Tom swung his schoolbag, trying not to let it touch the concrete surface of the pier. When that was no longer interesting he surveyed the familiar landscape of the town: the dark slate roofs huddled above. the quaysides, the colour-washed façades like neat smudges of paint randomly arranged, the spires of two churches, one fat and seeming nourished, the other slender and more delicate. Quays and warehouses gave way to a shore, and a promenade; break-waters staggered crookedly over sand; low, round hills began where the houses ended. Two thousand and twenty-seven people lived in the town, Sister Teresa Dolores said. There was a gasworks and a slaughterhouse, thirty-seven public houses and three banks, as well as assorted shops. There was a coal business and a meal business, and Lett’s Drapery Arcade and a picture house. For years on the ferryboat Tom had heard talk of a tinned meat factory coming to the town, but it never had.

As he waited, Tom thought about the knife-throwing act that was advertised on bills stuck up on telegraph poles in South Main Street. ‘Will we go?’ Haverty had said to him. ‘Would it be a thing yourself and myself would do?’ Once, when Toft’s Roundabouts and Bumper Cars had come, Haverty had taken him. They’d driven a bumper car and gone on to the roundabout, both of them sitting on a single horse, ‘I never saw knife-throwing,’ he’d said when Haverty asked him, and when he told his mother about it she agreed that he could go. She wouldn’t like it herself, his mother said, even though it was reputed to be Ireland’s greatest. The Zodiacs it said on the advertising bills, and this was the day they were to perform.

The ferryboat drew in and when Tom had clambered on to it he moved down to the front in order to stand beside the ferryman, which he did whenever the boat wasn’t too crowded. The ferryman was old, his hairless dome as brown as the timbers of his boat, his hands massive. A navy-blue jersey stretched over a rounded chest; when it rained he wore a black waterproof and a hat that made him look like the man on the sardine tins which were sometimes stacked up in the window of Meath’s grocery.

‘Did you ever hear reference to an animal called The Gullet?’ he enquired of a man who was crossing with a churn, and when the man replied he had not, the ferryman said he had it from Butt Nolan that The Gullet would come in at sixteen to one that same afternoon. ‘If you have a coin to spare,’ the ferryman advised, ‘I’d place it on The Gullet with a certainty of profit.’