‘Thanks, Eileen,’ Murt said, rising from his seat to reach for a doughnut. Jamie leaned in and measuredly thwacked the carton down the table towards his little brother.

‘And how’s Big Devaney?’ Jamie asked Eileen, meaning her partner, Mark.

‘He’s sound.’

‘And how’s your little buck? What’s your little buck called again?’

‘Ashleigh.’

‘Ashleigh,’ Jamie repeated. ‘Only I saw Devaney’s other boy, the teenage lad, in town the other day.’

‘That would be Danny.’

‘It’s an uncanny business,’ Jamie said.

‘What is?’ Murt asked.

‘Children,’ Jamie said.

Eileen and Murt were walking the path by the river in the Belleek Woods. It was only gone two in the afternoon, but the sky was already so grey it was like being on the moon, the light a kind of exhausted residue. To their right coursed the Moy, dark as stout and in murderous spate; to their left high conifers stood like rows of coats on coat racks. Eileen was smoking, a sheltering hand cupped over her mouth, mizzle prickling her face; Murt was in a woollen hat and gloves borrowed from his uncle. They’d agreed to walk the length of the woods and were both so soaked it would have taken more resolve to abandon the walk than to keep going.

‘Nuge is an incel,’ Murt said.

‘Incel?’

‘Involuntary celibate.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘What it sounds like.’

‘And in what sense is Nuge one of them cells?’ Eileen said.

‘Incel,’ Murt said. ‘And he is one in the sense he’s never known how to get ­any – and never will. That’s the problem with sex. In order to know how to get any, you need to have already managed to figure out how to get some. And Nuge is too innocent.’

‘Innocent,’ Eileen said.

‘In his heart, Nuge is an innocent. A man without guile.’

Murt and Jamie’s father had been a generally useless article who drank, and left the family to move to England when Murt was ten, ostensibly for work. They’d stopped hearing from him years ago. Nugent, his younger brother, had always been one of those men who spent a lot of time with children, back when that wasn’t looked at sceptically. He’d stewarded football games, volunteered in the community centre, and let Murt or Jamie stay at his place whenever they got too much for their mother.

‘He was always that way,’ Murt went on, ‘even before the stroke. Small towns are incubators for these men. It’s not even that they are secretly gay or anything like that. They just never developed the cop to have anything to do with it at all. These are the men who faithfully do the messages, by foot, every day for the mother, year in and year out, until one of them drops dead.’