You would have hardly thought it held anyone at all but for the yellow screams of children escaping the torn curtains and the filthy windows. Evan said he had rent allowance got for the house on account of his children. He had bred six off Suze and a couple off her sister, Elsie. These were open-minded people I was dealing with. At least with regard to that end of things. We went inside and the kids appeared everywhere, they were shaven-headed against the threat of nits, and they were pelting about like maniacs, grinding their teeth and hammering at the walls, and the women appeared – girlish, Elsie and Suze, as thin as girls – and they smirked at me in a particular way over the smoke of their roll-ups: it is through no fault of my own that I am considered a very handsome man.

‘Coffee and buns, no?’ said Evan the Head, and the girls laughed.

The house was in desperate shape. There were giant mushroomy damp patches coming through the old wallpaper and a huge fireplace in the main room was burning smashed-up chairs and bits of four-be-two. The Head wasn’t lying when he said I’d be as well off outside in the caravan. He brought me to it and I was relieved to get out to the yard, mainly because of the kids, who had a real viciousness to them.

Now of course the caravan was no mansion either. The door’s lock was busted and the door was tied shut with a piece of chain left over from the dogs and fixed with a padlock. The dogs were big and of hard breeds but they were nervous, fearful, and they backed away into the corners of the yard as we passed through. Evan unlooped the chain and opened the door and with a flourish bid me enter.

‘Can you smell the sex off it?’ he said, climbing in behind.

‘Go ’way?’

‘Bought it off a brasser used to work the horse fairs,’ he said. ‘If the walls could talk in this old wagon, ’ay?’

It had a knackery look to it sure enough. It was an old sixteen-footer aluminium job with a flowery carpet rotten away to fuck and flouncy pillows with the flounce gone out of them and it reeked of the fields and winter. There was a wee gas fire with imitation logs. Evan knelt and got it going with his lighter.

‘Get you good an’ cosy,’ he said. ‘You any money, boy-child?’

‘I’ve about three euro odd, Ev.’

‘Captain of industry,’ he said.

The gas fire took and the fumes rose from it so hard they watered my eyes. I asked was it safe and he said it’d be fine, it’d be balmy, it’d be like I was on my holidays, and if I got bored I could always pop inside the house and see if young Elsie fancied a lodger.

‘For her stomach,’ he said.