‘No.’

‘Or a semi-colon?’

‘No.’

‘Or why you mustn’t split an infinitive?’

‘No. No. No.’

‘Neither do I. Nor do I think it matters very much. Unfortunately there are those who do. So.’

There was a very long silence.

‘So?’ he asked eventually.

‘So I don’t suppose my career as a teacher will last very long.’

‘What will you do then?’

‘Ah!’

She produced triumphantly a somewhat bent cigarette from the bottom of her bag, where her hands had been blindly groping.

‘Oh God, I hate myself,’ she said, as she put it battered and all as it was into her mouth. ‘No damn self-control. I mean to say, Joe Logan, where are you if you can’t resist putting a small white tube full of poison into your mouth every half an hour?’ She took some matches from her pocket and lit the cigarette. She took a deep pull on it. ‘And what’s more, it must be the most expensive poison in the world.’

He noticed she was wearing a ring with a small blue stone on her right hand.

‘Are you engaged?’

She touched the ring for a moment with a finger and then pushed her hand into her pocket.

‘Oh, that,’ was all she said.

‘I don’t like my teacher.’

‘I don’t like quite a lot of my pupils.’

‘Oh.’

‘Perhaps it had never occurred to you that some of you, at times, are utterly unbearable.’

‘You get paid for teaching us.’

‘Not enough, Joe Logan, no way.’

‘You could always do something else.’

‘What would you suggest?’

‘You could always get a job in a cigarette factory.’

She laughed and then threw her half-smoked cigarette over her shoulder into the middle of the road.

‘Beastly boy. Now see what you’ve done, you’ve prolonged my life by ten minutes.’

‘You’ll thank me for that when the moment comes.’

‘Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. The Chinese … I think it’s the Chinese … have a peculiar idea. If you save someone from death, you are responsible for the rest of their life … as if your own wasn’t enough. So now you’re responsible for ten minutes of my life.’

He considered the suggestion.

‘I protest.’

‘Too late.’ She got up and pulled her coat around her. ‘Come on. It’s too cold to sit here any longer. Walk to the cigarette shop with me and I’ll buy you a bar of chocolate.’

‘No thanks.’

She didn’t argue, just looked down at him with slight amusement.

‘Tooraloo,’ she said, and walked off down the hill swinging her briefcase.

‘Mad.’ He said the word quietly to himself as he looked after her.

Brendan was sitting at the kitchen table when he went in. His hair was long like a girl’s and a soft moustache drooped around his mouth. Mam would hate all that. An anorak and a rucksack were on the floor beside him. He travelled light. The two of them stared at each other in silence.

‘God, you’ve grown,’ said Brendan eventually. ‘You’re not a babby any longer.’