The fucking waterfall in Powerscourt if you was ever there. That me kingly da was killed by a scumbag like the Afternoon Man. Oh, Jesus. And my little fella killed along the same street. Two of the things closest to my heart. Gone. You can imagine the state of me then, in me mam’s little sitting room.

His little fairy, he called me, now, which is a bit embarrassing. But he meant well. And every little girl looks like a little fairy, doesn’t she? I always wished I had got a little girl, like I said. To be dressing her and that. But I got a lot a happiness too out a’ the boys, yeh?

Billy died but the other two are just as nice.

They’re old-fashioned Dublin boys in that they’re nice to their ma. I don’t know why, but they are. And I’m very glad a’ that. I am. I wouldn’t trade it for nothing. If you said to me, Janet, you can have a big house by the sea and all the tea in China, if you will give up your two sons, I would say – but you know what I’d say.

Anyone would.

Everyone loves their kids.

When I was a little girl and me da stood with the window behind him, he looked like there was gold all around his head. I remember actually even when I must a’ been tiny, tiny, in one of them bouncy chairs you can get in Arnott’s, must a’ been, so was I even one year old? – I remember seeing him like that, like he wasn’t even real. He used ta be singing ‘Kevin Barry’ and he never tired of that song and he used a be singing that, dawn to dusk, and when I was about three or four, he put me up on a table, and learned it to me, so I could be singing it to him.

(Singing.) ‘Kevin Barry was a young lad, of the age of seventeen … ’

And most important maybe above all, he never laid a hand on me ma like most men did in them days, and yeh, later days too. So when people do be criticising the world as an evil place with nothing to put in the balance of evil, like, I always think of me da, and me mam too, and the love that there was between them, before the bleeding Afternoon Man took it away for ever.

A pause for a bit.