As a teenager, you were a fine lad; insouciant, not caring much for anybody, you were yourself, and harmlessly you used to rib that other brainbox in your class, the one who was nicknamed the Critic. Whoo–hoo the Critic! Whoo–hoo the Critic! you used to taunt when he looked at your latest poem and damned it with faint praise: Rather good. Reminiscent of Dryden, of course.

Whoo–hoo the Critic! because some kind of courage had been born within you and you didn't care what he or anybody else said about you. You were yourself and yet you moved among them all as a fish in water.

Your voice was you: it could be heard in a continuous monologue on the playing field, a commentary on everything, a rolling stream of dry unappreciated jokes, but all it really said was This is me; I am and I am I, a seabird doing a loop above the waves.

But back home your mother said Ciaran, you have a terrible temper, as if it had dropped into you out of the sky, yet the truth is you showed remarkable restraint: you were still in awe of him and perhaps you didn't want to desecrate again that already desecrated bond. Sometimes you burnt sullen in his presence and paradoxically you found release from it all in the confinement of a boarding school: at least there they thought you were somehow precious, a great makings of what they wanted you to be, and they watched you come and go; they kept their eyes on you, as your father did in old age when you visited, his gaze following you nervously around the room. But you were a fine lad and had that insouciant thing in you.

I would have done anything for your love but you stood divided up at the schoolhouse door, a cubist assemblage of your own fragments, a Guernica contradicting the natural forms and deep hues of autumn. Only one fragment of many would receive me, but I proved too big for it, a small boy wanting to be loved by his father was too big for that shard of your attention, and you ejected me as the eye ejects a mote of dust.