It was two days before her seventeenth birthday that she told me. We were sitting on the old swings in the corner of St Andrew's Park and it was already pitch black because it was November. She was all quiet and pinched from the minute I met her, which was weird. Usually my head was wrecked listening to her – "I had to sneak out in case Mammy caught me", "Fiona says the gang are going drinking down by the pier on Friday", "Fr. O'Brien asked me to do a reading at Mass on Saturday evening but the disco is starting at eight". Not that night though. That night she was quiet and pinched, and then she told me she was pregnant.

"Fuck me," I said, and then there was just silence except for the squeak of the rusty old swing set we were swaying on.

I was seventeen. Same as Stephen when Lucas was born, I guess. Just an overgrown kid. Not that I'd admit it. No, I wanted to be a man. Wanted the world to see me as that – powerful, strong and tough as nails. Never weak. Never frightened. Always in control. Like the men I used to clean up after night after night in the old man's pub in Dublin.

The fact that I wasn't those things, well… I'd had enough practice pretending by then, hadn't I? Ten years of shoving stuff as far under the surface as I could so no one would see it.

Eileen was part of the whole package – pretty, popular, feisty, fit. Up for a roll in the hay, if you know what I mean. And the stories I could tell the lads over a bonfire with a few cans of cider – smelly fingers and hand jobs and squeezing tits. Can still remember it, the way they'd guffaw dirty laughs and look at me like I was the fucking man, because the closest most of them had come was copping a quick feel through three layers of clothes at the Church disco, fucking awkward as hell. They hadn't learned that to get what you want, you just need to fake it.

As for the rolls in the hay themselves, I suppose I enjoyed them. It got my rocks off anyway. Obviously. She wouldn't have been sitting there two days before her seventeenth birthday telling me she was up the duff if it hadn't, would she? Jesus, I was seventeen. Horny as hell. Would have shagged a sheep if I'd caught one.

I mean, now I know better. Now when I think of it – bumpy and mellow and over in about thirty seconds. Can't even compare it to that hard, carnal sensation of sex with a man. But back then, how was I to know?

She wasn't a beard. Not at first, anyway. Despite what she thinks.

So first thing I thought (and said) was, "Fuck me", as I already mentioned. Sensitive, I know. But like most seventeen-year-olds, I was a knob.

Next thing that happened was she started talking.

Not talking, hyperventilating.

"Oh Jesus, Brendan, what's Mammy going to say? And Daddy? He'll kill me. And the priest. The family won't be able to go to Sunday Mass without everyone looking. Oh Jesus. Jesus. What the hell am I going to do?"

And then the third thing happened.

"We'll get married."

I said it calmly. Authoritatively. Like someone who knew how to fix the problem. Someone in control. Someone who wasn't all gangly limbs and spotty skin. A man.

And once I'd said it, I knew it was the right thing. Married, with a kid. Then I'd be a proper man. Then I'd be doing it for real, not just faking it and hoping no one saw that I was shaking underneath.

When she lost the baby, that was hard. We were three months married by then. I'd dropped out of school and was working for an English bloke called Houston in some dingy Belfast nightclub – The Star, it was called – working the bar, manning the door… plus a few less legal errands that put a few extra quid in my back pocket. Was at work when it happened, actually – when she started bleeding. No mobile phones back in those days, kids, so the first I heard of it was five am as I stumbled home after the customary Wednesday night lock-in with Houston and his cronies, serving the drinks as they played poker, throwing away sums on a single hand that could have bought the crappy flat I was scraping rent for. These were men. This was what I wanted to be.

Anyway, her Ma was there when I got back. In our flat. She just looked at me with this wrinkled up expression, pious fucking bitch, like I smelled bad. Then she says, frigid as anything, "Eileen's lost the baby, she's going to stay at ours", and she left me on my own.

I don't know, I suppose I should have been relieved. I mean, we were seventeen, for fuck's sake. Seventeen and living in a dump and I was barely making enough money for the two of us to survive let alone an extra mouth. But I wasn't. I felt hollow, like I was losing something. I felt my castrating bitch of a mother-in-law swooping in and seizing my chance. I felt that weird, foreign sensation of being needed, of belonging somewhere, that had gently started to pool around me over the last three months evaporating.

Well, fuck that.

So yeah, it was me that convinced her that we should try again, as it turned out. The very next morning, in fact. I waited until my hangover had eased considerably and sauntered around to her Ma's house with as much mustered confidence as I could and I hugged her and told her it was okay and I whispered that we could have another baby.

