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PART I

I Don’t Believe in God, but I Miss Him

The world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life

—Stephen King

1

Roses

When I was little, my father was famous. Dr Stanley Quinn was a man of letters, a man of words, a man who’d built himself from clattering keys and spooling ribbon – and a firm yank on his own bootstraps – to become the greatest poet, journalist and war correspondent of his generation.

In real terms, this meant that I grew up without my father around, although as I remember it, he always seemed strangely present. Throughout his many absences, my father endured as an active part of my life – his picture in the press, his thoughts in broadsheet black ink that rubbed off on my fingers, his disembodied voice from inside our kitchen radio.

To a child of perhaps three or four, it seemed as if my father only ever left home by degrees. His name, his voice, his picture were always there for me, always around to watch over us. Even now, almost thirty years later, my father returns, although far less frequently. His voice comes back in television documentaries about the old conflicts. Beirut, Suez, Muscat.