Reverend Davies is the father of Owen Davies. He runs the Pallid Rock orphanage, and has a church. Although quite who the church is dedicated to, it may be better not to ask. It features an organ powered by live fish, and there may be a small Elder God living in the rafters.
This piece is set around Sinners, at which point Reverend Davies has, through a mix of bad luck and his own actions, lost the people who mattered most to him…
The worst feature of grief
Is how things you used to loathe
Begin to haunt you
How your wife fussed over you
Moved things so that you
Could not put your hands on them
The precise way she had
Of closing a door too sharply.
Her only show of anger.
The way your son fiddled
Relentlessly, with everything
His insolence, his answering back
His total inability to leave
His dirty socks in a laundry basket
The things of his you sat on.
The indecent way she had
Of looking at you, sometimes.
How her mischief enraged you
When it tugged the corner of her mouth.
They are gone now
The things you used to loathe
Torture you most, I find.
The boyish, tuneless whistle
I would sell my soul to hear again.
Never to have my collar adjusted
By gentle, affectionate fingers
Never again to be laughed at
By the woman I most wronged.
What richness I had
When I thought myself ill-treated.