‘No,’ said Elsie, ‘but he has the spell on her, don’t he? I can beat the spell.’

So it was – so simple – that we became a kind of family that January in the old farmhouse outside Gort. But of course I could not say I was ever entirely comfortable with the situation. I kept going out to the caravan at night, to be alone for those cold hours, for my own space and to think of May-Anne, to look at her photograph, and to listen to the dogs, the strange comfort of them. Elsie thought this was snobbish of me. She wanted me to stay with her on the mattress. And Evan the Head said he agreed with her, and Suze agreed, and that was the start of the trouble.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I want to tell you about Elsie and what she looked like when she came. She wouldn’t allow me to put it inside because there’d been complications with the last child she’d had bred off her for Evan and she didn’t want another kid happening. I said fine to that. I have never been comfortable with being a father. I love May-Anne – my dotey pet, I always call her – but it makes me frightened just to think of her walking around in the world with the people that are out there. See some of the fuckers you’d have muttering at the walls down around the bus station in Parnell Place, Cork. You’d want a daughter breathing the same air as those animals?

‘Get in there!’ Ev cried from the hallway into the back room where Elsie and I lay on the mattress. ‘Get in!’

When she came Elsie had a tic beneath her left eye – at the top of her cheek there was a fluttering as if a tiny bird was caught beneath her skin. The dry-humping made me feel like a teenager again but not in a good way. We lay there – a particular night – with Elsie’s tic going, with me all handsome and useless, and Evan leapt on the four-be-twos off the banister, and the eight mad kids bounced off the ceilings and bit each other and screamed, and the wind howled outside, and the wretched dogs cried a great howling in answer to the wind, and then Suze was at the door, and she said:

‘Why don’t we make this interestin’?’