Brooky Hay was a clump of sessile oaks that grew in a hollow and apart from all the other trees in the wood halfway between The Hill and Joe’s house. We met there on a Saturday for a precious hour. I loved it; it was a different world. The bark on the trees was bumpy with silvery lichen and the gentle pale green slope all around it grew wild with sunshine-yellow dandelions and darker green ferns. No one could see us unless they marched all the way and stared into the dip. It was here, cocooned, that Joe and me had managed to float the idea of taking kissing to a whole new level.

When it came to home time, we pulled apart. I hated the way the wind hit my front where the warmth of his body had been just seconds before.

–  Alright?

–  Alright.

–  You were doin’ some serious smilin’ just then …

–  I’ve things on my mind, Joe Loughrey, funny business.

CHRIST! Why had I said that? I hadn’t meant to say that! I was not bold! It had been weeks since we’d had the guts to refer to it. It had been born in Brooky Hay and that’s where we’d left it.

–  Is that so? And it’s no time at all ’til Gortnahook … just a few weeks.

He was thinking about it too! He was thinking about getting his Body Part A into my Body Part B. He said he wanted me and I wanted to be wanted. I couldn’t have been happier if he’d pulled a box of Milk Tray out of his back pocket. We used the word ‘love’ instead of all the other words we knew for it. We’d try to make this love in a monastery with nuns and priests checking the perimeter. They’d set dogs on us, massive Alsatians like the army had, to run us down when we broke for the barbed wire. We must be out of our tiny minds but needs must where the Devil drives.

–  We better go, I hear the bus. Father Yankee Pat is coming to tea.

–  I’m not too keen on him … or his son.

–  Joe! He couldn’t be John Johns’s da; he’s a priest, for God’s sake!

We’d all heard the rumours over the years that he was meant to be Father Yankee Pat’s son. Now the good Father had decided to come back from San Francisco to Carncloon to celebrate thirty years in the Church and so for the first time in a quarter of a century they could be compared side by side. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, we say around here when we don’t want to use the word ‘bastard’.

–  If he’s not Father Yankee Pat’s, whose is he?

–  I don’t know. Mammy’s boiling over about it.