He was what was called a Midday Man. A Midday Man did get up at midday and he goes along the cars and looks for open cars and then he goes in and takes what he can find. And then down to Parnell Street to the Afternoon Man, he was a man that sat in the ’98 pub, and he took in the stuff and gave cash on it, in the jacks like. And I was often told to go and do the same when the husband was laid up with flu or the like, and then I was a Midday Woman – you might say. But – that was how it was, in them days.

In them days – I’m fucking counting on me fingers and it’s only nine years ago and it could be ninety, for all the changes. And here comes the new fucking millennium, just around the corner, and I suppose we’re like the scrawny little kid on the seesaw, balancing in the middle, while his two mates bang the seesaw up and down at either end, in the ould playground on Hill Street as may be.

In them days was before the Africans came to Parnell Street and it was only ourselves knocking around and drinking in the pubs there. The kids played on the pavements outside the pub while we drank so we knew where they were. My Billy catched on the back of a beer lorry the O’Connell Street end of Parnell Street, and was dragged in the back of it somehow, how it happened only God knows, and when the driver heard people screaming at him, screaming at him they were, he stopped and got out of his cab, and found poor Billy all bundled up somehow in the what-ja-me-call-it, the fender round the back wheels. We didn’t have no money that time as usual and we had to bury little Billy in the Angels’ Acre, the plot of ground in Glasnevin where stillborn babbies and small childer was put. When they died. We stuck up a bit a’ wood for a cross with ‘Billy’ wrote on it and his ma put a dome of plastic flowers where she thought the little chest might be.

He was only six.

It was an awful pity we didn’t have the money for a headstone, you know.

Then when we had done our crying over that, Joe caught the middle child Jack at the same lark and he ran after and didn’t he give him a right thrashing for that, because he was still as sad as Marlon Brando after what happened to Billy.

So maybe Joe was like a fella gets a taste of blood, hitting something smaller than himself, you know?