3am. Lilly is awake. Huddled at the end of her bed, arms wrapped tightly round the knees that are pressed to her chest, tears streaming down her cheeks, breath coming from her constricted lungs in huge, undignified gulps. Knowing again what it is to be totally and completely empty inside. No spark of life. No sense of connection. Only pain.

It is always the same this moment. Always she wakes at the same point. Always she is gouging her way out of thick blackness, awakened by the sound of her own wailing.

It is always the waiting that unnerves her. Always the systematic annihilation of hope as one by one the children emerge skipping and laughing from the subway. Always the advent of emptiness, imperceptible at first, then building, child after child, as she identifies no faces, recognises no voices, knows no footstep.

And then the long, long waiting. In case her child has been delayed. In case her life might still have meaning.

Lilly has been here before. Several times a year for thirty-five years. She always waits. She always hopes. She always wakes up to the sound of her own wailing.

It always starts so well. She and Bryoni. Bryoni dancing along the street. Bryoni laughing. Bryoni telling her to hurry.

"Maa-am! We'll be late, don'tchaknow."

How was it that she would know just how Bryoni would look?

Pigtails. Golden bunches really. Funny how she sees the pink bobbles on the elastic so clearly. Matching Bryoni's socks. Pink socks. Bell blue dungarees. Holding a yellow balloon in one hand and a parcel in the other. It's a birthday thing you see.

"Mam hurry! Hurry! I can't be late."

That voice. Lilly had never heard that voice. Not outside her head. Not ever. How was it that she knew just how Bryoni would sound?

Almost running now. Bryoni leading the way. Hand held tight. But Lilly has never held her hand. How did she know each contour so well? Can't be late. Won't be late. Breathing heavily. It's always like this.

Reaching the crossing. Black and white on the road. All the partygoers on the other side. Waiting. Bryoni hopscotching across the road. Lilly waving goodbye.

"Be a good girl now Bryoni. Have fun. See you at five. Don't be late!"

It's a Mother thing.

Lilly not knowing. Not even after all these times. All these re-runs. Not even now.

Where does time go in these dreams? What did she do for two hours? Lilly has no idea. But she knows she is back at the meeting point. At the entrance to the subway. Where she had been asked to be. Waiting. Early! Waiting for Bryoni.

It is always the waiting that unnerves her. Always the systematic annihilation of hope as one by one the children emerge skipping and laughing from the subway. Always the advent of emptiness, imperceptible at first, then building, child after child, as she identifies no faces, recognises no voices, knows no footstep.

And then the long, long waiting. In case her child has been delayed. In case her life might still have meaning.

Lilly has been here before. Several times a year for thirty-five years. She always waits. She always hopes. She always wakes up to the sound of her own wailing.

BRYONI!

Lilly MacNeil was seventeen when she fell from grace. The year was 1969, the place was Belfast. There was no worse time, no worse place for falling.

Her father, Andrew MacNeil was an elder to the flock in Mount Zion Pentecostal Tabernacle – a small, slightly isolated coterie of believers who eagerly awaited Christ's coming ("perhaps today" according to the handpainted scroll on the wall behind the raised platform fronting the small hall), priding themselves during His absence on their doctrinal purity and their rigid abstinence from all things that might by others be deemed pleasurable. Her mother Gertrude, a tentative woman, intimidated by life's dawning complexities, played the pedal organ and sometimes sang solo during the altar call - or at least she did until the falling.

Lilly throughout the nineteen-fifties and most of the nineteen-sixties had been a non-prepossessing child, in fact for the greater part of her first seventeen years Lilly had been a fat child. She had never intended to become fat; had not relished or revelled in the nicknames bestowed on her by her lissom athletic cohorts; had watched with morbid dread her bloated body continue to expand, removing her further and further from the life experienced by those around her. Lilly MacNeil learned before she was thirteen years old that the human condition delights in creating outsiders and that those who are "in" ring fence authenticity by creating ever more uncomfortable spaces for those who are deemed to be "out". And so, alone, she lined her space with the comfort of calories. And alone she found solace in the very substance and elements of her alienation. And alone she grew larger.

