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first house where clothes left in a wardrobe went mouldy overnight. It was an ease to her worry, though, that Victor was a Trustee prisoner from the start. Trust our Victor, she would say, and shake her head so that it could be seen that she was rueful but also proud.
    When she went into the visiting room he was usually satthere before her with that grin on that made you want to slap and also hug him. Of course she could not lay a hand across the table in light of warning notices that attempts to make physical contact will result in immediate termination of visit. At first it seemed that the desk where they sat was a great gulf separating mother and son. He was dark-skinned by nature but underneath he was pale. James told her once that sunlight was necessary to put vitamins in the skin. One of the foolish things he would say with the intention no doubt of putting the fear of God into her heart. A man who would go to football matches but would not come to visit his son. She knew there was nothing in it. But still a mother’s natural woe.
    Well son, she would always begin, and then they would sit there with nothing to say like persons who are facing a great jeopardy. She would feel as if her tongue and lips had betrayed her or that somehow words had been denied. She felt these encounters onerous. It was not something she could easily bear except that Victor seemed to have a light of understanding of this problem in his eye. At such times it seemed as if the whole room had stopped in a description of eternity. It occurred to her that speech itself is a cruel deceiver or kind of hoax which could not be relied upon. This fact was an ache felt in her breast. It left a taste as if of ashes in her mouth. When it seemed they had reached a pitch of silence to overtake endurance, a type of humming in the ears, Victor would find words like a man describing with hesitance a turning point in his life or a time he thought he would die but didn’t. He told her the routine of his day, which did not vary. The quietness of his nights without a soul. She saw then that he would not go to seed or fall into brooding. Someone, he said, had told him how great men had found thoughts to guide them for the rest of their lives during dreary prison nights. The result was she felt assurance and when people on the street stopped to ask her, how’s Victor? she was able to answer them with cheerfulness . Although she had misgivings from the start that the world would seek to thwart his high objective. It brought anightly tear to her eye to think of him there in a dark cell turning things over in his head and perhaps going to the window to stare through the bars. She wondered if she had found the words to advise him would he have taken her advice so that she was not now heartrended.

seven
    Ryan noticed how newspapers and television were developing a familiar and comforting vocabulary to deal with violence. Sentences which could be read easily off the page. It involved repetition of key phrases. Atrocity reports began to achieve the pure level of a chant. It was no longer about conveying information. It was about focusing the mind inwards, attending to the durable rhythms of violence.
    Coppinger pointed out how the essential details of an attack, the things which differentiated one incident from another, were missing. Points which he considered vital were being omitted from eyewitness accounts. Whether the killer spoke the victim’s name before firing. Whether or not the victim wore a mask, a combat jacket, a boilersuit. It was rare for paramilitaries to wear a stocking mask. It was a question of vanity. It made you look like an ancient bare-knuckle boxer. It suggested mild brain damage. Parkas were popular, berets, sunglasses. The black balaclava was a favourite and Coppinger held that this was due to commando films popular in the city. The Cockleshell Heroes.
    They agreed that the reporting of violent incident was beginning to diverge from events. News