She combed her hair with her fingers in front of the hall mirror and took her trench coat from the banister. I’m going for a walk, she called. So much for never seeing Michael Agnew again; one phone call and she was streeling from the house.

His car was between the Laverys’ and Mr Reid’s. He glanced at her as she sat in the passenger seat. She felt ugly, in her plaid skirt and jumper, and pulled her coat-tails across herself.

He was driving away from the town. I called to the pub, he said. I thought you’d be working.

Not tonight.

Good day? he said. There was a shadow where the collar on the white shirt should have been, a light trim of grime. Another smell, mixed with the laundry detergent and leather, ripe and elemental. Greyish chaff on his chin and jowls. He looked vaguely wrecked. Beautiful.

The father of one of my pupils was attacked last night, she said.

The man who was found this morning?

Yeah.

Christ, he said. I heard about that.

The estate was on their left, drab against the bright fields. The family live in there, at the very back, she said. It’s a mixed marriage. She watched his profile for a reaction but if there was one she couldn’t see it.

Apparently he went for a drink after work and left at ten to get a bus. He must have been dragged into a car, because he was found a mile and a half away, said Michael.

How do you know that? said Cushla.

We hear everything in chambers, he said.

Jesus, said Cushla. All he did was walk down a street?

It’s not about what you do here, he said. It’s about what you are.

She told Michael about the letters on the wall, the shit-flinging neighbours. The other children tormenting Davy because of the smell of frying on his clothes. That he considered it newsworthy that his father got a job.

Past the cemetery where they had buried her father, its sloping lawn and slim lanes of headstones. The army barracks, rolls of barbed wire on top of high fences glinting weakly in the evening light. Up and away from the town, and into the hills. The hedgerows had been cut back hard, except where the gorse was bustling and straining from the straight blocky lines. Michael’s house was further out this road. Why was he bringing her here?

He pulled in by an iron gate that was visible only for a moment to a passing driver.

She told him about Slattery’s terrible address to the children, Gerry’s singing, how she joined in to take the bad look off him. I haven’t a note, she said, and it’s the worst song in human history.

He laughed, a sound she felt in her lungs, and she thought she would do anything to make him happy.

What about you? she said.

Busy.

There was so little he could tell her.

They got out of the car. He took her hand and helped her up on to a hump that edged a narrow gully. The fields were dotted with ewes and lambs. The sky was cloudless, the hills across the lough petrol-blue, ribbed with white dashes, bungalows, rows of houses; the water dark where it narrowed towards the shipyards, the city sprawled around it.