The park was empty. Jack tore across the tarmac, leaped up onto the jungle gym, and zigzagged his way to its summit, negotiating the levels with hurling simian dexterity. Up top, he hooted triumphantly and bent his head and started tonguing the blue metal bars, lustily French kissing the things.

‘Stop that!’ Arm said.

Jack registered the sharpness in Arm’s tone and looked up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and appeared almost guilty for a moment. Arm sunk onto the bench and waved at his boy, sorry. Instantly Jack appeared content again, and began to low and bark happily to himself. The sky behind Jack wasn’t any colour at all really, just banded with watery shade lower to the horizon, where distant weather was stirring.

‘Hector was awful itchy on the phone. Short and itchy,’ Dympna said.

Friday afternoon. The sun had been shining and the rain had been falling all morning. Dympna and Arm were heading uptown in the shitbox, and Dympna, driving, was talking in a low voice out of the side of his mouth. Dympna, Arm knew, tended to go tight-jawed when apprehensive.

‘What about?’ Arm asked, though he could guess.

Dympna glanced at Arm. He squinched his lips and emitted a rhetorical tut.

‘How’d they find out?’ Arm asked.

‘The mammy, I reckon. Chief disseminator of all information in this world and the next.’

‘She seemed fine about it the other day.’

‘I thought so.’

‘You think they’re going to want something done?’ Arm asked.

‘Something, alright.’

Hector and Paudi Devers were the younger brothers of Dympna’s deceased father. They lived ten miles outside of town, on a secluded farm at the end of a barely navigable dirt track in the bogged and heathered foothills of the Nephin Mountains, and where, in conjunction with their regular farmerly duties, they cultivated an especially fragrant and potent strain of marijuana. They grew the plant hydroponically, in the permanent twilight of a temperature-controlled, UV-lit nursery built into the storage basement of a cattle shed. The operation was small but professionally appointed in scale, and the uncles produced enough weed to enable Dympna to service the appetite of every burned-out factory worker and delinquent schoolkid within the town limits. Arm was cool to them. The uncles were necessary to Dympna’s operation, but they were mercurial birds, easy to spook. Arm knew of at least two occasions inside the last couple of years where they had abruptly claimed they were going to give up growing, and Dympna had to beg and plead with them, and each time offer a bigger cut, to change their minds.

Arm and Dympna dropped out once a month to load up on a fresh supply and pay the uncles what they were owed. He and Dympna were, as far as Arm knew, the uncles’ only regular visitors.