He said I could come in later. He said there would be a pot of curried veg on the go. And that was the way our routine began. I would come in, the evenings, and I would be fed, and I would watch TV for a while and help with burning the four-be-twos before going and dry-humping Elsie on a mattress in a back room that smelled of kid piss and dried blood.

Elsie the third night told me that she loved me.

Now Elsie to this day I do not believe had original badness in her. It was just that she could be easily led and her sister had badness in her sure enough and as for Evan, well.

I said, the third night:

‘But Elsie you’re fleadhin’ Ev and all, yeah?’

‘What’s fleadhin’?’ she said.

‘Fuckin’,’ I said. ‘It’s a Cork word for fuckin’.’

‘Business o’ yours how?’ she said.

Elsie and Suze were from Leeds – Leeds-Irish – and they had people in south Galway. Their father had been put away for knocking their mother unconscious with the welt of a slap hammer and they turned up on the doorstep of the Galway cousins and they were turned away again lively. Their eyes were too dark and their mouths were too beautiful. They were the kind of girls – women – who look kind of dramatic and unsafe. They were at a loose end arsing around Galway then, fucking Australians out of youth hostels and robbing them, and they met Evan the Head in the Harbour Bar, was the story, when there still was a Harbour Bar, before the Galway docks was all cunts in pink shirts drinking wine. Evan was loaded at that time having brought in a trawler full of grade-two resin from Morocco – he came into Doolin with it, bold as brass, stoned as a coot in the yellow of his oilskins – and that was ten years back and if one of the sisters wasn’t up the spout off him since, the other was.

‘Evan an’ me is over,’ said Elsie, ‘but I’m not sayin’ he isn’t a wonderful father.’

At that moment there was the loud cracking sound of wood snapping – shhlaaack! – which meant that Evan the Head had lain a length of four-be-two along the bottom steps of the stairs and taken a lep at it from the banister. He was a limber man and he enjoyed breaking up the firewood in this way.

See him perched up on the banister, with the weird grin on, and he eyeing just the spot where he wanted to crack the wood – then the wee lep.

In Cork I had seen Suze sure enough, lumbering under children and dope smoke on the couch of the Togher flat, but I had never seen Elsie though I had heard her, once, in a far room, crying.

‘Does Suze love him still do you think?’