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Memories flood him. He's returning to himself as if pulling on a skinsuit. He forces his appendages into thick legs, chunky arms—repossesses his gut, his barrel chest, his big, hairy head. Feels a tingling in his fingertips, a chilly prickling sensation in his toes. He's dizzy, suddenly. Dizzy and sick. Drunk, too. He raises his head and feels his beard stick to something syrupy. He lets out a breath. Licks sweetness from his lips. Tastes almonds and old coins.

Recollection hits him like a train. For a moment, he feels as if he's hurtling at high speed through a collage of shredded images and blurry snapshots. He sees himself banging on the cracked wood of the back door. Sees his own face looming back at him from the darkened glass. Tastes again the sticky sweetness of the liquor. Hears the echo of his pitiful mewing: his pleas to be admitted, to be heard. Hears himself call her name. It becomes a mantra. 'Trina.... Trina.... Let me in! Trina.... Trina.... Let me in!' He's angry. Angry and sad and confused and drunk. He's the man he was before her. Before them. He's the man he was before Sal and Jarod. He's the bad man again. He's the bad man he becomes when he drinks.

He dies a little inside as a vision unspools inside his head. He sees himself lose patience. Sees himself put his shoulder to the wood. Sees himself stumble into the little boot room by the back door. Sees himself breathe in the damp and the earth and the cowshit and the fried food and all the mingled scents of this place that was once home. There was something else, too, wasn't there? Something underneath. Something that makes him think of meat wagons and afterbirth.

He pushes himself upright, a sound like Velcro tearing as he wrenches himself free of the pool of drying blood beneath his cheek. Smears a hand across his face, pushes his fingers into his hair. Takes stock of himself.

He's on his knees on the flagstone floor of the kitchen. Blood on his face, in his hair, on his hands. There's a low buzzing sound in his head and a pain running from his crown to the nape of his neck. He thinks of zippers. Thinks of cracked pots and hard-boiled eggs. Thinks of the phrenology skull on top of the three-bar fire.

He turns slowly, blinking as if staring into the sun. Everything's hazy. Instinctively, he touches his face. His glasses. Where are his bloody glasses....

He pats the floor around him. Screws up his face as the pain tunnels through his hair, his flesh: grinds into the bone at the base of his skull.

He lets out a low moan. His eyes are all tears and redness. He feels as if he's in the grip of a fever. Remembers the hallucinations he used to suffer in childhood, the nightmares and apparitions that slithered and crawled around his bedroom while his mother held him still: sobbing against her chest as he cried and thrashed and begged for it to stop; for her to take it away, to make them quiet, just for a moment—one blessed moment without the static, sibilant hissing at the centre of his brain.

He touches flesh. Cold, clammy skin. Thinks of slaughtered swine. Thinks of church candles. Thinks of the tramp he'd fished out of the harbour at Maryport: his putrid skin sliding off the bone like slow-cooked lamb.

She's lying half on her side. One big ham-hock arm is draped across her middle, the other pointed straight out to her side. She's wearing her nightie—the pink one with the white flowers. A fluffy burgundy slipper still covers her left foot. The right is naked: chubby pink toes and chipped red polish. He begins to shake. Trembles as he moves closer. Feels his heart punching at his ribs. Reaches out and takes her arm and pulls her on to her back.

There's a gash in her throat—a livid purple hole torn in the folds of her flabby throat. His spectacles stick out of the gory mess in a gruesome mosaic of smashed glass and spattered blood. Her face is a yellowy grey: the colour of the ceiling above a smoker's bed. There's blood in her nostrils. Blood in her hair. Whole constellations of red pin-pricks pattern the dead whiteness of her irises.

He blinks. Takes it in. Lets the full horror of what he has done flood his senses.

He says her name. Trina. Moves forward and touches her face with the back of his hand. Looms over her the way he used to when this was his home, and he was her man, and her arms fastened around his broad back like rope, and she made her farmyard noises and bit his neck, and he had all that he wanted in the world. Her kids called him Uncle Wulf. He knows they'd have called him Dad, eventually, if she'd just left them alone.