There was nothing but happiness them days for Joe. You’d swear he was after playing in the games himself, ‘we’ done this and ‘we’ done that, and ‘the lads’ were after doing such and such, and saying such and such – and maybe that was the trouble.

Now thinking about it all these years later, because Janey it must be near ten year ago, before even the Africans came to Parnell Street, and got everyone wearing beads in their hair, and got old shops all new again – thinking about it, maybe that was the trouble. Maybe that was the trouble, the great yawning gap between – the fact that in the upshot, he wasn’t a ‘we’, he wasn’t winning nothing, he wasn’t really connected, he was just fucking Joe, Joe Brady whose mother was from North Summer Street, and he was still getting up at midday and scouting the fucking cars, he was still a Midday Man, no matter what fucking countries we beat, and no nearer in all of eternity to washing himself in that wonderful river he was yearning for, yearning for, down at the Shelly Banks.

So this night he comes home, it was the night we got as far as the – was it the semi-final, or the quarter? I could not tell you at this distance – but we had got as far as we were going and although there was jubilation as the fella on the telly might say, yes, yes, there was something else also. There was something else like a crusher of stones, there was something else.

Joe came home from O’Connell Street. I was wearing the green jersey he had brung home for me the first time, I always wore it in bed on a match night, like instead of me T-shirt, to bring Joe luck. It was about four o’clock in the morning, and he was sober as a judge. I remember the lovely yellow light of the early morning sitting up in our bedroom window like some ould flower. He comes over to me half-asleep in the scratcher.

I was so glad to see him. I loved Joe, I knew everything about him, what he had to do to make a crust, and he was fond of his boys, he was, and he cried like a baby when Billy was killed, he cried for three days.

But what he was thinking of that time I do not know.

He comes over to the bed and I’m all warm like, you know the way you are, in the sheets in the summer, and sleepy, and glad to see him. ‘How did it go, Joe?’ I says, and he says, ‘What did you say?’ ‘How did it go?’ I says, and he looks at me all dark, and he comes over closer, and he sees the green jersey and he grabs it.