Yes it started like that – the trouble – it started as a soft kind of coaxing. Sly comments from Suze and sly comments from Evan the Head. And I got worried when the winter stretched on, the weeks threw down their great length, the weeks were made of sleet and wind, and it became February – a hard month – and the sly comments came even from Elsie then. She was easily led and bored enough for badness. I started to feel a bit trapped in this place and I thought about moving on but I had nowhere to go and no money to get there. Given the way things had turned out in Cork, I would be shot or arrested if I went back, no question. I missed May-Anne so badly but I thought the best I could do for her was to keep myself safe until the troubled times had passed over.

Then, late one night, Evan the Head came into the yard – I heard him hiss at the dogs – and without so much as a knock he was in the door of the caravan and he sat on the foot of my fold-out bed. He lit a candle and I saw him by its soft light. He had his twisted smile on. First words he said to me:

‘Suze is the better comer.’

‘Go ’way?’

‘Know what a geyser is?’

‘I do, yeah.’

‘That’s Suze if she’s in the form. You see she’s got one eye a dark brown and one a dark, really dark green?’

‘Yeah, kinda …’

‘Yeah kinda noticed that, ’ay? Did you, boy?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah well that’s a good sign,’ he said, ‘for a comer.’

I did not reply because I did not like the way he was smoking his roll-up. The hard little sucks on it and his eyes so deep-set.

‘She’s inside,’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘I said she’s waitin’ on you, boy. Are you goin’ to keep her waitin’?’

‘Ah please, Ev.’

‘You don’t want to get that lady riled. Suze? Not a good plan, boy-child. I said you don’t get that fucking lady riled.’

‘Evan, look, I’ve the thing with her sister, haven’t I?’

He stood then – he loomed in the candlelight – and the words that came were half spat, half whispered:

‘You’ll get in that fucking house and you’ll fuck my wife and you’ll fuck her sister or you’ll get the fuckin’ life taken out of you, d’ya hear me, boy?’

‘Evan get out of the caravan, please!’

He leapt up on the bed then and he danced about and he laughed so hard. And he kind of poked at my head with his feet, kind of playful, as if he was going to stamp me, but he let it go, he stood down, and he left without another word. Then I heard him turn the padlock on the chain outside.