Gerry growled. The game was so easy, it enraged him to die this cheaply. He felt like throwing the pad through the TV. He shut his eyes and breathed in, heard noises downstairs. He stepped over to the closed door. They were in the kitchen, Nick and Pell. Gerry had figured that Pell was in bed by now, but no, she’d either just gone back down or had been down there all this time. They were talking, though their voices were too faint and muffled to comprehend. Gerry got down on to his knees and pressed his face into the rancid fuzz of the carpet, the better to get his ear up to the ­half-­inch horizontal gap between his door and the floor. He held his breath but still could not make out what they were saying. Nor could he reliably gauge their tone. He wondered, as all eavesdroppers do, if he was the subject under discussion: wee indolent tubs sitting on his hole upstairs and refusing to come out of his room. It might be something they could laugh about together, at least.

There was a game Gerry liked to play, and he realised that he was playing it now: in his head, the muffled voices of his brother and his sister became the voices of his folks. It helped that he could barely recall what their voices had sounded like. The folks were growing vague to him. Sometimes, in the street, he would break out in a sweat as he registered, in the corner of his eye, the particular lanky stride of a man or the way a woman paused to slip the strap of a bag off her shoulder and rummage around for something, but then he’d look and, with a pang of utter relief, realise that there was no resemblance at all. With his parents safely dead, it was safe to imagine that they were not, and so he imagined descending the stairs, strolling in on not just Pell and Nick but the ­folks – the daddy unwizened, the mammy ­unwigged – seated at the kitchen table, grinning and abashed after their long and flagrant absence. They would look at Gerry and, in low, sincere voices he would instantly know as theirs, say, ‘Sorry for dying, son.’

And Gerry would say, ‘That’s OK.’ Gladdened, and made generous by their remorse, he would turn to Pell and Nick and say, ‘Sorry for being an arsehole today, lads.’ And Pell and Nick would say, ‘That’s OK, Gerry. We’re sorry for being arsehole, too.’