She bit down on her lips and upped the volume on the tea-making clatter, bashing cups onto saucers and biscuits onto a plate. After a while she said, “And now I suppose that’s the last we’ll see of Holly.”

“Here,” I said, holding up a fork. “Is that clean enough?”

Ma threw it a half glance. “It is not. Get between the prongs.” She brought the tea things over to the table, poured me a cup and pushed milk and sugar towards me. She said, “I’m after buying Holly her Christmas presents. Lovely little velvet dress, I got her.”

“That’s a couple of weeks away,” I said. “Let’s see how we go.”

Ma gave me a sideways look that told me nothing, but she left it. She found another cloth, sat down opposite me and picked up something silver that could have been a bottle stopper. “Drink that tea,” she said.

The tea was strong enough to reach out of the pot and give you a punch. Everyone was out at work and the street was very quiet, just the soft even pattering of the rain and the far-off rush of traffic. Ma worked her way through various undefined silver widgets; I finished the cutlery and moved on to a photo frame—it was covered in fancy flowers that I would never get clean to Ma’s standards, but at least I knew what it was. When the room felt like it had settled enough, I said, “Tell me something. Is it true Da was doing a line with Theresa Daly, before you came on the scene?”

Ma’s head snapped up and she stared at me. Her face didn’t change, but an awful lot of things were zipping across her eyes. “Where’d you hear that?” she demanded.

“So he was with her.”

“Your da’s a fecking eejit. You knew that already, or you’re as bad.”

“I did, yeah. I just didn’t know that was one of the specific ways he was a fecking eejit.”

“She was always trouble, that one. Always drawing attention to herself, wiggling down the road, screaming and carrying on with her friends.”

“And Da fell for it.”

“They all fell for it! The fellas are stupid; they go mad for all that. Your da, and Matt Daly, and half the fellas in the Liberties, all hanging out of Tessie O’Byrne’s arse. She lapped it up: kept three or four of them dangling at once, broke it off with them every other week when they weren’t giving her enough attention. They just came crawling back for more.”

“We don’t know what’s good for us,” I said. “Specially when we’re young. Da would’ve been only a young fella back then, wouldn’t he?”

Ma sniffed. “Old enough to know better. I was three years younger, sure, and I could’ve told him it would end in tears.”