I call Patty Duffy the pride of Parnell Street because it was people like her put the pride back into the place after the desolation. In the months after, people could look back and remember how all the human feeling rose up in Patty and in themselves, and that they looked after the wounded and the dying and the dead, and cried for them, and stroked their suffering hands. There were gougers and layabouts there that day that came forward to help, that were made good by the occasion, as the priests would say – fucking redeemed they were.

Oh, Jesus, human pride.

Violence, you know.

Anyhow.

But, thinking about it, maybe that was why I was able to leave Joe. And not go back, I mean. Because when I was just a little girl I’d seen something so bad. You know? Evil. That you couldn’t do nothing about. And then, hitting women, kicking your wife in the belly, where she made her babies, and punching her in the breast, that she fed them out of – you know – the same fucking thing. Only, you could do something about it. Feck off with yourself and the kids. Make a decent life.

Pride.

Jesus, I never meant to say all that, all the same.

Jesus, Jesus, I’m sorry.

Some things is private after all.

Where was I in me story? For fuck’s sake. Oh yeh.

Lost me job in the loony bin, but, it’s the new Ireland, isn’t it?

God help us.

Jobs galore. Got a job in Geldof’s factory, no bother. Yeh. Glad to see me. Uncle or something of your man that had us all sending money to Africa in the eighties, even I sent a few shillins, I did. A lovely singer, that wrote a lovely song about Monday. He never pushed on to Tuesday for some reason, I don’t know why. He could a’ covered the whole week, he was that good a singer, for God’s sake.

Happy days. Happier, anyhow.

Little house from the council, southside, but only just, near the old gasworks on the docks, shades of me father, and Jack and little Macker teenagers, little no longer. Beautiful boys. Handsome, and it’s not just me saying that. The very spit of Joe, both of them. Joe in his prime, in the old days, when I loved him.

And then I heard he was sick, the poor bollocks. I heard he was very very poorly as a matter of fact, that the poor bastard was down in the Bon Secours hospital, and I knew he probably didn’t have many to go in and see him, and I also knew – oh, I also knew that he would be facing things bravely enough, because he is a brave man, all in all, except when he was being a coward that time, with me.