‘I’ve got children,’ I started. ‘Or should I say I “had” children? I don’t know what the correct tense is. It’s relevant, though. And I thought I’d get it out in the open right at the start: it appears to be a big deal around here.

‘I was married too. That’s definitely past tense. It’s difficult to believe now that there was ever a time we chose to be together. I’ve looked at old pictures and not recognised myself. Hypnotism, that’s all I can put it down to. Black magic. I must have been in a trance. She might have been, too.

‘I won’t go into the details, but we parted when the children were still very young. It’s a mystery how we stayed together long enough to breed. Long before the end, neither of us had a single sympathetic feeling for the other. It could have been comical: you couldn’t have picked out two people in the whole world who despised each other so ardently. Brian and Joshua have got nothing on my marriage.

‘The good thing was that I had the kids after the divorce. My wife was a complete drunkard. Even the court could see that she was unfit, although I didn’t dare believe it until the verdict came down in my favour. And we made the most of it, had a decent life, even though I found it wearing: I set up on my own so I could work the hours I chose, and two youngsters to bring up, there wasn’t much lazing around doing nothing. But it worked, and they didn’t die, and they grew, and learned things and all that sort of stuff. Isn’t that amazing? How does it happen?

‘They hardly ever saw their mother. I had a single rule: she had to be sober. That meant a lifetime of cancelled arrangements, last-minute turning back, tears, screams. We might as well have still been married. It was the only dark cloud on our landscape, as a family. Big one, though. She was their mother, for Christ’s sake. I knew her better, of course, but they didn’t. They shouldn’t have needed to.

‘It took a lot of my emotional capacity, that did. But that’s what humans are best at. It’s very simple to suffer, or to sympathise and sustain in times of need. It’s a fine distraction from real life; adversity gives purpose and definition, and that’s what everyone wants. Much more challenging, I found, was the basic stuff. The continuous setting of an example through my own actions. A single slip and you’re found out. It’s too easy to undo months or years of impeccable behaviour, a lifetime of suppressing urges, with an unconsidered reflex. Hypocrisy isn’t always totally vigilant. Life is always lurking, ready to pounce.

‘And one day it did. And it was my fault. And I lost everything as a result. Years of irreproachable self-control counted for nothing in the shadow of a supernova of ordinary weakness. Now my children are almost grown up – she’s 14, he’s 12 – and they’re with their mother. The woman who could barely stand up while they were learning to ride bikes or trampoline, now she has what she wanted all along. It took so little to convince the authorities that they were better off with her. Almost as if they had been waiting all along for something to happen.

‘I suppose it’s easier for her this time. My daughter doesn’t move around too much now that she’s in a wheelchair. And they’ve both grown up a lot since they’ve been back with her. Too fast, I say. Couldn’t help it, I suppose. When you have to fend for yourself the majority of the time, that’s what happens. I knew it would end up that way, and I used it as an argument, but it turned out I didn’t have a leg to stand on. Family trait, that. One way or another, only my son appears to have functioning legs nowadays.

‘My daughter was paralysed from the chest down. I was responsible: I was driving the car. But still, I can’t be sure it’s as simple as that. I’ve never mentioned it to anybody before, but I think I had known for a long time that something similar was destined to happen to me, one day.

‘It started almost as soon as she was born. I began to be afflicted with an inexplicable phenomenon. I couldn’t cross a road, no matter how safe I knew it to be, without feeling, or sensing, I suppose, a dull thud to the side of my head every time I set foot off the pavement. At first it was just a curious irritant, but I became more and more unsettled by it. You’d find me wheeling around in panic halfway across roads, certain that I’d missed something. Didn’t matter whether I was on my own or with the kids. I don’t know how to describe it. A dry thud. Just a hint. No moving parts. As if a tiny drum were being beaten inside. Always on the right side.

‘Time went by and the clarity of the impact increased. I could even hear it, almost. Every time I crossed a bloody road. I had never actually witnessed a motor accident, not even been involved in one, so there was no way I could have any idea how accurate the feeling and the sounds were. Turns out I was spot on. Lucky me.

‘But life went on as normal. It had to. I took them to see their cousins. My brother’s kids. His lot were a few years older and mine worshipped them. We’d been out all day, like always; swimming in the river, playing cricket, skimming stones, catching frogs, you name it. It was a big day for my two. My brother lived miles out in the country. He was always on at me to move out nearer, but I didn’t want to. He was chipping away at me again that day; it had become more of a ritual than anything else, but I knew my guard was dropping. The children were never happier than when semi-submerged in an ice-cold river with their cousins. Watch them at it for long enough and you can start to believe anything.

