Tick-tock. How about if I plastered my face in Phyllis’s Pond’s cream, backcombed my hair to stand up like a fright wig, wrapped my sheet around me like a toga, and walked into Big Jacky’s room saying, ‘Phyllis, get up. It’s exactly this time every night that we slaughter the cat’? She’d leg it all the way back to Carrickfergus in her long nightie, squealing like a stuck pig.

Tick-tock. Or, still with the face cream on, but in a voluminous nightdress to look like my mother, whispering, ‘It’s Grace, your dead sister. Leave wee Jacky alone, he’s mine, after all, not yours.’ But that would be a wicked thing to do. Big Jacky would be ashamed. I pictured him up there, looking down at me and smoking the pipe, slowly shaking his head in grave disappointment. ‘Don’t torment Phyllis,’ he would say. ‘She’s not a bad soul.’

Tick-tock. I could just about hear her snoring. Does that mean, if she woke up, she could just about hear me crying?

Tick-tock. The starlings singing, puffed up with the importance of the morning, balancing on the telegraph wire with their gnarled little feet. The grey dawn creeping through the fine curtain. The piglet oink and whistle of Phyllis snoring. Me wide awake.

And all of that was just one night.

4

‘Your big mate got a beating last night.’ There was a mixture of fear and excitement in Marty’s voice as he ran up next to me: fear at the darkness of what had happened, excitement at the size of his news.

It was a lead weight casually pitched into the bowl of bad soup already swaying in my stomach.

‘Which mate?’ I said. I didn’t need to ask.

‘Your big dopey mate, Titch you said his name was.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘I heard the shouting in the night. Four fellas with balaclavas on pulled him out of his house, I seen them out my window. They yanked him out over towards the waste ground, and I couldn’t see, but I seen the one left behind pushing his ma back into the house. She was screaming too. The ambulance came later.’

How much later? I thought. They had got organised and cocky about the beatings now. I had heard that they dialled the ambulance themselves before they gave someone a doing. I wondered what they’d hit him with. I hoped to God it wasn’t the planks of wood with rusty nails in it. The last boy that got that had infections and was in the Royal for weeks.

I could picture him there, flailing around, a clumsy bear prodded with hot pokers. It made me wince even to imagine it.

‘Thanks for telling me,’ I told Marty. He nodded abruptly and sauntered off down the street.