‘Organisation Todt,’ Pierre’d said when they had first arrived a year or so earlier. ‘After some Nazi or other. They build roads and things. Riff-raff, for the most part. Criminals.’

No, Joe thought, stretching the word. What could that lad have done? He was no delinquent, Joe would put money on that. The boy was short, young, and Joe saw himself in Cloghane standing on the flats as his daidí wound back his fist. I will not hear another word. The lad’s face was pinched, his eyes white against the grime and he was gesturing to his mouth, food, food. Joe delved in his pockets. He had a tobacco pouch and his pipe, a handkerchief and a box of matches. He knew there was no food, but he turned his pockets inside out and shook his head.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, pulling his bike free of the wall and pushing down hard on the pedals so the wheels squeaked and scraped the ground with their threadbare tyres, scratch-scratch on the broken tarmac.

He took to looking out for the lad, searching him out in every gang he passed, breathing in the sickly cloy of the men, the sour of festering bodies. No flesh or muscle, sallow skin on bone, covered in dust and sand, as ramparts thirty feet high grew along the strand at St Ouen, cut off the sea with thick concrete walls, shrinking the island, shrivelling it to wrinkles in the landscape, to sulphurous craters, the vistas brown and small. It was like being buried alive in a vast, open mausoleum, watching as the masons sealed the vault, the air and the light diminishing day by day.

Joe didn’t have the heart to try to open the boxing club again, couldn’t face another angry mother. He thought of going to the pub, but he didn’t have the money for a beer and though no one back home would have let Father Murphy pay for his Guinness, he knew they did things differently here. He wasn’t sure he’d be welcome, either. Now they had no wirelesses it was difficult to know what to do in the evenings.

Pierre had taken to coming round to the convent in the spring, once the boxing club had closed.

‘There’s only so much of my sister I can take,’ he said one Friday. He pulled out his cigarettes and a small flask of brandy. ‘She doesn’t drink. Doesn’t smoke. And her lodgers, those nurses.’ He paused. ‘They’ve got as much sense of fun as a cuttlefish with a budgerigar.’