The first time I attended a service in a Catholic church I was 19 years old, and it was the funeral of our friend, the artist Kieran McGoran. He always used to call in on us over Christmas – you couldn’t quite predict when – but that year he had taken ill and died on Christmas Day. The book I had bought him for his present was still sitting on the sideboard at home, wrapped.
Kieran was one of my favourite people to come to the house. He was thin and thoughtful, with very dark hair, and he drank whiskey and smoked heavily: one had the sense that the dull bureaucracy of life, bills and parking fines and suchlike, stacked up around him unheeded. When he came he often brought a painting with him – his paintings were hung all over our walls – and he had a talent for capturing the different kinds of light that happened in our part of Northern Ireland: the subdued gleam of sunlight strained through pewter clouds at the horse races, for example, or the thin grey-blue sky of winter over the Lagan river. He loved the Impressionists, in particular Degas and Pissarro: in fact, he said that as an artist he preferred Pissarro to Picasso. I was not well-versed in art, but I was aware that people generally thought Picasso the man to beat, and I was impressed by his confidence in stating otherwise.