She asked me if I was okay. I remember that really clearly. It kind of caught me off guard, I think. Her looking up at me from that embroidered chair (the whole fucking house looked like someone had vomited doilies all over it), eyes red-rimmed but dry, like all the tears had already been cried away.

"I'm sorry about the way you heard, Bren," she said, fucking quivering voice and all. "Are you okay?"

I shrugged out of it easy enough, boomeranged it back with some drivel about my main worry being her, and she lapped it up. I mean, it wasn't even really alive yet, was it? Even if they had been able to tell us it was a girl. Even if we had thought maybe we'd call her Niamh. It was just a bunch of cells. I wasn't going to turn into a whinging fucking bitch about that, was I? Not when we could just make a new one. Simple.

It was eleven months later that Declan arrived.

Woah.

Nothing prepared me for that. I mean, fucking nothing.

He was perfect. Fall-down-on-your-knees-and-kiss-the-ground-in-worship perfect. Pure and good and innocent and blessed. Like nothing I had ever known in my whole fucked-up existence.

Now I had something to try for.

And I did try, really did. Retrospect and all that… I suppose, I probably didn't try the right way. Now that I know that every action has a consequence. Now that I know a few extra quid for the family isn't always "no strings attached" – that some day some deranged psycho might try to hurt that family because you sold one bad poxy E to his brother. And now that I've seen Stephen, alone and abused and thrown into fatherhood just like I was, trying in a totally different way.

But that was me, what can I say? An honest day's pay for a hard day's graft, that was a mug's game. Fuck them, those shells of men crawling around in the gutter, stretching everything they could to make ends meet, powerless and impotent and not in control. I didn't want that. I wanted to be respected. In charge. I'd spent enough of my life in a fucking whirlpool of powerlessness. I wanted to be the one in control.

So that's how the first few years passed. Me working my way through the ranks under Danny Houston, hawk-like watching, soaking it all up like a sponge. By the time I was twenty-two I was his right-hand man. Like I said, all you gotta do is fake it.

The move to Liverpool was really because of Pete. After the crash. After he knew… or thought he knew about me. Bullshit, really. I'd had a few gropes before – drunken, fumbling things I didn't understand – but it was nothing I'd examined in the daylight. I was married, for fuck's sake. I had a kid. I had a woman in my bed every night of the week and I shagged her regularly, thank you very much. Those piss-headed fumbles, they weren't my fault. I made that clear, too. Danny Houston had taught me ways to make myself very clear.

But with Pete it was different. Pete was a mate. My best mate, I suppose. One of the lads I had sat around the bonfire necking cans of cider with. One of the blokes that helped out on my less legal errands once Danny had promoted me enough to let me, "Take someone you trust wiv you". He wasn't some insignificant runt like that queer-as-folk Nolan boy. Pete mattered.

I was drunk to fuck when I did it, obviously. The rest of them had already drank themselves into slumber so it was just the two of us left, sitting around the bonfire in the middle of nowhere, two city boys plonked into countryside. Too old to light a bonfire down at the pier anymore, we'd figured, so a camping trip was suggested as the obvious way to relive our misspent youth for a weekend. Just me and him and the fire and about a gallon of cider splashing around in my belly and I just landed on him, messy and open. Drunk to fuck, obviously.

Still, it stung like hell the way he looked at me. Drunk or not. Looked at me exactly the way I looked at myself, when no one else was watching. Like I was a filthy, weak faggot.

I don't really remember the crash, you know. Honest to God. Don't think I wanted to hurt Pete though – ironically, the only man to knock me back and the only one I didn't want to beat the shit out of. Naw, I just wanted it to be over then. The game was up. The mask was gone. I felt like he knew everything, the whole shebang. My whole tragic life exposed and I just wanted it to be over now, please. I wasn't even fucking gay, but I didn't know what the fuck I was… A freak. A weird, unnatural, unholy freak.

Honestly, I don't even know if I thought about Declan in those seconds before I slammed the van into that tree. I hope I did. I hope I whispered some little prayer to keep him safe, but I don't really remember.

I fucked off to Liverpool after that. Upped sticks and fled, Eileen and Declan in tow. Danny was opening a club there, I was going to manage it – in charge at last. And Pete… well, he wasn't my problem no more, was he?

So Vinnie, he was my first, I guess. Funny, because I bet if you asked him he wouldn't have told you that. He never would have guessed it. That's how in control I was. It was just "yes boss", drop trou', "thank you boss" and "see ya later". No chats, no caresses, no romance. Just some weird scab that I had to pick at every so often. My terms. Thinking about it now, Vinnie was messed up. Must have been, to take it like that, silent and grateful and not one hint of protest if I clocked him one because my day was shit. Must have been, to try it on with Danny. I never found out why though. Never cared what had happened in his life to make him willing to take the shit I gave him. He was letting me pick at that scab, what the fuck did I care?

