PART ONE

Back in the time of Giants

Years ago now, in a town called Antrim, on the eastern shore of Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, there were two kids from an estate named Parkhall. The kids were Pearse and May-Belle, of whom people have heard a lot, but know little.

When they were wee – and this was a very long time ago – these children did a whole host of terrible things, so some say, and were punished and sent away. Part of the rules of their sending away had it that they could never see each other again – whether free or at large, no matter how old they grew, inside or out.

Now, two such people as Pearse and May-Belle were not meant to be apart – depend on that. And so, when they could, throughout their lives, and no matter where they were, they worked and wended their way towards each other, regardless of who said what: the courts, the police, social workers, prison guards, government ministers, doctors or probation officers, let alone the newspapers and the great general public at large.

For no other reason than it seems to go that boys always get their say in first, Pearse's story begins when he comes to consciousness – as he would put it – sometime around the age of two; early for most, granted, but he remembered it all.

In Pearse's house back then there was a long hall, front to rear, that seemed to have no end to it – just a fizzing black hole at the very back of the house – a kitchen, a cubby-hole place under some stairs for the coal and bad kids; rooms, a door, paintings of horses and men, little brass bells, a polar bear mat and TV.

Around this time, young Pearse carries out what he considers to be a great act of heroism. The great act of heroism is this: he walks into the kitchen, goes to a drawer, gets out a fork, returns to the living room – where the father fella, Da, will not stop shouting and swearing and hitting, and Mum won't stop screaming and crying and hitting back – and Pearse stabs the fork into Da's leg, pretty deep for the thrust of a little arm. 'I kill you,' Pearse said. He was still too young back then to have a proper sense of the future tense, or perhaps he thought that words had to back up deeds to make the action happen, like magic. Whatever the reasons for the grammar, Da dropped him with a bop to the face, a lion paw cuff, which, before Pearse hit the ground, realigned his wee body in space, so his feet swapped places with his head.

Often Pearse would be told about this by Mum and Gran, but never by Da, of course; for Da it never happened. But for years this was proof of Pearse's future character. The day Pearse showed him.

After all of this terrific bravery, there didn't seem to be anything very much of anything going on for a while, just a grey bobbing along of Champion the Wonder Horse, the news, playing in the park; food, mostly beans and Smash.

Things start to jellify a little, though, around the Time of the Beehive. The beehive is a mound of stones – or maybe bricks – piled in the back-yard, pine-coned like an old-fashioned beehive; an attraction he has never seen before. Barky the dog is there too. Pearse declared to