‘She told me to go straight home.’

The boys were filling their pockets with pebbles in case they met any soldiers on their way to wherever they were going.

‘What’s half an hour?’ Peter threw a stone into the air and caught it on the back of his hand.

‘No,’ said Joe. The back of her hand had been like knotted string.

‘Ah, go on.’

‘I’d better go home.’

‘Suit yourself.’

The boys started throwing stones at each other, without weight behind each flick of the arm, without malice. Joe’s wave was unnoticed. She had never really liked him going out to play with other children. She had always wanted him to be there with her when he had been small and Brendan had been out at school. She hadn’t been able to go out to work then and he never left her side. He went to the shops with her and to the Church, and stood fidgeting on the pavement while she passed the time of day with a neighbour. Sometimes if the sun was shining and she had finished her work around the house she would take him for a walk up to the park, or down along the quay to look at the boats. She taught him to write, setting him at the kitchen table with a box of coloured pencils and a couple of sheets of paper. ‘Emm is for Mammy,’ she would say, bending over him to draw a great big M at the top of the page. ‘Here now, you do it.’ She would leave him with his fingers clumsily pushing the pencil across the paper, and get on with her cleaning and boiling. In his whole life no one else’s mother had ever boiled things the way she did. She had needed his company there all the time, not, he had somehow been aware, because she couldn’t pass an hour without him, but so that she wouldn’t have to be alone with his father. He was some sort of protection for her.

‘I have the child,’ she used to call up at him, when he shouted down for her to run to the shop for his cigarettes, or to the off-licence for a couple of bottles of stout. Then the old man would have to wait for Brendan to come home. Brendan would do it, Brendan was his boy. Brendan was the great lad. He would run those interminable messages after school to the pub, or the bookie. He would go out and look for him on those evenings when Mammy had finally taken his tea out of the oven and angrily scraped it off the plate and into the bucket. It was Brendan who could coax him home and back upstairs to his bed and would then sit by him listening to the stories, over and over again the same stories, the glorious days, the fairy tales. Brendan knew those names as well as he knew his own: Liam Lynch, Ernie O’Malley, Liam Mellows, Sean Russell, the Joes, the Eamons, the Charles, all heroes, dead heroes, living heroes, men of principle, men of action. Heroes. The world was peopled with heroes, with patrols and flying columns and sad songs that used to drift down through the floor to Joe below, songs about death and traitors and freedom and more heroes.