I feel bad about that, sometimes. But it's too late now. Like a lot of things.

Eileen didn't like Liverpool. Home bird, and all that. She stuck it out for a couple of years, joined Pilates or whatever-the-fuck, but basically she wanted out. When she got pregnant again, it was the tipping point. Wanted back home to the warms talons of that fucking fanged beast of a mother of hers. We argued about it for a bit, which was unusual for us. I didn't argue with Eileen. Just kept her happy and ignorant of what I did, where I was, who I was with. It'd just upset her, I figured. But yeah, I had a good deal in Liverpool – basically my own boss, good wage, tidy extra on the side, Vinnie there to help me pick at that scab when I needed to, and none of those fucking ghosts that haunted Belfast. I didn't want to leave. But in the end. Like I said, I kept her happy and ignorant.

I took over the Star when we got home – Danny'd moved back to England by then. Months passed, Padraig came, I was besotted again and for a bit that scab didn't bother me at all. 'Til one day it just did again.

There was a string of them after that. None like Vinnie though. None self-loathing enough to put up with how I treated them for long. I went through them pretty fast, and it worried me. Belfast was small. Then things started with Macca.

It wasn't ideal. He was Eileen's brother-in-law, married to her little sister Angie. Potentially messy. But he was eager as fucking anything, never met a man so desperate to get a bumming. And I had that bloody scab I needed to pick at. Truth be told, he irritated the shit out of me other than that. Whining and moaning and shouting out "Brendan" when he came like he was in a fucking Mills and Boon novel, deliberately dropping innuendo into conversations in front of our wives. I had to use my fists on him more than once, but he seemed to lap that up as much as the sex, fucked-up bastard.

It was a Friday when she found out. I can actually still see it, played out like a video tape in front of my eyes. Macca was crouched in the fucking wardrobe – the wardrobe, like some cringe-worthy rom-com with Ben Stiller – and she's just staring at me and my deflating semi and the sheets covered in sweat and sperm and she just lets rip. I mean, seriously. I'd never seen her like that, but it's she's unleashing twelve years of pent-up hurt and anger and disappointment. She throwing things, and screaming, and it's "Mammy was right all along" and "twelve fucking years of my life" and "how many women have there been, I know this isn't the first time". Fuck me. Apparently I hadn't kept her happy or ignorant. I'd failed, obviously.

Obviously.

The real questions didn't start until later. After I'd managed to get rid of Macca – I actually think he wanted to get caught, the fucking racket he made climbing out the window – and was finally able to breathe again. Only I couldn't breathe. Not really. Because my life was over.

I've never flown a plane, but you know when they say "caught in a tailspin"? That's what I reckon had happened. I was just powerless, watching reality hurtling closer and closer to the ground to smash into a million pieces.

Let me ask, what would you do? Go on. You're caught in a tailspin. The plane is going to crash. You have no control.

There was only one thing I could do. Push the fucking eject button.

So I did. I ejected myself. I packed up my stuff and I hopped on the ferry and I showed up on Cheryl's doorstep because she was the only person I knew who would be happy to see me. The. Only. Person.

And the part that I'm not mentioning is the most important one. The part where I don't go back to visit at weekends because I'm scared as shit of Eileen. The part where, three months later I go home for Christmas and Declan is six fucking inches taller than the last time I saw him and Padraig's GAA team played in Croke Park three weeks earlier and "all the dads went". The part where, a year later, Declan comes to stay and his voice is deep and he doesn't hug or say "I love you" anymore. The part where I phone one day and Padraig picks up and doesn't recognise my voice. The part where it's Christmastime and I chase them to Busaras bus station and they tell me to fuck off and leave them alone.

So the point is, I get it. I get it because I lost mine already. And it was my fault. Because I tried in the wrong way. Because I didn't treat their mother right. Because I pressed the fucking eject button when the whole world was nose-diving and I didn't know that two years apart might as well be fifty when they're your kids and they'll be grown up next time you look.

And now he's losing his and it's my fault again. My fucking fault. And even though he's crying now, he has no idea how much the weight of this this is going to crush him to dust if he lets two years trickle by.

I am powerless and impotent and not in control.

I want to fix it. Before he chases them to the bus stop and they tell you to fuck off. Please, let me fix it.

Please, Stephen.