Papa did not like my vegetarianism. But I couldn’t eat meat anymore. I just couldn’t. I could not put my teeth in a piece of animal flesh. The thought, the texture, the knowledge of where it came from. The mooning eyes of Paddy Cow when she came up to the window in the morning; the dumb glassy eyes of the chooks; the sightless orbs of a myxo rabbit, dead on the side of the road. If it’s got eyes, I’m not gonna eat it, I told Papa. I didn’t do it to spite him. But it made him furious. ‘Potatoes have eyes!’ he yelled. But I shook my head. He wagged his finger at me and said that the poor people of this world didn’t have the luxury of not eating meat. He said I was a privileged little shit. He whacked the top of my head with his hand. And then he changed his mind and grabbed my head against his chest and hugged me and said, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry. And then slapped me again because he was still angry.

I was confused. But I was a vegetarian. It annoyed the men around me. It was the first beginnings of a separate me.

Only the women supported my new vegetarian self: Mother, Mrs Parish, and you, Ornella. Carlito ate a steak in front of me with relish, oohing and aahing over every forkful and smacking his lips. You just shrugged your shoulders and fried me up an eggplant. If you got it fried well enough, an eggplant oozed just as much as a piece of meat. You could mix up rice and nuts and crushed tomatoes and wrap it in vineleaves like the Greeks did. Or stuff it in zucchini. You could even fry the flowers of a zucchini. If Papa had consulted me, he could’ve put vegetarian on the menu way before it was fashionable. He could’ve been ahead of the pack.

Mother used it as an excuse to have eggs and baked beans on toast for dinner. She said it would be like camping. We ate on a picnic blanket on the floor in front of the telly but she rarely finished her dinner, just mopped it round and round with toast and then butted her cigarette out in it. I liked the cans of tomato spaghetti best. I would even eat them cold, I didn’t care. They were squishy in a way that was not like meat, but somehow satisfied me the same way.