Kevin’s brother got into big trouble once. His name was Martin. He was five years older than us and what he did was, he went to the toilet down a bit of hosepipe through Missis Kilmartin’s car window and he got caught because Terence Long blabbed to his ma because he’d been the one holding the hose and he was afraid he’d get blamed for going to the toilet as well. Terence Long’s ma told Kevin and Martin’s ma.

–Terence Long Terence Long—

Has a mickey three foot long—

He tried to get Kevin’s brother and them to call him Terry or Ter but everybody still called him Terence, especially his ma.

–Terence Long Terence Long—

Wears no socks—

What a pong—

He wore sandals in the summer, big ones like priests’, and no socks. Kevin’s da killed Martin and he made him wash Missis Kilmartin’s car seat with everyone watching. He was crying. Missis Kilmartin didn’t come out. She sent Eric out with the car keys. He was her son and he was mental.

Martin smoked and he was leaving school after the Inter. He drank CocaCola with aspirins in it and got sick. He mitched all the time, all day down at the seafront even in the winter. He was an altar boy. But he got thrown out for painting white stripes on his black runners. He got Sinbad—him and Terence Long and even Alan Baxter—and they painted the other lens of his glasses black. They made him walk home wearing the glasses, right up to our house, with a stick they’d painted white. Ma did nothing about it; she sang to Sinbad while he was crying—

–I TOLD MY BROTHER SEAMUS

I’D GO OFF AND BE RIGHT FAMOUS—

–and when he was finished she went into the garage and got a bottle of spirits and started to clean his lens and she showed him how to do it. I said I’d help him but he wouldn’t let me. Da laughed; he was home late and Sinbad was in bed, but I wasn’t. He laughed. So did I. He said that Sinbad would be doing things like that when he was Kevin’s brother’s age. Then he got annoyed because the plate covering the plate that his dinner was on was stuck because the gravy had hardened to it in the cooker. Ma sent me to bed.

Martin wore longers in the summer. He always had his hands in his pockets. He had a comb. I thought he was brilliant. Kevin did too but he hated him as well.

He got Missis Kilmartin back. He gave Eric Kilmartin a box in the face and Eric couldn’t tell who’d done it cos he couldn’t talk properly; he could only make noises.

Martin and them built huts. We did too, from the stuff we got off the building sites—it was one of the first things we did when the summer was coming—but theirs were better, miles better than our ones. There was a field behind the newest of our type of houses—not the one behind the shops—and that was where most of the huts got built. It was full of hills like dunes, only made of muck instead of sand. It used to be part of a farm but that was years before. The wreck of the farmhouse was at the edge of the field. The walls weren’t bricks; they were made of light brown mud full of gravel and bigger stones. They were dead easy to demolish. I found a piece of cup in the nettles against the wall. I took it home and I washed it. I showed it to my da and he said it was probably worth a fortune but he wouldn’t buy it off me. He told me to put it in a safe place. It had flowers on it, two full ones and a half one. I lost it.

This field looked like they had started to get it ready for building on but they’d stopped. There was a wide trench, wider than a lane, down the middle and other trenches grown over. Some of the fields hadn’t been touched. Da said that the building had been stopped because they’d had to wait till the mains pipes were down and finished, with water in them.

I ran through the untouched part of the field—for no reason, just running—and the grass was great, up to way over my knees. I had to lift my legs out of it, like in water. It was the type of grass that could cut you sometimes. It had tops like wheat. I brought loads of it home to my ma once but she said you couldn’t make bread out of it. I said she could but she said you couldn’t, you just couldn’t, it was a pity. My feet made swoosh noises going through the grass and then there was another noise, one in front of me. And the grass moved. I stopped, and a long bird flew out of the grass. And stayed low, flew out in front of me. I could feel its wings beating. It was a pheasant. I turned back.

Kevin’s brother built his huts in the hills. They dug long holes; they got lends of their das’ spades. Terence Long had his own one; he got it for his birthday. They divided the hole into segments, rooms. They covered the hole with planks. They sometimes got hay out of Donnelly’s barn. That was the basement.

When I came out of a hut my hair was full of clay and muck. I could make my hair stand up.

The rest of the hut was made of mostly sods. Wherever you went in Barrytown you found places where sods had been cut out, even in front gardens; patches of bare earth, all straight lined. Kevin’s brother was able to get the spade through the grass into the earth with no effort. I loved the watery crunch of the blade going through the mesh of roots. Terence Long stood up on the spade and rocked, and got down and moved the spade and did it again. They piled the sods like thin bricks and pushed them down. They became a solid wall but they could be pushed over easily. But if you did that you got killed; Kevin’s brother always found out who’d done it. There were more walls inside the main walls, rooms again, planks on top, and a plastic sheet and more sods for the roof. From not too far away the but was like a square hillock. It didn’t look built, not until you were up to it.

Worms came out of the sods.

We made booby traps all around our hut. We buried open paint cans and hid them with grass. If your foot went through the grass into the can usually nothing happened except you fell over. But if you were running your leg could be broken. It was easy to imagine. We buried one with the paint still in it but no one stood in it. We got a milk bottle and broke it. We put the biggest bits of glass standing up in a can right in front of the hut door.

–What if one of us puts our foot in it?

The traps were supposed to be for the enemy.

–We won’t, said Kevin.—We know where it is, stupid.

–Liam doesn’t.

Liam was at his auntie’s.

–Liam’s not in our gang.

I hadn’t known that—Liam had been playing with us the day before—but I didn’t say anything.

We sharpened sticks and stuck them in the ground pointing out towards where the enemy would be sneaking up from. We kept the sticks low. If the enemy was creeping along he’d get a pointy stick in the face.

Ian McEvoy ran into a trip wire and he had to go to hospital for stitches.

–His foot was hanging off him.

It was real wire, not string like we usually used. We didn’t know who’d set it up. It was tied between two trees in the field behind the shops. There was no but near it. We didn’t build huts in that field; it was too flat. They’d been playing relievio, Ian McEvoy and them, in front of the shops and when Kilmartin’s hall door opened Ian McEvoy had thought that it was Missis Kilmartin going to yell at them to go away and he’d run into the field and the trip wire. The wire was a mystery.

–Fellas from the Corpo houses did it.

There were six new families living in the first row of finished Corporation houses. Their gardens were full of hardened halfbags of cement and smashed bricks. Some of the children were the same age as us but that didn’t mean that they could hang around with us.

–Slum scum.

My ma hit me when I said that. She never hit me usually but she did then. She smacked behind my head.

–Never say that again.

–I didn’t make it up, I told her.

–Just never say it again, she said.—It’s a terrible thing to say.