And with this young man, who now steps out of the back door and makes his way down the beleaguered path to a ramshackle hut from which there rises a welcoming chorus of coos and flutterings.

His name is Calhoun Mooney, but he's universally known as Cal. He is twenty-six, and has worked for five years at an insurance firm in the city centre. It's a job he takes no pleasure in, but escape from the city he's lived in all his life seems more unlikely than ever since the death of his mother, all of which may account for the weary expression on his well-made fare.

He approaches the door of the pigeon loft, opens it, and at that moment - for want of a better - this story takes wing.

Cal had told his father several times that the wood at the bottom of the soft door was deteriorating. It could only be a matter of time before the planks rotted completely, giving the rats who lived and grew gross along the railway line access to the pigeons. But Brendan Mooney had shown little or no interest in his racing birds since Eileen's death. This despite; or perhaps because, the birds had been his abiding passion during her life. How often had Cal heard his mother complain that Brendan spent more time with his precious pigeons that he did inside the house? She would not have had that complaint to make now; now Cal's father sat most of every day at the bade window, staring out into the garden and watching the wilderness steadily take charge of his wife's handiwork, as if he might find in the spectacle of dissolution some clue as to how his grief might be similarly erased. There was little sign that he was learning much from his vigil however. Every day, when Cal came back to the house in Chariot Street - a house he'd thought to have left for good half a decade ago, but which his father's isolation had obliged him to return to - it seemed he found Brendan slightly smaller. Not hunched, but somehow shrunken, as though he'd decided to present the smallest possible target to a world suddenly grown hostile.