‘Not much chance of me running anywhere.’

‘That right?’

He groped under the dash and held up a big spanner.

‘I’m getting on a bit,’ he said. ‘But I’ve surprised one or two with the speed I can move.’

I sat back. My foot throbbed in pace with the engine. I had banged it again going down those hellish stairs in the dark.

‘It’s a scunner,’ the driver said. ‘You know what they call this time of night in any other job? Unsocial bloody hours.’

The taxi stopped. Looking out, I saw a wall covered with names and threats. All the paint looked black in the light from the sulphur lamps.

‘This it?’

He didn’t answer. I opened the door and then sat back deliberately.

‘What’s up?’ he asked turning to look at me.

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘Eh?’

I climbed out and limped forward to pay him.

‘You have an honest face, pal,’ he said.

Now I wanted him to say the wrong thing. I wanted him to get out of his safe little cabin. I didn’t think his spanner would do him much good.

‘I have a bloody sore foot,’ I said. ‘Is that not more like it?’

‘Don’t be that way, son.’

‘Here. Take the money. That’s my lot. Call it a tip for your conversation.’

It was awkward for him. I dropped the money a little at a time into his hand.

‘You’re okay, son,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you’re a big fellow and I wasn’t sure of that stick. All the best.’

‘Thanks and fuck you too,’ I said but he had pulled away.

I went into the close that had the right number and climbed the first stairs. With the effort of favouring the bad foot, the muscle of the calf cramped. I crouched kneading it until the knots came out. At every door I hoped to see her name so that I could rest. I got to the top and then I came down again checking all the way. She might be a lodger. She might not have her name on any of the doors. My name was not on the door of the Kennedys’ house. I could knock at a door and ask. I thought how pleased someone would be to have me knocking at his door in the middle of the night.

I sat on the bottom step. I had no money and no idea what district this was. At the back of the entry there was a scurrying like the light tapping of fingernails. Even respectable tenements drew rats. There was a door beside me, one of the two on the ground floor. I pressed the bell. In the stillness I heard the dull burring from inside. I leaned on the tiny dull square of light three times; nobody came and I limped past the second door into the street.

The name of the street was on a plate on the tenement wall. It was the right name, but it was a ‘Street’. I checked the piece of paper and the name was right, only it was not ‘Street’ but ‘Gardens’. I went round the corner and there was another plate and it had what I wanted. I was back in business.

The Gardens began with one block of tenements. After that there were hedges with neat bungalows tucked behind them. I searched for some clue about the numbering until I was frustrated, exhausted and ready to give up if there had been anywhere else to go. When I got the right house, I found in the middle of the gate the number trickily worked in iron.

It was a house like the others; if you were absent-minded, or hungry enough, you might have rushed by mistake into either of its neighbours and sat down to someone else’s dinner. No lights showed, but then it was late. Nothing but the inertia of all the little decisions since I had fished out the fold of paper in the taxi made me open the gate.

There was a bell and it had a little light so that you could find it in the dark. I could not bring myself to ring it. Maybe if I went round the house I would come on Margaret standing at a window. We would get into bed and every time the springs creaked a woman’s voice, her mother’s, would call out: ‘Are you all right dear?’

I tucked the stick under my arm and leaned on the roughcast wall for support as I went round the house. The side window was open. There was no sound from inside and nothing to make out but shapes. I hesitated with my hands on the ledge for what felt like hours then turned back to the front door.

I made a pointless little rapping, too quiet to waken anybody. I rang the bell. I banged with my fist; I rattled the box. At the height of the din, an insomniac stopped at the gate. I turned to look at him. He went away. Under a lamp, he emerged as a fat little man with a white dog at heel. If he was a good neighbour, he had changed his mind.

With a soft rub of wood on wood the window rose. I reached in with the stick and swept it in an arc without touching anything. Please God, I thought, don’t make it her parents’ room. At least there was no sound of creaking springs. I bent in over the ledge till my hands touched the floor, gathered the good foot under me and hit the floor crouching. Silence.

I had got to my feet and started to edge forward when the door opened. A pencil beam of light crept forward just ahead of the new arrival. If the torch beam had swung about it would have caught me playing statues. The light crept across the surface of the table. There was a vase with white papery discs of honesty standing up out of it and a piece of paper propped against it. The paper was held so it could be read then was taken behind the beam out of sight. The light moved and there was a bump.

‘Bloody hell!’ a man’s voice said. I knew the voice. No name came with it, but I had heard that voice before.

A man’s shape spread cruciform against the lighter dark of the window and vanished as the curtains were drawn. The beam wound back across the carpet, a switch clicked and there was a dazzling brightness from overhead.

‘Muldoon!’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you knew Margaret.’

His foxy mask gaped in shock, the torch still lit and waving in his hand. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he could speak.

‘Was that you hammering at the door?’ he asked.

‘Nobody else, but why didn’t you open the door? Is Margaret here?’

But at the first question his tiny eyes scuttled to the drawn curtains and I remembered the window opened behind it. I turned my back on him and went over to pull back the curtains. The glass underneath the catch had been cut out in a half circle. I put my fist up beside it as a measure.

‘I don’t think you came in by the front door either,’ I said. The neat hole was just larger than my fist. ‘That’s professional. I couldn’t have done it. Was that one of the optional extras in the seminary?’

‘Never mind me,’ Muldoon said. ‘Is burglary a new course at the University?’

‘I’m a friend of Margaret.’ I leered at him like a bad comedian. ‘She’s expecting me.’

As he didn’t answer, my own words put another thought in my head.

‘Are you breaking your vows with her?’

He put the torch out at last.

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘You and Margaret. Nothing sinful. Only trying to make little Muldoons together.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. There are people who ask to be needled; Muldoon had taken me that way since the day I met him. Sometimes I had the feeling that I did not really care for him. With remarks like that, I could usually drive him into a miniature puritan frenzy.

‘You’d better sit down,’ he said. ‘Before you fall down.’

‘You first.’

He shook his head as if he was patronising me – it was very strange – and sat down himself beside the table with the flowers. When he was down, I let myself sit. Every muscle in my body sighed. For the first time I took in the room – a sofa, chairs, a gas fire set into the hearth with a fuss of ornaments on the shelf above it.

‘There’s nobody else in the house. Is there?’

‘Just you and me,’ he said.

‘Cosy.’

I knew I should be questioning, getting things out of him. My mind was foundering in pillows of weariness. When I tried to get him in sharp focus, bolsters of flesh pressed from below and above to close my eyes.