Arm hit Fannigan again. There was the wishbone snap of his nose breaking and the old man was clean out. Arm wrenched the plasma from the wall and tucked it under his arm. In the hall, he dropped the key and toed it under the bathroom door. Arm could hear Fannigan’s mother scuffling on the other side, groaning, ‘Where’s my Billy, where’s my Billy?’

Arm became friends with Dympna at fifteen. They were in the same school, but hung in different groups and it was not until Dympna showed up at Saint Ignatius Athletic, the local boxing club, that Arm got to know him. Dympna was a porky, eager boy back then, keen to transmute his flab to muscle and learn how to throw a punch. Boxing was Arm’s thing; at under-age level he had fought his way to county, and briefly, provincial, distinction. Arm had the clear head and cold-bloodedness required by the ring, the knack of detachment. Arm could be buried in the moment of a fight, spun and dizzy and snorting sputum, his body bright and ringing, and yet at the same time occupy a little bubble of lucidity above it all. His punches travelled with just the right weight and restraint, and they had a bounce to them when they landed, the way raindrops splash. And Arm was relentless. If the ref did not intercede, he could pound equably away on a lad until his head fell off.

Because Arm was the best around, Dympna pestered after him to spar. Dympna was barely in shape, and had mediocre form, and both boys knew rightly that Arm would destroy Dympna, but Dympna insisted. After each session they would sit in the bleachers, Dympna staunching a pumping nostril with a wad of cotton or pressing an ice pack to a blown-up eye socket, and at his behest the two would go forensically back over whatever combination of moves Arm had used to demolish him that day. Dympna viewed the beatings as instructional in nature, a mapping out, bruise by bruise, of the vulnerable regions of the body. Arm intuited that even at sixteen Dympna had plans, and that Dympna would need to understand the dynamics of pain, its infliction and its absorption, in order to effect those plans. What Dympna couldn’t give a fuck for were the organised formalities and quaint codes of conduct that governed in-the-ring competition, and after he secured what he wanted—Arm, Arm’s friendship—he persuaded Arm that he shouldn’t either.