And not that it done Jack any good. He was always a holy terror. Him and his mates used to go up North Great George’s Street, trying all the car locks as they went. They used to practise on the older cars, ould Fords from the seventies, because you could open them with a screwdriver. In them days that street was bumper to bumper with cars, and if Jack and his mates wasn’t educating themselves on the locks, they liked to go up the whole street on the backs of the cars, never touching the pavement once. If they came to a car they knew, you know, if they knew the owner, someone that lived on the street as may be, they might go around that car, in a friendly way. I mean, Sinéad O’Connor lived on the street that time, and to Jack and his mates that ould beamer she drove was like a holy fucking relic. They’d never a’ walked over that. Never. Your man from The Pogues lived there too, but, he didn’t drive a car, for obvious reasons. I mean, you never saw him without a beer in his paw.

Of course, Joe couldn’t say much to Jack about all that, considering his own line of work. But.

Jesus, it was like fucking Hollywood, North Great George’s Street, that time, but without the palm trees.

We were all rubbing along together, I suppose.

Well.

Now Joe was always good enough in his way, his mother was from North Summer Street, his father had a scrapyard in the garden at the back instead of flowers, you know – Joe used to be sent as a little lad out to Ringsend on his own to bring back pram wheels, I don’t know why there were so many prams dumped out by the power station, but there were. And he used to go swimming at the Shelly Banks in the summer in his knicks, while he was on the job like, and he always did say that was the happiest days of his life.

It wasn’t a real job, was it?

He wanted to get a job at the power station because he knew the workers there washed the coal off themselves in this river of hot water that came out of the power station, it was after cooling the engines, and they had soap stuck in the walls of the river, and Joe liked all that, he said it was a grand life. But he never had a job in his life, other than being a Midday Man like I said.