It was Eileen’s opinion that if you wanted demented, if you wanted pathology, here was Jamie: with his vicious jabber and his incoherent clothes, his brain like a door with a busted latch, incapable of ever being shut. The forestry jacket was pure Jamie. Out of technical college he’d managed to get a job in which he was paid very well to sit in a Portakabin in the Belleek Woods and read the paper while polite ­middle-­class ramblers visiting from Dublin and the odd school tour trekked around the trails and the ruins. Last year he’d been suspended and then fired after it was discovered he was taking payments to let travellers burn rubbish on a site in the woods. The smoke had almost completely killed off a listed species of weed that grew wild there. Jamie maintained that the real reason he was let go was that he’d consorted with travellers, treating them with what he insisted was dignity while the council racked their brains to find a way to run them out of town altogether. Eileen recalled the second car outside. She wondered if Jamie had also managed to shack up with Nugent. Jamie had been the standard superior big brother, oscillating between picking on and protecting Murt, and still possessed an occult hold over him without even trying. Eileen could already hear Jamie’s influence in Murt’s voice.

‘Another problem being, economics is a theology now,’ Murt said.

‘Absolutely,’ Jamie said. ‘Absolutely. And the worst one there is.’

‘Is he here too, so?’ Eileen asked Nugent, nodding at Jamie.

‘In what sense?’ Nugent asked.

‘In the sense is he staying here too.’

‘For a spell,’ Jamie said. ‘Would be the situation.’

‘Define spell,’ Nugent said to Jamie, a little irritated. Then, to Eileen, ‘I made the mistake of not offering terms and little has been forthcoming.’

‘Nuge understands solidarity,’ Jamie said. ‘And is a ­tender-­hearted cunt underneath it all.’

‘Nuge is frankly sound,’ Murt said.

‘We love him,’ Jamie said.

‘Stop,’ Nugent said.

Eileen came over to the table and popped open the doughnut carton. She’d bought five, figuring one apiece for Murt, Nugent and herself, with an extra one each for the boys. ‘Have at them,’ she said.

‘These from the Maxol out at the Tesco?’ Jamie asked.

‘Yeah,’ Eileen said.

‘Excellent. They are of course not good, but they are the best you will get in this corner of the world,’ Jamie said, lifting a glazed ring and taking a bite.

‘I want like a half,’ Sara said. Jamie tore his doughnut in half and tossed her the bitten part.

‘Prickhole,’ she said, and threw it back at him. It landed on the floor.

Nugent said he would put on the tea.

‘I was thinking we could go into town, maybe,’ Eileen said to Murt. ‘Or a walk.’