*

The first fight I ever saw in real life was when we went on holiday with my ma and da to Dublin. I must have been four or five year old. My ma was washing her hair and my da says to us, let’s go down the arcades and get a shot of those penny falls while your ma’s getting ready. My da was addicted to the penny falls. We get down there and it’s busy as hell, everyone is squeezed in around the machines, it looks like they’re going to tip, and my da gives me a handful of pennies. Get in there, he says, and win us a wee fortune. There’s an old dear playing right next to us and next to her is stood a shady-looking silhouette, now, in my mind, a featureless ghost, hiding out in my past. The old dear looks like she’s going to tip the pennies. And this shade starts pushing into her, starts trying to claim her place. My da steps in. Play the game, he says to this blank silhouette, to this gap in my mind, and he holds onto the machine so that he can’t push in any further. But the shade leans in to him, and pushes back, and he accidentally skiffs my da’s chin with his hand. My da draws back, takes a hammer from the inside of his coat – it’s the first time I realised that my da always carried a weapon – and starts fucking the guy over the head with it. The side of his skull caves in and he falls forward but my da catches him with another blow and sends him flying backward, through the window and out into the street, and now there’s blood and glass everywhere. Me and Peter are both crying. My da steps up to the penny falls, calm as you like, drops a penny in, and he’s won, with a single penny, the money starts tumbling out, and he turns to the old dear, it’s all yours, he says to her, and then he says to us, move it, let’s go, and he grabs our hands and we run off and we have to duck into doorways on the way as the peelers go screaming past and after about half an hour we go back to the scene of the crime and we spy on the arcade from across the road and the body is gone but we spot the old dear and she’s talking to the peelers. That bitch is going to grass us up, my da says to us. Trust no one, he says, and don’t tell your ma, neither.

It wasn’t till years later, at my da’s funeral, that I telt this story for the first time, and my ma had no idea it had even happened. He was some man, she says to me as we stood at the side of his grave. Wee bastard thought he was Robin Hood. I still think of that ghost every so often, that shade lying in the glass and the blood on the pavement, and I wonder if he’s alive or dead. I think dead, probably.