–I know you’re only playing when you do it, said Mister Finnucane.

Henno was standing behind him. He was blushing as well. He’d been out in the yard looking after us; he should have seen what was happening. There was no escape; James O’Keefe was dead.

–only having a bit of fun. But it’s not funny. Not funny at all. Doing what I saw being done this morning could cause serious injury.

Ah; was that all?

–That part of the body is very delicate.

We knew that.

–You could ruin a boy’s life for the rest of his—life. All for a joke.

The big hole in front of us was filling up. He wasn’t going to say anything wrong or funny. He wasn’t going to say Balls or Mickey or Testicles. It was disappointing, only it had stopped another history test—the life of the Fianna—and now he was going to kill James O’Keefe.

–Sit down, James.

I couldn’t believe it. Neither could James O’Keefe or anybody.

–Sit down.

James O’Keefe got halfway between sitting down and standing up. It was a trick; it had to be.

–I don’t want to see it happening again, said Mister Finnucane.

That was all.

Henno’d get him when Mister Finnucane was gone. But he didn’t. We went straight back to the test.

There was no proper road outside our house for months, up as far as the summer holidays. Da had to park the car down at the shops. Missis Kilmartin, the woman from the shop who spied on the shoplifters, knocked at our door: there was no room for the H.B. man in his lorry to make his delivery because of Da’s car and Kevin’s da’s car and three others. Missis Kilmartin was angry. It was the first time I’d ever really seen an angry woman. It wasn’t a bloody carpark, she said; she paid her rates. She was squinting. That was because she was never out in the daylight; she was always behind the oneway glass door. Ma was stuck; Da was at work—he went in the train—and she couldn’t drive. Missis Kilmartin put her hand out.

–The keys.

–I don’t have them. I—

–For Christ’s sake!

She slammed the gate. She grabbed it so she could slam it.

When I’d opened the door she’d said,—Your mother.

I’d thought I was in for it. I’d been framed. She’d seen me buying something and she thought I was robbing it. The way I’d picked it up, it had looked like I was going to rob it.

I never robbed from that shop.

You only went to jail if you robbed more than ten shillings worth of stuff, at one time. People my age and Kevin’s didn’t go to jail when they were caught. They were sent to a home. You went to Artane if you were caught twice. They shaved your head there.

We had to stop running through the pipe; it was too far. It had gone up past my house, out of Barrytown. We took over the manholes. They stuck out of the ground, like small buildings. They’d become level with the ground when they were surrounded by cement; they’d become just parts of the path. We got Aidan and shoved him down the hole. He had to stay down there on the platform and we lobbed muck in. He could hide because the platform down there was much wider than the hole. If we lobbed the muck low it went through the hole at an angle and hit the platform walls and maybe Aidan. We surrounded him. If it had been me I’d have got down to the pipe and charged down to the next hole and climbed out before the others found out what I was doing. And I’d have pelted them and have used stones as well. Aidan was crying. We looked at Liam because he was his brother. Liam kept throwing the muck into the hole so, so did we.

The new road was straight now, all the way. The edges of Donnelly’s fields were chopped off and you could see all the farm because the hedges were gone; it was like Catherine’s dolls’ house with the door opened. You could see all the beingbuilt houses on the other side of the fields. The farm was being surrounded. The cows were gone, to the new farm. Big lorries took them. The smell was a laugh. One of the cows skidded on the ramp getting up into the lorry. Donnelly hit it with his stick. Uncle Eddie was behind him. He had a stick as well. He hit the cow when Donnelly did. We could see the cows all packed in the lorries, trying to get their noses out between the bars.

Uncle Eddie went in one of the lorries beside the driver. He had his elbow sticking out the window. We waved at him, and cheered when the lorry full of cows went through the knockeddown gates of the farmhouse and turned left onto the new road. It was like Uncle Eddie was going away.

I saw him later, running down to the shops before they shut to get the Evening Press for Donnelly.

The old railway bridge wasn’t big enough any more for the road to get under it. They built a new one, made of huge slabs of concrete, right beside the old one. The road dipped down under the bridge so that big traffic, lorries and buses, could get under it. They cut away the land beside the road so the road could go further down. More concrete slabs stopped the cutaway land from falling onto the road. They said that two men were killed doing this work but we never saw anything. They were killed when some of Donnelly’s field fell on them, after it had been raining and the ground was loose and soggy. They drowned in muck.

I had a dream sometimes that made me wake up. I was eating something. It was dry and gritty and I couldn’t get it wet. It hurt my teeth; I couldn’t close my mouth and I wanted to shout for help and I couldn’t. And I woke up and my mouth was all dry, from being open. I wondered had I been shouting; I hoped I hadn’t but I wanted my ma to come in and ask me was I alright and sit on the bed.

They didn’t blow up the old bridge. We thought they’d have to, but they didn’t.

–If they blew it up they’d blow up the new one as well, said Liam.

–No, they wouldn’t; that’s stupid.

–They would so.

–How would they?

–The explosion.

–They have different explosions for different things, Ian McEvoy told him.

–How do you know, Fatso?

That was Kevin. Ian McEvoy wasn’t all that fat. He just had little diddies, like a woman’s. He never swam now, after we’d seen him.

–I just do, said Ian McEvoy.—They’re able to control the explosion.

We weren’t interested any more.

The old bridge was gone. They just knocked it down; took away the rocks and rubble in lorries. I missed it. It had been a great place for hiding under and shouting. It only fitted one car at a time. Da kept his hand on the horn right through it. The new bridge whistled when it was windy, but that was all.

He let us look in the window, but no further. Only a few got into the house. He pushed the couch away from the window so we could see it properly, his Scalextric. Alan Baxter was the only one in Barrytown that had it. He was a Protestant, a proddy, and he was older than us. He was the same age as Kevin’s brother. He went to secondary school and he played cricket; he had a real bat and the yokes for your legs. When they played rounders, the bigger boys, behind the shops, when he played he kept taking his jumper off and putting it back on again but he wasn’t any better of a player than the others. When he was fielding he put his hands on his knees and bent forward. He was a sap. But he had Scalextric.

It wasn’t as good as the ads, a track the same shape as a trainset track—two tracks joined together like an eight—and the cars never went too far without jamming. But it was brilliant. The controls looked great and easy. The blue car was much better than the red one. Terence Long had the red one; Alan Baxter had the blue. Our breathing and handprints were messing up the window. Terence Long—he was six foot one and still only fourteen—kept having to straighten up the red car; when it started a corner it got stuck. A few times it beat the corner and kept going. But the blue one was way ahead. Kevin’s brother picked up the red one and looked under it but Alan Baxter made him put it back. They were the only ones in the living room, Alan Baxter, Terence Long and Kevin’s brother. The rest of us—we were all much younger—had to watch outside. The worst was when it was dark. It really felt outside then. Kevin got in once, because of his brother. But I didn’t. I was the oldest in my family; I had nobody to get me through the door. They didn’t let Kevin do anything. They just let him watch.