Billy Dean is hidden away. He knows only his mother and father. She is a hairdresser, young and beautiful. He is a priest, smelling of cigarettes and candles, who visits rarely to impart strange wisdom and tell stories.

As Billy grows up he remains locked away, a secret child inhabiting his own private world. His father tells him he can heal, that he was born on a terrible day of reckoning and that this might mean something. But then the day arrives when his father stops coming.