For awhile she had played the clown. For awhile she had perhaps imagined that her fellow pupils and neighbours were laughing with her. But eventually it had become impossible to pretend that their laughter was anything other than a kind of baiting, a sinister provocation of the outsider, a challenge to produce an even more self-degrading sideshow in the vain hope that the creation of a joke might produce some momentary connection with her tormentors. And so by the age of thirteen Lilly had retreated into her own safer world, hiding her thoughts behind green eyes sinking deeper into fat. And in her world she imagined that she might one day be beautiful, or if not beautiful at least inconspicuous.

Gertrude MacNeil was perhaps not as alarmed as she might have been by her daughter's size and withdrawal. In fact deep in her heart she might from time to time have admitted that she watched Lilly's intake of calories with some degree of relief. For Gertrude had been dreading the onset of her daughter's adolescence - a new concept born of the times in which they lived; a temporary concept, the transient creation of television - the Devil's box and righteously banned from Mount Zion households; and, worse still, of "Pop" – a provocative, gyrating, self-indulgent noise that the organist in Gertrude could never call "music" - propogated by Elvis Presley and those long haired Beatle lads.

These boys were demonstrating an unleashing of sexuality – a concept about which Gertrude knew little, except that it was a most unpleasant experience thrust upon God-fearing women such as herself by the occasional appearance of their husbands' baser nature as punishment for leading them astray in The Garden. Gertrude had been raised, as had her mother before her, to believe that there were God-fearing women who the Scriptures said would be saved through childbirth, thus redeeming and dignifying the whole unfortunate process of copulation, and there were the brazen. The brazen would lead God-fearing men into sin with their flaunting. The brazen were to be avoided and condemned. Gertrude had missed the ironic message of the scripture text that hung above the bed in which she and Andrew had spent all of their married life. "Occupy till I come".

And so Gertrude watched with a guilty relief as her daugher blossomed into heftiness knowing that the child was physically ill-equipped to be brazen and hoping that the trauma of adolescence might pass their family by. For Lilly there were no conversations about awakening womanhood, no preparation for the onset of menstruation, no mention of the thoughts that would well up unbidden in her mind, disorientating her and leaving her breathless. And certainly no explanation of why, fat and ungainly as she was, she would find somewhere inside herself a developing hunger for the comfort of touch or imagine the brushing of a tentative hand across the blue black tumbling of her hair.

The MacNeils knew love in the sense that a puppy dog knows love. Their needs for food, for shelter, and for entertainment, such as it was, were met within a family unit for whom such needs were easily quantifiable and more than affordable. Intimacy, however, was beyond them. Somewhere on their long evolution through history the MacNeil tribe had traded certainty of belief and solid conviction for the fragility of being that allows souls to dance naked in each other's warmth. So Lilly did not expect more than she received. She did not unburden herself of either her alienation from the world around her or of her ever deepening sense of her physical self. Like her mother before her she prepared to cordon off areas of incomprehension both within herself and externally, in the scary place beyond her well-set boundaries. She would become a watcher, protected from participation by her physical dimensions, and she would develop simple needs that could be easily satisfied within the purchasing power of a regular civil service or similar income. Then came the falling, and her world changed for ever.

For many years Lilly could not bring herself to articulate the moment. Could not approach it head on in her conscious living. Only in her subconscious did she relive the falling again and again in images that were never painted in colour. In landscapes that were always wrapped in fog and inky darkness. Alongside monsters who only hinted at presence, but whose absence was more terrifying still.

When awake she was only aware of the pain. Only aware of the fact that there were sounds (like the slamming of a car door) or smells (like the slightly fetid whiff of three day worn underpants mingled with male sweat) or words (like don't you dare tell; like our secret; like you made me do it) that could send her into a state of fugue that lasted for days. She could only remember that she had occupied her mind with thoughts of winter; of the feel of snow underfoot; of the crispness in the air and the redness of noses in the chill; of the crackling of a fire; of the sound of laughter around the Christmas table; of the smell of mince pies. She had occupied her mind with safe places, with familiar smells and sounds. She had blocked out as far as she could the intrusion of his smells and his sounds. Even then she knew that her mind must remain her own place. Her secret space. She had occupied. Till he came.

