He gave a high, sharp hum, looked sidelong at his mother and shovelled potato into his mouth.

Another cup of tea. Kevin was watching the news as the others cleared the plates, his finger in the mouth of the little dog, who worried it lightly. Matty rose to find the loo, and caught the cousins’ low voices among the radio.

‘What’s going on there, then?’ Carly was saying. ‘She’s a bit blokey, isn’t she?’

‘Lesbian,’ said Michael. ‘Total lesbo. Would have got that knocked right out of her if she’d been round here.’

‘All right now, that’s enough.’ Maureen’s voice, not overly harsh.

Matty knocked on the open kitchen door. Tried to look less boyish. ‘Just looking for the toilet.’

Michael turned. ‘Down to the end, on your left,’ he said, voice artificial, with a dangerous smile.

Carly brought the baby’s cheek down to Maureen and Kevin for goodnight kisses before she disappeared with her. Michael was slouched almost horizontally on the sofa, his arms crossed, biceps bulbous.

‘We’ve not the room for you,’ Maureen said, briskly. ‘There’s the sofa there if you’d like it for the night at least.’

Michael’s jaw remained slack, but his eyes slid over. Impenetrable, almost.

‘It’s cool,’ Matty said. ‘I’ve got the van.’

‘You’ll stay tonight.’ Maureen already sounded relieved.

‘It’s all good. No worries.’ Up. ‘Thanks for dinner.’

Maureen stood in the hallway, holding her ashtray, as Matty put each boot on. A sense of her carefully studying every move, every gesture, struggling a little not to blurt out what everyone always wanted to blurt out.

‘When your father was round here, as a kid, you know,’ she said, ‘he always wanted to go further west. Over the water. He’d sing that song, “Home on the Range”.’

A flare of rib-pain, the memory of Joe singing with his arms outstretched, doing a little cowboy hop with imaginary spurs.

‘Face off America, he said.’ Maureen shook her head and flicked her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘He was so bloody self-important, that boy.’

Matty stood up.

‘There was a place,’ she said, frowning a little. ‘Ah God, it’s too long ago.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Up at Donegal. He was always on at us to head up there, just because he’d been with a friend. Ross-something, it might have been. Bet that narrows it down.’ A wry look.

‘Can you give me a sec?’ Matty didn’t wait for the answer, going out to Shifty and coming back with the map. Finding Donegal, and gazing at it. Pointing. ‘Here?’ On the north coast, a lumpy headland butting out into a bay. The Ross.

Maureen glanced at the page, non-commitally. ‘I think it was on the west side.’

Matty pointed to another village, further south, beginning with Ros.