Then Brendan had gone away, gone over there. It had been a summer afternoon and the windows in the street sparkled.

‘I don’t want to deliver milk bottles forever, kiddo.’ He looked down the hill as he spoke and pinched Joe’s shoulder between his first finger and his thumb as if to impress something upon him, Joe wasn’t quite sure what. In his other hand he carried the old brown suitcase that had lain on top of the wardrobe as long as Joe could remember, gathering dust.

‘Might as well be a bloody cow.’

Mam hadn’t come to the door to see him off, and the old man had been in his bed for days.

‘I’ll come back a millionaire.’

He had walked off down the hill, leaning slightly away from the suitcase as he went.

Dad had been bad for weeks after. Ill, shaking all the time and giving off a terrifying smell of illness that made Joe want to keep away from him. He had put his fist one night through the window in the front room, and Mam had filled the black hole with cardboard which had stayed there for the best part of a year. But things were starting to get bad then and soon they weren’t the only people with cardboard in their window.

‘Provos rule’ was written in large white letters on the gable end of a house. A few days ago the letters had been grey, but someone had brightened them up. It was now the brightest thing about the day. If I had a cat I would call it Pangur Bán. It would sit on the wall with its tail curled tidily round its feet and watch Mrs O’Toole’s hens scratching for nothing in her back yard. It would jump through the window in the middle of the night and sleep in the bend of my legs, only Mam would say no. No dirty cats on beds, she would say, and then boil the bedclothes.

There was a girl sitting on the low wall which he regarded more or less as his private property. She had her coat clutched round her and she appeared to be staring at the green slope across the valley, or the walls, or the spire of the Cathedral rising above them all. Or maybe, he thought, as he put his schoolbag down on the wall, she was really only staring at the inside of her head. The world’s longest stare, the world’s most unrewarding stare. He tucked his anorak under his behind and sat down also. He had seen her there before like himself, loitering rather than doing anything sensible. She always carried a briefcase that weighed her down slightly as she walked, reminding him, in fact, of the departing back of Brendan. Now, her briefcase was on the wall beside her and a red-gloved hand held the edges of her coat together at the throat. She was quite unaware of Joe’s arrival, even unaware of the wind that tangled her brown hair, and had changed the colour of her face from the palest cream to a pinched mauve. She sat quite motionless, only the wind lifted and stretched her hair out to one side. Suddenly she took her hand from her collar and pushed it into her pocket. She took out a packet of cigarettes and some matches. She put a cigarette into the corner of her mouth, and then, for some reason, became aware of Joe’s presence. She turned and gave him a quick look and held out the packet towards him.