‘We went back to my brother’s and he lit a barbecue. He was, he is, a fabulous cook. It was the sort of end to the sort of day you tried hard not to forget. I had to dismiss the dangerous thoughts flitting around my addled mind. Sun, meat, wine, contentedness, they’re all imposters of the worst kind, I reminded myself. This was just a day. There was no sense in extrapolating it out to a lifetime.

‘I was tired and my brother offered us beds for the night. The kids were desperate to stay but I wanted to get back. They had another busy day coming up and I desperately needed to do some work. I had been neglecting it during the school holidays, even though it was the busiest time of year for me. And there I was, frittering it away in my brother’s garden, drinking his Rioja.

‘It took me a while to get the children ready to go. They were just getting to that point in life where they understood how emotional blackmail worked. They reckoned without the skills I’d built up living with their mother, though, and they were no match for me. I wasn’t popular, but we set off. In silence.

‘Within moments the pair of them were fast asleep. The sky was almost pitch black. A storm was blowing in. We needed it: hadn’t had any rain for a couple of weeks and the country was just about to reach meltdown. Physically and figuratively. I was driving south-east, into the heart of the thunderheads. I don’t even know what kind of satanic blue you’d call their sawn-off lower limits, but they meant business and frankly I was glad my children weren’t awake to witness it.

‘I put my foot down. That had always been my initial reaction to danger. Some people freeze, I let the adrenaline take over. We hurtled into that storm like lemmings over a cliff.

‘A few minutes under the downpour and I relaxed a bit. The drama of the approach didn’t last long under the damp grey drudgery. Rain driving. Survival took over, and I found myself trailing the rear lights of the car ahead. Getting lazy. Twice, three times I physically shook myself awake. I even opened the window for some real air at one point, but got a soaking.

‘My head ached. I could feel the earth spinning. We were over an hour from home and I had never seen rain like it. The drops bounced off the road surface like ping-pong balls. I actually worried the car might get dented. But soon I’d resigned myself to the fact that it would probably never relent, never even ease off, and the regular bashing of it on the roof and the underside of the car became quite soothing.

‘You guessed it. Naturally, I don’t know how long it took, but I dropped off. My awakening was pretty brutal, and reminded me of every time I had crossed the road in the previous 10 years or so. That made it a strangely non-violent experience. I just thought “yes, that’s it, that’s how it feels. I knew that.” I woke with a face full of airbag and a shoulder full of tiny nuggets of car glass. The cacophony outside was infernal. Horns, brakes, minor impacts, screams, it was like a painting; one with loud noises.

‘Finally, even I remembered that it was not just me in the silent car. I tested my limbs and they all seemed to work. I released my seatbelt and turned around as far as I could. My son was behind me. He was grunting frantically, trying to force his door open, but it was too misshapen. I calmed him, then leaned over and opened the front passenger door. He could just clamber through and get out. It was still chucking it down, but we had to be better off on the top of the verge than we were in that car. It could have gone up in flames any moment, as far as we knew. For once he did exactly as I told him and scrambled up to the top. He had a tartan woollen picnic blanket to protect him from the downpour. I thought he was limping a bit, but it was difficult to tell.

‘My daughter, though, she was a different story. She was awake too, and totally still, just looking at me. I had never seen a face that terrified. Jesus. I can’t see her even now without that look superimposing itself. She was begging me to help her, but there was nothing I could do. I tried. She was wedged in underneath the passenger seat. They had to cut her out. At least she was in no pain, as if that makes up for anything.

‘I lost the plot, not to put too fine a point on it. It was all my fault. You can narrow it down to the split-second of time that I nodded off, but it was a whole day, or a whole evening, of irresponsible complacency that had caused it. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t put the two, the cause and effect, together. One was so trivial, one so life-changing. They didn’t belong in the same plane. It wouldn’t even be strictly true to say that I couldn’t forgive myself: at the time I was incapable even of comprehending the reality of it.

‘My ex-wife licked her lips, of course. She took the children from me as easily as if she had slipped rohipnol into my drink. The tables turned, and from then it was I who never saw them. That was none of her doing, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t suit her just fine. I simply couldn’t face it. I saw my son a few times, when I would sneak along to watch him play football or cricket; but not my daughter. I saw her once, in her chair. I stared and cried. Apparently my reaction caused her more upset than the accident did. Even coming from my ex-wife, I believe that. How the hell could I have made things worse than they were? Quite a talent I’ve got, there.

