Aye, said Betty. She lifted a garment from a bowl of sudsy water and began working at it with a nail brush, dipping, peering, scrubbing again. The vests and faded pyjamas that were spilling from the bag were spotted with watery ochre stains.

Did you see the cut of our Tommy? said Betty, lifting her ham-coloured hands from the water and dragging them across her tabard.

Maybe he’ll go back next year. Have you spoken to the school?

He’s eighteen. They say he can do what he likes. He’s hardly here any more. He’s been knocking about with his cousins, she said, reaching to stir the soap-slicked water with the shaft of a sweeping brush. Bad news, them boys.

Oh! Cushla said. That reminds me. Davy can get school dinners for the rest of the term.

Who’s paying for it? said Betty.

Cushla hadn’t prepared an answer. The school, she said, a beat late.

Betty had stopped working and was frowning as she listened. That’d be handy, she said eventually.

As Cushla passed through the sitting room, Mandy was in front of her father, lighting the cigarette that was between his lips, Davy watching. Cushla called goodbye to them and went to the hall. Tommy came down the stairs as she opened the front door. He caught the edge of it with one hand; in the other he held the copy of Jude the Obscure she had lent him.

Best book I’ve ever read, he said.

I’m delighted you like it.

A smile was trying to escape him, manifesting itself in a deep dimple on either side of his mouth. It’s great, he said. Dark, like, but great. Keep them coming.

It was an oddly cocky thing to say and she felt colour rise in her face. Your mummy’s demented about you, Tommy.

The dimples vanished. She had reminded him that he was a schoolboy. Did you see what they did to him? he asked.

It’s horrific.

He has seizures from getting his head kicked in. He can’t concentrate long enough to read a headline in the paper. He’s sitting in there with a bag of his own piss strapped round his fucking leg, like.

I hope the police find whoever did it soon.

I hope they find them before I do.

She laid her fingers on his cuff. His arm jerked, as if she had given him an electric shock. He stared at her hand for a moment and went back upstairs, slower now.

When she got to the end of the estate, she could hardly see for crying. A gully sucker was coming from the left. There was time to swing out ahead of it, but she let it pass, wiping her eyes with her sleeve and following its foul sludgy load down the road towards town.