said anything about you being able to afford it? It's for you." With a sudden darting of fingers, the stallholder seized Jessica's wrist. She shivered with sudden gooseflesh. "You keep it."

"I can't. I couldn't possibly accept ..."

"You've got to have it. You can't not." Her grip had tightened, a gin trap made of bone. Jessica swore, tried to tear herself free from the old woman's grasp. The old woman wheezed and giggled and tried to force the torque over Jessica's balled fingers. Then she saw him-a moment of clairvoyance, of the kind Madam Mysotis had spent her whole life seeking. That face, that brief glance over the shoulder of the dirty Army greatcoat, that flicker of recognition through the press and shove of Saturday afternoon people, that slight suggestion of a smile.

And somehow, the spell was broken. Jessica felt the old woman's skeleton grip fall away like withered leaves. Like a heroine in a Hollywood dream sequence, she fought her way through the crowd, but the press and shove of bodies only seemed to mount before her the more she exerted herself. Certainly, no Hollywood heroine ever swore as enthusiastically as she saw him slip away, with an almost mocking smile, beyond her reach.

She retraced her path through the crowd to give the old woman on the junk jewellery stall the benefit of the sharp edge of her tongue, but the stall was gone. A blowsy woman peddling cotton sheets stood between the religious curio kiosk and the tea booth. She possessed the utter solidity of one who has stood all day and not sold a thing.

"What you gawping at, you little gurrier?"

"Never seen a backside could dress itself and talk at the same time." Jessica noted some of the ensuing colourful oaths for future use.

Em and Rozzie were busily engaged in acts of oral outrage with ha'penny ice cream cones by the entrance.