‘I became more and more withdrawn. I told myself I didn’t really have anybody – I couldn’t open up. It was all a lie, of course: for a start, there was my brother, but I would have felt stupid: if only I had stayed with him that night, none of it would ever have happened. My friends were desperate to know what was going on, but I cut them out completely. All I needed was those last few hours in my brother’s garden, the spiteful rain and the look on my innocent daughter’s face. Until that point I had been her father and she had loved me. There was no room for friends.

‘Work fell away, too. I felt like exploring. It was a compulsion that grew in me. I travelled further and further afield, generally from pub to pub. I met some interesting people, people who had no idea I was a maimer of children. I appreciated the way they knew nothing about me. Not like the others. It was so liberating that I wondered why it had taken me so long to figure it out.

‘One night I was out, as usual. There was snow. It must have been April, but there was snow. I can’t remember how far from home I’d gone, but I was never more than a bus trip or two away, so it’s not like the climate would have been any different from where I lived. Besides, sometimes there’s snow in April. It’s not that peculiar. I was chatting to a stranger, which was nothing new. I don’t think I had ever even been in that pub before, but it was difficult to be sure. Anyway, I started waxing lyrical about the snow and the liberation of being totally free from the constrictions of my life, carrying no baggage, answering to nobody, recognising no authority except my own imperatives, all that sort of stuff. I had started to believe it myself.

‘I couldn’t believe the old fart hung around listening for so long. I must have been rabbiting on for hours. He even bought me a pint when I started to run dry. In the end he heard me out. He just looked at me and smiled. Gave me a phone number, told me to call it whenever I could, although he recommended I sobered up first.

‘I called the next day. It was this place. I spoke to a few people over the course of the next week or so, tried to do some background research where I could. I even had to use a library – there are still some left if you know where to look. But the long and the short is that I ended up right here, talking to you. I had no idea things could be so good again.’

I looked at him. His face was impassive.

‘Very good,’ he said. ‘You’re a standard hopeless case. I was hoping for something else, but it’s pretty rare we get that.’ He supped his beer and considered his next truth. It was not long coming. ‘As it goes, you’re in the right place; there was nowhere else that would have taken you. But you need to know, this is no bolthole,’ he looked at me seriously. ‘You might feel you’re as far away here from anywhere as you can get, but it’s nowhere near far enough. One day it’ll find you.

‘I must tell you, your marriage was a good match-up, if not a good match, in the end. You’ll both go to great lengths, it seems, to develop your own ways of avoiding responsibility. You’ve really outdone yourself with this one, though. Pisses on her alcoholism. You know, that Sound is pretty effective at protecting us from the undesirable, but there are limits. You can’t drown what’s after you. You can only fight against adversaries who’ll tire. This is no contest. The sooner you realise that, the better for you.’

I believed he had ruined, in one short speech, my whole evening, but it seems he wasn’t finished.

‘Let it come,’ he continued. ‘Let it come and do its worst. It’s nowhere near as powerful as you think. You think any harm can come to you here? There’s no chance of that. I’ll repeat it: you’re in the right place. Let it come, and be done with it; because until then you can’t hope to achieve anything. That desk of yours, for example, will remain in half-formed pieces around your cellar. Look at yourself now: you crave beauty, aesthetic masturbation, just because you know no better. It’s not your fault. What you don’t realise is that there’s no room inside you for that beauty to live. Or at least no more than a superficial shaving of it. You’re still too shallow. That’s why you need to take on what you’ve run away from. And then, once you’ve cleared the blockage, you won’t be able to help yourself: everything you produce will show you the perfection you covet now, and you’ll know it like you’ve never known anything before. Of course, one day it’ll come to mean nothing to you again, of course, but that’ll simply be a measure of how you’ve developed.

‘I’m glad you’ve come here,’ he added, ‘and everybody recognises how significant it is. But I can’t be of any help to you until you’ve dropped the counterweight that’s keeping part of you over there. We’ll continue to argue about art and utility and all that fine stuff, and it’ll be funny for a while, but we’ll both tire of it and eventually you’ll have missed your only opportunity. You won’t be able to stay here. He’ll see to it.’

‘Who will?’ I asked.

‘I think you know the answer to that,’ he frowned. ‘But, again, there’s really no need to worry. He has no intrinsic power, you must realise that. He can only act on what you have already decided is inevitable. I’m the same, although my purpose is vastly different, of course. You’ll find it’s a recurring theme amongst us here.’

I sipped my pint, which had remained mostly untouched through my story. Outside, The Child was approaching the empty church, striding muscularly through the insouciant drifts, his faithful mutt trotting, head down, oblivious to all but his master’s heels. They didn’t enter the building, but carried on past, vaulted the back wall and disappeared from view almost immediately. The ground must fall away quite sharply behind the church, I thought to myself. I had never been that way.