And now?
Kevern sighed. You win, he said.
I’ve won, she thought.
She’s going to be hard work, this one, he thought.
His other thought was that she was just the girl for him.
ii
The morning after the call he sat on his bench and wondered if he was about to experience happiness and, if so, whether he was up to it. He could have done with someone to talk to — his own age, a little younger, a little older, it didn’t matter, just someone to muse with. But enter someone you can muse with and enter, with her, heartbreak. They were as one on this, he and the girl whose ankles he would never again object to, although they didn’t yet know it: to think of love was to think of death.
He rarely missed his mother, but he did now. ‘What’s for the best, Mam? Should I go for it?’ But she had always been negative. What was for the best? Nothing was for the best — for her the best was not to go for anything, just stay out of trouble and wait to die.
That was the impression she gave Kevern anyway. In fact she lived a secret life, and though that too was wreathed around in death, the very fact that it was secret meant she saw some risk as worth the taking. Was it because she loved Kevern more than she loved herself that she didn’t recommend risk to him?
A funny sort of love, Kevern would have thought, had he known about it.
As for his father, any such conversation would have been equally out of the question. ‘You always hurt the one you love,’ his father had said the first time Kevern was 
ilted by a girl. Kevern took that to be an allusion to one of the old songs his father listened to on earphones. His father did not normally have that much to say.
‘But she’s the one who’s hurt me,’ he answered.
His father shrugged. ‘Bee-bop-a-doo,’ he said without taking off his earphones. He looked like a pilot who knew his plane was going down.
‘I’ll go for it, then,’ Kevern said to himself, as though after considering all the sage advice no one had given him. But he still wanted to run it all over in his mind.
It infuriated him when Densdell Kroplik appeared up the path, singing to himself, a countryman’s trilby pulled down over his eyes, heavier boots on than the weather merited, swinging his rucksack full of unsold pamphlets and nettle conditioner.
‘If you want the bench to yourself I’ll clear off,’ Kevern said. ‘I’ve got work to do.’
‘If I’d wanted a bench to myzelf I’d have found un,’ Kroplik said.
I see, playing the yokel this morning, Kevern thought. That wasn’t his only thought. The other was ‘Up yours’, though he was not normally a swearer.
His mouth must have moved because Kroplik asked him what he’d said. In for a penny, in for a pound, Kevern decided, taking a leaf out of Ailinn’s book. ‘I said, “Up yours.” I was repeating what you said to me in the pub last night.’
The barber rubbed his face with his hand. ‘Yeah, I sayz that sometimes,’ he conceded. ‘And a lot worse when the mood takes me.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ Kevern said.
‘Like khidg de vey. If you knowz what that means.’
Kevern nodded, saying nothing. It was a way of getting through life: nodding and saying nothing.
‘You don’t know, though, do you,’ Densdell Kroplik went on, enjoying his own shrewdness. ‘But I’ll give yerz a guess.’
‘No doubt it means something like go fuck yourself.’
Kroplik punched the air. ‘We’ll make a local of yerz yet. Go fuck yerzelf is spot on.’
‘I didn’t bring up your abusive language to me last night so you could abuse me further,’ Kevern said. He heard how pious he sounded but there was no going back now. ‘I’d rather not be spoken to like that,’ he went on.
‘Oh, you’d rather not.’
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Pog mo hoin.’
‘Don’t tell me. . Your mother’s a fucker of pigs.’
‘Close, close. Kiss my arze.’
‘You are a mine of indispensable information,’ Kevern said, getting up from the bench.
‘That’s what I’m paid to be. Do you know who the first person was to say pog mo hoin in these parts?’
‘You.’
‘The first person I sayz.’
‘No idea. I wouldn’t have been around.’
‘No, that you wouldn’t. So I’ll inform yerz. The giant Hellfellen. That’s how he kept strangers out. He stood on this very cliff, right where you’re standing now, made a trumpet of hiz fist, stuck it in hiz backside and blew the words “kiss my arze” through it, so loud they could hear it three counties away, and you had to have a very good reason to come here after that.’
Kevern was not a folklore man. Mythology, with its uncouth half-men, half-animals, frightened him. And he hated talk of giants. Especially those who used bad language. If there were going to be gods he wanted them to be supreme spiritual beings who didn’t fart, who employed chaste speech and otherwise kept themselves invisible.
‘We’ve always known how to extend a warm welcome down here, that’s for sure,’ he said.
‘We?’ Kroplik made a trumpet of his own fist and belched a little laugh through it. ‘Well yes, in point of fact we do.’
‘So when you tell me to go fuck myself you intend nothing but friendliness by it.’
‘Nothing whatsoever, Mister Master Kevern Cohen. Kiss my arze the same. I’m being brotherly, and that’s the shape of it. And to prove it I’ll give you a free shave.’
On this occasion Mister Master Kevern Cohen declined. ‘Pog mo hoin,’ he thought about saying, but didn’t.
His detestation of swearing amounted almost to an illness. At school, although Latin wasn’t taught, one of his classmates told him that the Latin for go fuck yourself was futue te ipsum which, for all that it sounded nicer, still didn’t sound nice enough. Kiss my arse the same. It wasn’t only that he didn’t want to kiss anyone or have anyone kiss him there — least of all those to whom it would have been most appropriate to say it — he recoiled from the sound of the word. Arse! Even cleansed of Kroplik’s brute enunciation it made the body a site of loathing. Swearing was an act of violence to others and an act of ugliness to oneself. It had no place in him.
With one exception he had never heard either his mother or his father swear. The exception — single in type but manifold in application — was his father’s deployment of the hissing prefix PISS before words denoting what he most deplored. As, for example, his transliteration of WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED into the raging, estless est-speak of THE GREAT PISSASTER or THE PISSFORTUNE TO END ALL PISSFORTUNES or simply THE PISSASTROPHE. Accompanied always by a small, self-satisfied whinny of triumph, as though putting PISS before a word was a blow struck for freedom, followed just as invariably by a stern warning to Kevern never to put a PISS before a word himself, not in private, and definitely not in public.
Otherwise the worst his father ever let drop in his hearing was ‘I think I’ve forgotten to rumple the bloody hall carpet.’
And even for that his wife reproved him. ‘Howel! Not in front of the boy.’
It was something more than distaste for bad language. It was as though they had taken an oath, as though the enterprise that was their life together — their life together as the parents of him — depended on their keeping that oath.
They were elderly parents — that explained something. Elderly in years in his father’s case, elderly in spirit in his mother’s. And this made them especially solicitous to him, watching and remorseful, as though they needed to make it up to him for being the age they were, or the age they felt they were. At the end of his life his father had admitted to a mistake. ‘We would have done better by you had we let you be more like the rest of them,’ he said. ‘We wanted to preserve you but we went about it the wrong way. May God forgive me.’