Someone touches her arm. It’s the man with the small glasses.

Miss Lavery, he says. Do you remember me?

THE IRISH FOR NO

1

Cushla wrapped her handbag in her coat and pushed it into the gap between the beer fridge and the till. Her brother Eamonn was bent over the counter with a stock list. He looked up at her and his eyes narrowed. He inclined his head at the mirror that ran the length of the bar. Cushla leaned in to check her reflection. Father Slattery had marked her with a thick cross an inch wide and two inches long. The rub of her finger raised the piney, resinous scent of whatever blessed unguent the ashes were mixed with and blurred the cruciate shape to a sooty smudge.

Eamonn slapped a wet serviette into her hand. Hurry up, he hissed.

Most of the men who drank in the pub did not get ashes on Ash Wednesday or do the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday or go to Mass on Sunday. It was one thing to drink in a Catholic-owned bar; quite another to have your pint pulled by a woman smeared in papish warpaint. Cushla buffed until the skin on her forehead was pink, the serviette blackened, flittered. She tossed it in the bin.

Eamonn muttered something under his breath. The only word she could make out was eejit.

The regulars were lined along the counter. Jimmy O’Kane, the single egg he bought for his tea bulging in his breast pocket. Minty, the school caretaker, who got through so much Carlsberg Special Brew the pub won an award for having the highest sales in Northern Ireland, even though he was the only customer who drank the stuff. Fidel, in his khaki cap and tinted glasses. By day he measured mint imperials and clove rock in his mother’s sweet shop; by night he was brigadier of the local branch of the Ulster Defence Association. A fitter from the shipyard called Leslie who didn’t speak until he was drunk and one night told Cushla he’d love to bath her. Another man. Middle-aged, with a whiskey in front of him. Dark-eyed, faintly jowly. He was wearing a black suit and a stiff white shirt from which the collar had been detached, clothes that were conspicuous among the overalls and drip-dry fabric. His hair was flat to the ears then wavy at the nape of his neck, as if it had been sweating under a hat. Or a wig.

Cushla climbed on to a stool to turn up the volume on the television. When she climbed down, the man with the whiskey was flicking at the filter of his cigarette with his thumb, as if he had just looked away.

The news started the way it always did, with a montage of short scenes. A riot. A boy of six or seven climbing up the side of a Saracen personnel carrier to poke a stone into one of the slits from which the soldiers pointed their guns. A march on Stormont, thousands moving up the long avenue to the parliament building. They had added a new one. A single parked car on an empty street. It looked like a photograph until the car bulged and exploded into a great ball of smoke and fire and its doors somersaulted away from it, glass from the surrounding buildings falling like hail on to the tarmac. The segment finished where it always did, on an image of Mary Peters holding up her Olympic medal.