Peter strolled along the sea front and
thought about the indisputable facts; but as the tide swelled and
turned he soon lost his metallic edge. Were the set of events laid
out in his mind, and the established conclusion of that trajectory,
truly facts? Or were permutations possible? Indeed was it not that
fiction was the gold in the cracks, giving rich story where nothing
lay? He thought about his half sister; whom he had never met and knew
very little about; what was she doing, how was she living her life
and where? Was she even still alive? Had she ever existed in reality
or had the one statement of her existence been a conjuring by his
mother – using the fact of her as an emotional weapon against the
rosy tinted image of his absent father held in his boyhood mind? He
recalled that one time he met his father; the short walk they'd taken
across the field in Tuam. His father did not speak until they saw a
small group of horses standing by a tree and then he had pointed into
the mid distance and exclaimed that it was raining on the other side
of the field – and how for a moment they were held in another space
and time. Another reality. A charm. And how they had walked back to
the family smallholding, silent but for their breathing and then once
back his father had pressed a piece of gold into his hand before
moving away down the hall. The only thing his father ever gave him.
His mind moved on and he thought about the woman in the next street
to his whom everyone talked ill of. Joan loved a man called John but
John had killed a woman and was serving life in some prison
somewhere. Was Joan negating the facts surrounding this man, to use
the phrase 'in spite of' or did she not even perceive the facts as
truth? What were Joan's set of facts? Peter walked on, muttering in
his mind of how the Buddhists say there is no truth.
