Would ye go ’way with yere coleslaw, he thinks, and cheerfully he lifts the first plain bite to his mouth.

The sandwiches are washed down with the bottle of orange. The orange is followed by the four biscuits wrapped also in foil. For a while, the biscuits would vary – if only for variety’s sake, was the mother’s reasoning – but the variance threw Donie out. It became an agitation to him that he did not know whether it would be fig rolls or Hobnobs he was getting. He could guess accurately enough by shape but there’d come a morning of round biscuits and who was to tell a Chocolate Goldgrain from a Polo? It was a dead loss, and it is specified now that it is Chocolate Goldgrain he will unwrap.

He has just finished the last of the biscuits when someone sits down beside. Donie needn’t look up to know that eyes are on him – the heat of a stare burns like nettle sting across every inch of his flesh.

‘How’re we?’ the man says.

Donie raises his glance now and finds a man wearing a thin, half-grown beard, and he is pale-eyed, and yellowish of the flesh.

‘What’s it they call you?’ the man says.

‘Donie.’

‘Ah yeah. Is it short for Domhnaill?’

‘It is.’

‘The Irish spelling?’

‘That’s right. D.O.M.H …’

‘Good …’

‘N.A.I.L.L.’

‘Very good. Give the boy a biscuit.’

‘I ate my last biscuit.’

‘It’s an expression, you poor dumb cunt.’

Donie knows that he must rise and go but the man reaches across and lays a steel-cold hand on his. Clamps it to the bench.

‘Stop that,’ Donie says.

The man giggles.

‘I’d say the best part of Donie dribbled down the father’s leg, did it?’

The thin hard bones of the hand, the yellow of the skin … there is something the man brings to mind but Donie cannot place it specifically. He knows that there is the sensation of an animal.

‘I’ve to go now,’ Donie says.

‘If you get up I’ll kick the ankles out from under you.’

‘Don’t do that!’

Donie’s voice quakes and the words are tiny and lost almost to the roar of the river.

‘He’s sobbing!’

Donie looks at the man’s hand locked on his and the yellow of the spots on the back of the man’s hand and it comes to him, the word comes from the colouring: hyena.

‘You’re like a hyena,’ he says.

The man whistles a laugh down his nose. Another comes in quick succession. He shakes with thin hilarity. He continues to lock Donie’s hand to the bench but now moves his thumb slowly and sensuously along the back of the hand.

‘Don’t.’

‘Why?’

‘It tiddles.’

‘And what would a hyena do to you, Donie?’

‘Will you leave me go now?’

‘What would he do? A hyena?’

‘I have to go home to my mother. I have the twelve o’clock train to get.’

‘Would it have a feed off your corpse, would you say?’