Lilly does not sleep again that night. The dream has unsettled her one more time. She cleans her little flat though it does not need cleaning, makes herself several cups of tea that end up undrunk and cluttering the clean but faded surfaces that define the confines of the world that is secure to her, and pores over old memories, searching every crevice in her soul for something that might offer redemption or escape, but finding only silence.

By three o'clock in the afternoon it is time to prepare for work. She's on an earlier shift now and likes to get started before five. And it's a long bus ride into town, and she needs to protect her stall. She takes care with her clothes. It's harder than it used to be to look presentable and age is beginning to take its toll. The weight that she worked so hard to lose is beginning to creep back on again. She'll have to retire soon, she knows it and the thought brings her some pleasure – she has a little laid by and her needs will be cheap ones. They always have been.

The day of the falling had begun like any ordinary Saturday – homework in the morning, punctuated by a trip to the local bakery to purchase her daily Cream Dan. Lilly loved Cream Dans and often braved the possibility of after-school detention when, driven by the pangs of a deeper hunger than she understood, she would, in her morning break time, sneak out through the wrought-iron gates of Greymount Girls Secondary Modern and hurry as fast as her oversized legs would allow her to Brown's bakery. And there, for just five minutes, she could imagine herself to be satisfied as she sank her teeth into the creamy softness of the Dan, before hurrying back to the most tangible scene of her loneliness. To the fat girl catcalls that had become the soundtrack to her life.

Lunch came and went and the afternoon passed slowly. She had no friends with whom she could go window shopping, play records or discuss the first fumblings of innocent intimacy that so enthralled the teenage mind and so her days were longer than they should have been, with each minute a drawn-out monument to a life that never was. To a time that should have been. And anyway, she was not allowed to own records, and there never was any fumbling before the falling, and the mannequins in the pretty window pictures were never shaped in such a way as she.

She was to babysit that evening. She was often volunteered but rarely consulted, but that was how it was in 1969 and she didn't mind. And in any event it got her out of the house for awhile, and she could enjoy what was almost company for a few hours before she sent the twins to bed.

Catherine and Margaret. Twelve years old, not much younger than herself really but inhabitants of another world. They were confident, and athletic. Blonde and vivacious. And above all, beautiful. They did not attend Greymount Secondary Modern - having passed their eleven-plus examination they were high flying academics at one of Belfast's top grammar schools. These were children who knew all that had passed Lilly by and who rejoiced in all that living could be and become.

"Can I drive you home Lilly?"

Jim Brennan was a big man. He had none of the lithe athleticism of his daughters or his wife though apparently he used to play football for Parkend back in his youth. Hardly Arsenal, but he talked as if it was the next best thing. A goalie. That's what he'd told them. He was a goalie. His life, however, had run aground early and he was facing redundancy from the factory. He lacked the skills to be readily redeployed and 1969 was not a bright year for the North so there were no ready-made employment opportunities. Jim had no idea what he would do now and he wore his frustration like a badge. Fifty-one is too young to become useless.

"Here's the money Lilly. Thanks so much for doing this sweetheart. We really appreciate it"

Elizabeth Brennan. A truly graceful woman. Clearly the mother of her daughters. Articulate and enthusiastic, and a recent addition to the Mount Zion community – though Jim wanted no part of his wife's new found "Bible-bashing hobby". Elizabeth was one of the few adults who had communicated with Lilly and had to some degree understood her alienation and Lilly had returned her interest with a devotion that went far beyond Elizabeth's expectations. Lilly felt a fierce loyalty to Elizabeth and to her family, Elizabeth had become her idol, her heroine.

"Thanks Mr Brennan, a lift would be great. And any time you need me Mrs Brennan, just let me know."

Four thirty and she's on the bus. It's been a strange day, but then it always is when she dreams the dream. She feels as if Bryoni has been calling out to her, reminding her of her shame, or filling the space between them with some kind of sacramental connection. She doesn't know what she feels. She just knows that the dream leaves her confused and in pain. Always.

