Every time he passed the bank, the same idea flitted through his mind; the guitars, the records, the clothes he could buy. No guilt at all; just the simple fear of being caught. He killed the days in VINNIE’S WORLD OF MUSIC, trying out the same guitar, sneering at the Royal Showband, the Miami, anyone who wasn't groovy. When Vinnie told him to get lost, he stood peering through the window, his hair a crow's nest that scandalised old women on the footpath. He bored his friends with how music liberates your mind; why none of the English crowd could hold a candle to Dylan, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish. At home every conversation turned into a row:

The darkness was a stage, a screen on which images from Holy Angels terrorised her eyes. She tried leaving the light on, but, the minute she closed her eyes, they came again. A grey room filled with tiny cots. Thirty girls marched in freezing lines around the yard. Steam swirling from the laundry. Fingers bleeding in the sewing-room. The morning she awoke with blood sticky on her thighs. The darkness shaking with the voice of Holy God. 'There is no room in Heaven for bold girls, dirty girls who destroy their nice clean sheets.' She saw Sister Carmel in Annie Oakley's buckskin, the monogrammed guitar poised above her like an axe. She jerked awake and fell forward, sobbing on the bedclothes. When her lips stopped trembling, she parted the curtains and gazed across the Market Square. "O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary, please take away the pain."

To finally get rid of him, Vinnie gave him the guitar for £2 down and ten shillings a week. He swaggered home, sanded down the sunburst finish, and painted the body seven different colours. Along the psychedelic whorls he printed THIS MACHINE KILLS SHOWBANDS.

Now and then, out of the blue, she heard the tuning-fork. A needlepoint of sound that flashed from Sister Carmel's fingers and pierced the scent of beeswax. For one hour a week, she wasn't a bewildered child in a pinafore, a skivvy feeding cabbage soup to rows of snivelling girls. Her voice found the note and followed Sister Carmel's hands. Tantum ergo sacramentum, venermur cernui. She loved the mystery of the words, how her own mouth, the lips that seldom moved except to answer questions, could shape the sound and direct it towards the stained-glass windows. The happiest day of her life was when Sister Carmel died and she was chosen to sing at her funeral. She closed her eyes and felt the words rise from deep inside her; saw them soar above the bowed heads, the coffin with its four black candles, and vanish into clouds of incense. When Father Lalor smiled, she felt her heart leaping like the infant in Saint Elizabeth's womb. That night she lay awake for hours, oblivious to the darkness, the noise of children weeping in their sleep.

A girl in a KISS ME QUICK hat opened the door.

She never said to herself: I have enough of scrubbing floors, washing smells from other people's clothes. She just walked from the chapel and out the wicket gate. It was so easy it frightened her. Only when her legs began to ache did she stop to look behind. The city was a mantilla of light in the distance, the sky the black cloth over Sister Carmel's coffin. All that night she cowered in a shed that reeked of animals. When the sky turned grey, she snatched a dress from a clothes-line and ran until her throat burned. That afternoon, a lorry stopped beside her and she blurted out the name of somewhere she had seen on a signpost. The driver looked her up and down and told her to get in. When she wouldn't answer any more of his questions, he handed her a sandwich, lit a cigarette and squinted at her breasts.

"He's a bit of a bollocks alright."

The first time he beat her, she threw the ring across the floor and walked the streets until his headlights impaled her to a wall. The second time, she screamed and warned him never to lay a finger on her again. The third time, she fell into his arms, begging his forgiveness, swearing to do anything he wanted if he wouldn't leave her on her own. When it happened again, she hung around the Galtymore until the band finished and, six months later, walked on to a stage in Ireland, a grinning cowgirl with a monogrammed guitar.

Deep into the night, while his mother dreamed of suits and ties, he practised until his fingers bled. When they could take no more, he fell back on the bed, closed his eyes and walked on the stage at Newport. He chopped and changed everything he learned until he had chords and melodies of his own. Pacing the room, fists clenched, he prayed for words to fit the tunes. He stared into the mirror and, in his bloodshot eyes, saw the voice of his generation suffering for his art.

One night he found his mother slumped in her armchair. He stood for a moment, startled by the shiver of tenderness, the surge of love unlike anything he'd ever felt before. Is this what it all comes to, asked himself, twenty years of working your fingers to the bone? As her breathing filled the kitchen, he remembered her tears the morning he came back from San Francisco, her arms around him on the doorstep, pleading with him never to break her heart again.

He swore he'd never do it again, but here he was, creeping back into his granny’s room. He eased the box from underneath the bed and came whistling down the stairs. She was lying back in the chair, her mouth gaping at the ceiling, a thread of silver spittle on her chin.

She ignored them all. The men in suits who looked funny asking for more vinegar. Young lads smirking through a daze of beer. Pasquale offering her a rise if she'd lie down in the shed. Voices lurking in doorways. Voices flung from cars as she walked home alone. Letters from London promising the earth.

"No, Ma, I don't want it. Keep it for yourself."

"This is a grand one... Tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui...."

Happiness took her by surprise. She squeezed his hand and told him how music wiped away the past. He was amazed by how she sang his words as if she believed every single one. When she said she was tired, he lulled her into sleep with lies about America. When he went on and on about the voice of revolution, she wondered what she was letting herself in for. When he burst in one night and said they had a booking in November, she said no, she couldn't face it. Next morning she handed in her notice.

"But what's the smell?"

And so the first hippie in the Midlands and his ageing beehive blonde set out for their first engagement in a pub in Tullamore. As the van bounced along the bog road, she asked him to slow down. In reply, he opened the window and his hair streaming in the wind made him feel like a musician. Outside Killeigh she asked him again. She was thinking of Sister Carmel lying in her coffin when suddenly he swore. The last thing she saw was a little girl talking to Our Lady.

Most of us can remember the year, some can name the month or season, others can pin it down to a particular day or night, but he could remember the precise moment he fell in love. 3.15 pm, Sunday, September 16th, 1967. His first thought was: This is how my mother felt the morning I came home from San Francisco. Someone who will die for you and more. Every time she brushed my hair, kissed away a headache, cried on my First Communion picture. At exactly 3.15 pm on that warm Sunday evening, as somewhere down the corridor a radio played 'Amazing Grace', he stared at the bed and she was a small animal squealing in a trap, his father weeping on his deathbed.

In a basement in Rathmines, he hit an open D and waited for it to die away. He played the chord a second time, listened intently, and told the landlord he'd move in on Sunday evening. His mother waned to know if he was stone mad. He said no, I'm in love. She warned him never to darken her door again. He threw the note on to the hallstand - 'Don’t criticise what you don’t understand’ – and slammed the door behind him….

For the first few months he could understand her silence, how she sat for hours, the mirror trembling in her hand. He kept telling her about a girl he knew in San Francisco:

Normally he resented her prayer-meetings, but tonight he didn't care less if she never came home. No mirror, no tears, no wanting to tell her to shut the fuck up. He could tidy the place, switch off the lights, close his eyes and and wait for John Wesley Harding to galvanise the dark. Where did she put that incense…? He cursed her, he cursed himself, he cursed his mother; he cursed the bastard who sold him the van. She'd be back any minute and the night, his night, would be ruined. He eventually found her note sticking from the sleeve of Blonde on Blonde, the writing in big, careful letters: 'I'm going away for good and bringing the suits. God bless.'

©2006 woodlawn fiction