Easter Saturday. The Christ holed up in the tomb; the one full day in the calendar where God is dead, or at least his son. It seems the perfect day for it; a day off for everyone. The clown looks over at the McDonalds building, its curved fascia wrapping round the corner of Victoria Road, the words ‘Trinity House’ still embossed on the brick. Formerly the Trinity House School, latterly a furniture store, now a fast food restaurant. Nothing stays the same, only God goes on. Over on the east side of the street, a fashion outlet and a phone store stand at either corner of Quex Road, another of Powell Cotton’s vanities. A crossroads, although the clown has already promised his soul to the Devil, and today the Dark Lord is calling in the debt.

Behind the distant cotton candy of a cherry tree on Quex Road, the clown can just make out the Catholic church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. A chapel and monastery was founded by the Fathers known as the Oblates of Mary who laid their cornerstone a hundred and fifty years earlier, their mission to save the souls of Irish railway workers who swarmed, shovels in hand, to the metropolis. A century or so later, the clown fell in with three thousand mourners who followed a coffin along the High Road and turned up this street, the casket draped in the flag of Ireland, so light that it contained more soul than man. The body, when it lived, belonged to Michael Gaughan, volunteer in the Clann na Éireann, a prisoner in Parkhurst who starved in solidarity with the car bombing Price sisters, renegade soldiers demanding political status and transfer to an Irish jail. Gaughan’s skin shrivelled and shrank until one day, six correctional officers held him down, dragged him by the hair, forced his head back over the bedrail and placed a wooden block between his teeth. Through a hole in the wood they pushed a tube so roughly that the man’s throat bled. Seventeen times over the next two months, they roughhoused him with their tube until one day they pushed it down so savagely that it hit a lung, filling his bronchioles with liquid milk and eggs, drowning him. Unable to follow any further once the parade deviated from the main thoroughfare, the clown watched the crowds walk solemnly up Quex Road for a requiem at the church, a foretaste of the fifty thousand men, women and children who would turn up to hear Dáithí Ó Conaill stand by the coffin at the Leigue cemetery in Ballina, scarlet with fury, denouncing Gaughan’s jailers as the vampires of a discredited empire.