She gets off at the top of Adelaide Street. She remembers years ago when she worked in the more salubrious surroundings of a south Belfast red brick. When she moved in the company of cleaner and more prosperous clients than those who fill her diary now. She smiles as she remembers the Mercedes and the BMW soft-tops and the discreetly wrapped presents purchased on the company credit card. But now she's located in Adelaide Street, street of the car parks, and the dilapidated, decaying old office blocks that would soon fall foul of the developers' wrecking balls. She manages a weak smile at the pun.

It happened so quickly and after it was over she knew only tears. When it was over Jim Brennan had stolen her youth. Taken her innocence and buried it amongst the carnage of his own lost manhood. In an act of the deepest violation of both her secret and her public self he had used her savagely to assuage his own diminished sense of being. To rediscover the powerful feelings that he assumed were his by right. He had not even kissed her mouth.

He had turned the car into a deserted parking lot at the bottom of Cavehill; had looked at her with an expression she could neither read nor understand as he killed the engine. And then with unseeing eyes, and with an almost robotic determination he had raped her. And even the stars hid themselves behind clouds.

And after it was over he would still be facing redundancy. After it was over he would still be fifty-one. After it was over and she was weeping Jim Brennan would still be trapped in the frustration that had become his times, and carrying his own shame. Though he would never accept any blame, or admit that the crime had taken place. Even as he zipped himself up he was accusing her of leading him astray. Telling her that she had seduced him. Demanding her silence and cementing her sense of shame.

Lilly MacNeil was seventeen when she fell from grace. The year was 1969, the place was Belfast. There was no worse time, no worse place for falling.

There's something familiar now to hold on to. The usual faces appear out of the usual office doors at the end of a corporate day. The usual suits open the usual car doors and drive out of the usual car parks at appropriate times. Lilly knows them all by sight, and one or two to say hello to. It's a small place Belfast. A village really. And she's had her stall here for a while.

She's never sure of herself on the days after she's had the dream. Unsure how to explain the connections. How to join the dots from there to here with any sense of certainty. Or how to find any sense of logic in what she knows are the random steps of a life that fell from logic a long long time ago.

The only obvious connection was the child. She always thought of the child as Bryoni, though in truth Lilly had never known her name, and she was unsure of the spelling of the name that she had chosen. But she had to call her daughter something, even if the only time they spoke was in her dreams.

When she had finally summoned up the courage to tell Andrew and Gertrude about the missed periods, about the mornings spent with her head pushed down the lavatory bowl, about the swelling in her body, she had not summoned up courage to tell them the name of the father. In her head she could still hear the words - like don't you dare tell; like our secret; like you made me do it - that told her that the fault was her own. She felt she owed it to Elizabeth Brennan to remain silent. And anyway who would believe that a man like Jim with an attractive wife and all the usual male prejudices would ever have wanted to penetrate such a body as hers?

And of course there was her hero-worship of Elizabeth. Elizabeth who had befriended her. Elizabeth who had become to Lilly the epitome of all her aspirations. How could she ever allow Elizabeth to hear the shame into which she, Lilly, had accompanied her husband Jim? And so Lilly made a solemn vow to herself, that she would never tell.

Then the recriminations began. The "How could you?" The "We just don't know you any more Lilly" The "Have you no shame?" And of course there was the deepening scar caused by the wedge that the falling had driven between parents and daughter. Between past and future. Between the safety that was home and childhood and the wild threatening landscape that became the place where she lived the rest of her life.

The Mount Zion flock had never experienced the like before, and judgement came easily. Lilly had become one of the brazen and Andrew and Gertrude were forced to choose between community and daughter, between belonging to the crowd and defending the defenceless. Gertrude was never invited to sing her solos during the altar call again, and though in later years she did reclaim her seat at the organ, Andrew was quietly asked to retire from the eldership, and was never reinstated.

Ultimately however the choices that Andrew and Gertrude had to make were internal. Their daughter was refusing to name the father of her child, and deep in their hearts they judged the reason why. Lilly had become one of the brazen and in so becoming had moved beyond their understanding. The only certainty that they possessed in their pain was that they knew the choice that had to be made, and though it cost them dearly they made it. They would house her until the baby arrived, and then... well, then Lilly might have to go and start a new life. Perhaps it would be for the best.

