After this confrontation he turned his attention towards the girls. He grew to despise the slight tan on their skins, their infantile conversations, their sly fey world, their use of words like swoon, sensual, dire, awry, dour, provocative, sensible, assured, emphatic, lonesomeness. It was a language MacDonagh treated with polite condescension. His Irish grew evangelical. He alluded to historical knowledge they did not have.

He’d let go with reams of Gaelic names. Resurrected all the sexual words he could think of in Irish to shame them into subservience. Read entire pages of prose without stopping. He started making empty-headed talk about boys with a whingeing slur in his voice – that lad Noone, young Love, the gasur from Lavells – then laughed evilly. His gaze, his tone, imputing to the girls some moral discrepancies.

His intrusion into their lives became a sexual one.

And then, when he heard veiled stories of the Adams girls, even he was ashamed of the salacious thrill it gave him as he slept in Sara’s bed, to think how close to him the girls were. Beyond the wall that divided his room from theirs he imagined them sleeping in their skin. They’d hear him moving round his room at all hours. The soft pop of a bottle. The roll of the mattress. Sara’s sheets hauled aside. And such was his fantasy about the Protestant girls that his member would collapse into his hand without even standing. They’d see it in him the next morning with that sense of indignant sadness girls feel for unfortunate men. The sleepless round eyes, the pale twitching cheeks, the scarf round his neck fallen like an extra skin down from his pale head. Then, the quick unsatisfactory breath, and the constant slur. He said things, gave hints that told them he knew of their doings, yet he stopped from telling them all. That was left to their imaginings. Their rejection drove him to insurmountable peaks of self-abuse in Sara’s bed. Sometimes he’d expend himself and stare listless and open-mouthed at the ceiling like a doll. For a moment he’d know peace, he’d hear his breath coming and going, then, first one woman would come into the Irish teacher’s head, then the other, but hard as he tried he could not stop their personalities – their real selves – from intruding. His fantasy could not keep them under lock and key. Only as he approached his coming orgasm would they lie down obediently for him. From next door they’d hear his sigh. But his mind could not hold them in submission. He’d find one of their faces in his mind, then the other, looking away from him. His cock would collapse wet in his hand. It would be over.