It was his watch strap on his white wrist I remember. It was a silver bracelet and jangled when he shook his hand. He’d talk, and, to emphasise the point, he’d shake his wrist. I was mesmerised by his hands. Those hands I’d seen holding the Eucharist above the crowd at Mass each Sunday.

Now they were a few inches from mine.

He listened and was interested in me. I watched his handsome face shake with merriment at my feeble jokes. I felt wanted for the first time in my life.

But that was later, much later.

It was the Thursday afternoon I’d bought the record.

Geography was from two to five.

No, I couldn’t stand it. I turned away, away from those long windows with the cobwebbed corners. Away from that smell of newly polished wooden floors and shining tables. I walked away from school, from imprisoned innocents, and walked towards town.

I entered my world, full of second-hand furniture, books and music.

The quays of the Liffey offered a wonderland of escape. Books stalls, old furniture shops, records in tattered covers, all awaiting to be handled and perused, bought, loved and brought home to a new life.

Finally, a purchase, a second hand record: - “You’ll Never Know” sung by Sammy Davis. I picked up the record in its brown paper cover.

“I’m not too sure that’s Sammy Davis Junior, I think it may be his father” the man said as I handed him my two shillings. “His father was a singer too.”

He looked up from his encyclopaedia of popular American music.

“Played in the Music Halls, he was pretty good.”

We both looked at the circular white label on the black record and, sure enough, it only said “Sammy Davis”. I hesitated, and then said “I’ll take it anyway”.

It was just as I was coming out of the shop that I bumped into Father O’Shea- large, laughing and friendly.

“Caught you mitching from school, have I?” he said, and touched my shoulder so slightly.

Over tea and cakes in Bewley’s Coffee Shop we talked.

He listened and, every now and then, with a twist of his wrist, his silver watch strap jangling, would agree wholeheartedly or disagree gently.

“Things are not always what they seem to be” he smiled when I told him about the record. When he laughed I noticed his white collar was too tight around his red neck. The blackness of his suit seemed to be pressing against his body as if the only release was an escape upwards. He drove me home in his little dark VW beetle. We parked outside the house. The television light played on the front widow curtains.

“No. I won’t come in,” he said, slowly pulling up the handbrake.

Just as I was leaving the car he reached and held my hand, not in a handshake, but softly and gently. He began to slowly to caress my palm. His strong face now seemed childlike and pleading.

I panicked and, clutching the record, opened the car door and ran to the house.

At the door I looked back at the small black car. He looked so forlorn and sad, sitting there, his eyes, his white collar catching the light from the streetlights.

The noise from the spluttering motor died as he turned the corner and headed home.

I felt frightened, relieved and, somehow, guilty.

Opening the door I heard the television blaring.

“Bobby Kennedy has been shot.”

My father stood up and looked at me and said “They’ve killed him, the only honest one of them all. We’ll never know truth again from that crowd.”

The small whiskey glass stood empty at his side.

My mother turned and smiled from her chair, a sweet sad smile.

I hurried up the stairs away from their world.

My mother accidentally broke the record.

She accidentally trod on it while hoovering the room the following Saturday morning.

“I’m so sorry” she said as we both looked down on the broken record pieces.

“It’s okay.”

She looked surprised that I wasn’t upset.

We began to collect the black plastic pieces.

I could still read “Sammy Davis Sings” on parts of the white label.

“It’s funny” I said, “But I’ll never know who sang this song, ‘You’ll Never Know’ - Sammy Davis or his father.”

But she misunderstood me

“He’s been moved”

“Who?”

“Father O’Shea, he’s been moved and no one knows where.”

I felt sick.

I never saw him again.

Never knew how he dealt with life, with love, with, perhaps death.

Quietly, we put the broken pieces in the bin.

The white and the black.

I thought I saw my mother crying, but it could have been my imagination.

I don’t know.

Will never know.