Rebecca was patting the horse’s grey face. ‘I got to get this brat fed and watered,’ she announced. ‘We have a convoy coming in from the retirement home just after lunch.’

‘Good luck with that,’ Arm said. ‘Hope that fecker doesn’t throw you.’

‘She won’t,’ Rebecca said, ‘I’ll see you next week, Jack.’

Jack pulled his mouth away from the fence. There was a blotch of saliva, a bracelet of bite marks worried into the wood.

Arm shepherded Jack up the main street. Jack knew where they were going and was getting excited, yipping and wanting to scramble ahead. Arm kept a finger snagged in the collar of his jacket.

‘Walk,’ he urged, ‘Walk.’

Dympna rang.

‘How’s the head, soldier?’

‘Not bad,’ Arm said. ‘Just out with the boyeen.’

‘I’ve a soft skin on me today, myself. Jesus Christ, we were milling through that whiskey like it was water,’ Dympna chuckled. He sounded supine and pleasantly shattered. Dympna enjoyed stewing in his hangovers, and often passed entire afternoons in a recuperative fog on the living-room sofa, duvet crimped around his neck like a barber’s bib, downing two-litre bottles of Fanta and watching box set after box set of DVDs.

‘Out with Jackie boy, is it?’

‘Correct,’ Arm said.

‘When’s that done up?’

‘Shortly.’

‘Cool, cool, sure I can drop down and grab you.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I know its okay, it’s no bother,’ he said. ‘We’d best get out there, get things squared up.’

When Arm did not respond Dympna said, ‘Sorry, fuck. Look. Take your time with Jackie.’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Arm said.

‘You have grades of brooding silence, Arm,’ Dympna said, ‘I can tell I pissed you off, or else you already were. Either way I’m not adding to it. We both have enough shite on our plates.’

‘And sometimes you have to eat it up,’ Arm said.

‘Exactly,’ Dympna said. ‘And speaking of which. Fannigan. Don’t sweat on that.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Arm said.

‘The uncles we can bring round. We can get them to see what’s best in the long run.’

‘You didn’t think so last night.’

‘Ah, I was drunk. Letting fretfulness get the better of me,’ Dympna said, like it was all nothing. ‘So. Will swing down your way for four, will we say? Give you plenty a time with the lad.’

‘Okay.’

‘I know,’ Dympna sighed, ‘it just goes on and on, doesn’t it?’

‘It does.’

Arm still had his finger hooked in Jack’s coat collar. They were at the zebra crossing. A modest stream of traffic was emptying down the main street. Cloudbanks blotted the sun above the post office and the air was laced with a salt foretaste of rain.

Jack lurched forward, impatient to cross. He could not see or register or interpret the flashing bodies of the passing vehicles, they were not even ghosts to him.

‘Nyyhhh,’ Jack was moaning. ‘Nyyhhh, NYYHHH.’

He was building up a head of steam, and slapped himself, open handed, on the side of his head.