He was no good at joining the letters. She let me put his letter into the envelope. I folded it separate and slid it in beside mine.

When my da came home from work he stuck the letter up the chimney. He was crouched over; he was making sure we couldn’t see properly.

–Did you get that letter, Santa?

He yelled it up the chimney.

–Yes, indeed, he said in a deep voice that was supposed to be Santy’s.

I looked at Sinbad. He believed it was Santy talking. He looked at my ma. I didn’t.

–Will you be able to manage all those presents? my da yelled up the chimney.

–We’ll see, he said back.—Most of them. Bye bye now. I’ve other houses to visit. Bye bye.

–Say bye bye to Santa, lads, said my ma.

Sinbad said bye bye and I had to as well. My da got back from the chimney so we could say it properly.

My hot water bottle was red, Manchester United’s colour. Sinbad’s was green. I loved the smell off the bottle. I put hot water in it and emptied it and smelled it; I put my nose to the hole, nearly in it. Lovely. You didn’t just fill it with water—my ma showed me; you had to lie the bottle on its side and slowly pour the water in or else air got trapped and the rubber rotted and burst. I jumped on Sinbad’s bottle. Nothing happened. I didn’t do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen.

Liam and Aidan’s house was darker than ours, the inside. That was because of the sun, not because it was scruffy dirty. It wasn’t dirty, the way a lot of people said it was; it was just that all the chairs and things were bursting and falling apart. Messing on the sofa was great because it was full of hollows, and nobody ever told us to get off it. We got up on the arm, onto the back and jumped. Two of us would get onto the back and have a duel.

I liked their house. It was better for playing in. All the doors were open; there was nowhere we couldn’t go into. Once, we were playing hide and seek and Mister O’Connell came into the kitchen and opened the press beside the cooker and I was in there. He took out a bag of biscuits and then he closed the door real quietly; he said nothing. Then he opened the door again and whispered did I want a biscuit.

They were broken biscuits, a brown bag of them; there was nothing wrong with them except that they were broken. My ma never bought them.

Some of the boys in school had mothers that worked in Cadbury’s. Mine or Kevin’s didn’t and Aidan and Liam’s ma was dead. Ian McEvoy’s ma did; not all year, before Easter and Christmas. Sometimes Ian McEvoy had an Easter egg for his lunch; the chocolate was perfect, just the egg was the wrong shape. My ma said that Missis McEvoy only worked in Cadbury’s because she had to.

I didn’t understand.

–Your daddy has a better job than Ian’s daddy, she said. Then she said,—Don’t say anything to Ian, sure you won’t.

The McEvoys lived on our road.

–My da has a better job than yours!

–He does not!

–He does so.

–He doesn’t.

–He does.

–Prove it.

–Your ma only works in Cadbury’s because she has to!

He didn’t know what I meant. I didn’t either, not really.

–Because she has to! Because she has to!

I gave him a shove. He shoved me back. I held onto the curtain with one of my hands and pushed him hard with the other one. One leg slipped off the back off the sofa and he fell. I won. I slid down into the sofa.

–Champion! Champion! Champion!

I liked sitting in the hollow, just back away from where the shape of the spring was. The material was great; it was like the designs had been left alone and the rest of the material had been cut with a little lawn mower. The designs, flowers, felt like stiff grass or the back of my head after I got a haircut. The material didn’t have any colour but when the light was on you could see that the flowers used to be coloured. We all sat in it when we watched the television; there was loads of room and brilliant fights. Mister O’Connell never told us to get out or stay quiet.

The kitchen table was the same as ours but that was all. They had all different chairs; ours were all the same, wood with a red seat. Once when I called for Liam they were having their tea when I knocked on the kitchen door. Mister O’Connell shouted for me to come in. He was sitting at the side of the table, where me and Sinbad sat, not the end where my da sat. Aidan was sitting there. He got up and put on the kettle and he sat down again where my ma always sat.

I didn’t like that.

He made the breakfasts and dinners and everything, Mister O’Connell did. They had crisps every lunch; all I ever had was sandwiches. I hardly ever ate them. I put them in the shelf under my desk; banana, ham, cheese, jam. Sometimes I ate one of them but I shoved the rest under the desk. I knew when it was getting too full in there when I saw the inkwell beginning to bob, being lifted by the pile of sandwiches underneath it. I waited till Henno had gone out—he was always going out; he said he knew what we got up to when his back was turned so not to try anything, and we kind of believed him—and I got the bin from beside his desk and brought it down to my desk. I unloaded the packs of sandwiches. Everyone watched. Some of the sandwiches were in tinfoil, but the ones that weren’t, that were just in plastic bags or the cover of the pan, they were brilliant, especially the ones near the back. Stuff was growing all over them, green and blue and yellow. Kevin dared James O’Keefe to eat one of them but he wouldn’t.

–Chicken.

–You eat one.

–Got you first.

–I’ll eat one if you eat one.

–Chicken.

I squeezed a tinfoil pack and it piled into one end and began to break through the foil. It was like in a film. Everyone wanted to look. Dermot Kelly fell off his desk and his head hit the seat. I got the bin back up to Henno’s desk before he started screaming.

The bin was one of those straw ones, and it was full of old sandwiches. The smell of them crept through the room and got stronger and stronger, and it was only eleven o’clock in the morning: three hours to go.

Mister O’Connell made brilliant dinners. Chips and burgers; he didn’t make them, he brought them home. All the way from town in the train, cos there was no chipper in Barrytown then.

–God love them, said my ma when my da told her about the smell of chips and vinegar that Mister O’Connell had brought with him onto the train.

He made them mash. He shovelled out the middle of the mountain till it was like a volcano and then he dropped in a big lump of butter, and covered it up. He did that to every plate. He made them rasher sandwiches. He gave them a can of Ambrosia Creamed Rice each and he let them eat it out of the can. They never got salad.

Sinbad ate nothing. All he ever ate was bread and jam. My ma tried to make him eat his dinner; she said she wouldn’t let him leave the table till he was finished. My da lost his temper and shouted at him.

–Don’t shout at him, Paddy, my ma said to my da, not to us; we weren’t supposed to hear it.

–He’s provoking me, said my da.

–You’ll only make it worse, she said, louder now.

–You have him spoiled; that’s the problem.

He stood up.

–I’m going in now to read my paper. And if that plate isn’t empty when I come back I’ll let you have what for.

Sinbad was scrunched up in his chair looking at the plate, staring at the food to go away.

My ma went after my da to talk to him more. I helped Sinbad eat his dinner. He kept dropping it out of his mouth onto the plate and the table.

He made Sinbad sit there for an hour until he was ready to inspect the plate. It was empty; in me and in the bin.

–That’s more like it, said my da.

Sinbad went to bed.

He was like that, our da. He’d be mean now and again, really mean for no reason. He wouldn’t let us watch the television and the next minute he’d be sitting on the floor beside us watching it with us, never for long though. He was always busy. He said. But he mostly sat in his chair.