When the child was born, after a long, lonely and painful labour in Belfast's Jubilee Maternity Ward she was whisked away for adoption and Lilly never saw her again. Though within her soul Bryoni always dwarfed the space. For in those months when the baby had lived in Lilly's womb and her tiny feet were kicking, Lilly MacNeil knew the only true companionship of her life. And when she was taken away Lilly lay on her hospital bed and sobbed the sobs of the truly forsaken.

"How much for the full works?"

Long ago they drove Mercedes and BMWs. Then it was Volkswagon Golfs and Fiestas. Now it's a beat-up Transit Van.

He's late fifties, overweight and in need of a wash. He haggles over the price, but she needs the money and concedes quickly. This stall comes at a price that she has to meet or suffer the consequences. And when you're fifty-one yourself and clearly gone to seed you can't demand top dollar.

She knows how pathetic she looks in her blue denim dress open almost to the waist. She knows how obvious she appears. And deep inside she knows it was always that way. Even back when she wore fur round her shoulders and silk stockings on her shapely legs. She knows how transient her slender shape had been. And she knows the price that she paid to achieve that shape.

In the long aftermath of her falling Lilly MacNeil had eventually indeed approximated to beauty as her weight fell away in the months when she lay on a cot in the Purdysburn psychiatric hospital. The pain of her separation from home and family had left her lost and mentally ravaged and one day she had simply given up the fight.

For awhile after the birth and immediate loss of Bryoni she had tried to start a new life for herself. A life for which she had had little preparation. On discovering her entitlement to grant aid and a small subsistence allowance she had found lodgings in a student hostel in Belfast's Howard Street, and had tried to pick up the fractured pieces of her education. She made no more friends in the hostel than she had at Greymount Secondary Modern, and loneliness coupled with the total sense of loss that was now dominating her life had led to the inevitable consequences. She had been dreaming the dream every night for several years, and one morning she had just stayed huddled on the end of her bed, rocking and sobbing until the tenant in the next room had called for emergency medical assistance.

When she emerged after fourteen long months in care she had shed weight and gained a new hard shell around her secret soul. Somehow, continuing with her "O"-level studies at Renshaw's, the crammer in Botanic Avenue, had lost its appeal for Lilly and so armed with her lack of qualifications and more user-friendly appearance she went to work as an escort. She discovered that Lilly-lite was popular enough with the punters, and her self-esteem was so damaged that she felt there was nowhere further to fall. In her own mind she had done the right thing at the time by not naming Jim as the father of her child. But her love and hero-worship of Elizabeth had demanded a heavy price and anyway now she knew that no-one would believe her if she had tried at a later stage to retell the tale. Maybe no-one would have believed her at the time either. Lilly will never know.

And so she worked her way downwards through the layers of the Belfast pay-for-sex industry as age and cynicism gradually took their toll. And if the fact that she has become what people at the time of her falling had assumed that she already was strikes her as ironic she has nobody with whom to share the joke.

Price settled, he drives the van round the corner towards a distant and empty parking lot. Lilly has been here before this evening. Twice. The scenery won't have changed.

Her thoughts are somewhere else. She is remembering, as she has all day, the kicking of a tiny foot in her womb. The shape of the bulge on her distended stomach skin as Bryoni moved and turned. The feeling of companionship that was hers for so short a time. Her only understanding of love in a life full of pain. She remembers her dream, and once again has to stifle a sob. He doesn't notice the sound.

"This ok for you darlin? You're going to really enjoy what's coming you know"

Lilly has heard it all before. Every corny self-aggrandising line. Every guilt-reducing cliché.

She begins to mindlessly undo the few unopened buttons on her blue denim dress. To draw the shutters on her conscious thought. To find the place where she wants to go.

She tries to occupy her mind with thoughts of winter; of the feel of snow underfoot; of the crispness in the air and the redness of noses in the chill; of the crackling of a fire; of the sound of laughter around the Christmas table; of the smell of mince pies. She tries to occupy her mind with safe places, with familiar smells and sounds. So she blocks out as far as she can the intrusion of his smells and his sounds. After all this time she knows that her mind must remain her own place. Her secret space. So she occupies. Till he comes.