On the quays Tom stood in the doorway of a warehouse. He could see the boat just beginning its journey and he watched it making its way across, people stepping off it and the returning travellers being greeted by the ferryman. When it had drawn out into the water he went to the quayside and sat on a bollard. The ferryman never talked to his mother the way he did to the girls from the fish sheds or to the other passengers. Going over with her to Mass on Sundays, Tom had noticed it, and he noticed it when she arrived now: she was the only passenger, and when the engines were turned off the ferryman didn’t begin a conversation. His mother had the stain too, was what Holy Mullihan had meant.

Together, they walked from the quays. Neck Daly and Deso Furphy were picking at the paint blisters on the shutters of the closed-up shop in South Main Street, and Tom hoped they’d call across the street to him so that he could tell his mother who they were—older boys who were already at the Brothers’, who even so would bother to address him. But they didn’t see him, nor did Father Pierce, who was going into Barry’s. Tom had never before gone to the promenade with his mother, which was where she said they were going now, although he’d thought they would be walking out to his grandmother’s house. They passed the hall-doors with the brass plates. Ikely the dentist had a nickname in the class, he told his mother. ‘Feathery Ike,’ he said.

His mother was hurrying and distracted, not interested in the nickname. There was a rhyme that went with it:Feathery Ike, Feathery Ike, give us a ride on your buttery bike. He hadn’t understood it until Neck Daly explained it had been made up because the dentist bore a resemblance to a parrot, and because a pound of butter had once melted in the basket on his bicycle. Sister Teresa Dolores had had a tooth drawn by him once and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. She’d had to keep a towel in her mouth all night.

‘Hullo,’ his mother said to a woman in a black shawl. The woman had seen them approaching her and had risen from the promenade seat where she’d been sitting. ‘Well, is that Tom?’ she said. He thought she was going to kiss him but she didn’t.

She was a slight woman, with grey hair hardly showing under the edge of her shawl. ‘You’re looking well, Brigid,’ she said.

‘You’re looking well yourself.’

‘I have my health, thank God, Brigid.’

‘Did you walk it in?’

‘I did walk it. I came on the back road. It’s better the back way.’

‘It is.’

The conversation ceased. The shawled woman examined Tom closely. After a while she said:

‘Is a weekday hard for you with your work?’