‘Yes Milly, I know. But Trisha, Dreadful and Frightful etcetera.’

  ‘Dreadful and Frightful went back to Liverpool. We waved them off from the wharf. Not Granny, of course (good riddance to bad rubbish). You’ll keep on with that—with the . . . embroidering?’ It was like a dirty word, the way he said it. They’d pix it out on TV.

  ‘Of course!’

  He looked and I busied myself with the silver silk.

  ‘One day,’ (talking fast) ‘after we’d moved to Granny and Grandpa’s, I heard piano music coming from a house and I moseyed along the row to have a look. It was the marching season—you could smell stuff burning after the parade. I hung about listening to the music, which was sort of thwanging off the row like a tennis ball.’

  Tennis ball was a nice touch. Especially seeing he was in a hurry.

  ‘Eventually it stopped and a kid came barrelling out of the house and up the street. By this time I was sitting on the footpath mucking around and humming, and this man came out and said in a pompous sort of way, I see they’ve been celebrating the fall of Ireland—because the sky was all red over the roofs. Then he said, Keep singing, I was enjoying it. But I didn’t, of course. He asked me if I wanted to have a go on the old ivories. I said, What’s ivories? And he said, That’s French for piano. I remember he was laughing all the time. He was grey like all the other adults, but there was something different about him. But I just thought he was a weirdo, so I ran home. He called out after me to tell Ma that Mr O’Connell said I had a good ear. So I told Ma and she said, Oh, Mr O’Connell, does he? She’d known him since she was a girl.

  ‘I started learning the piano from Mr O’Connell like a lot of the other kids in the row. It’s strange, circumstance, isn’t it?’ He smiled a bit, looking at the costume but not looking. ‘I mean, how you come to do what you do.’

  ‘What, you mean this?’ I said, indicating the sewing in my lap.

  He shook his head vigorously.

  Remember I wasn’t going to get self-centred? Someone would tell me if I did? Well tell me.

  ‘I mean, everything.’ He cast around the room, the red couch glowing in the sun, the white floorboards gleaming, the theatre curtains looking black against the glare, and ended up back at me, his expression hard to read. ‘Where we fetch up. There’s no choice.’

  Please don’t let him be a New Age philosopher type, I prayed. To some New Age god or other. I mean fetch up, for Christ’s sake.

  ‘If there’d been a tree,’ he said, ‘we would’ve climbed it, but there was a piano teacher so we played the piano.’

  Alright. Yeah. It’d been the same for me. It was education or education. But it did occur to me that Trisha was like a tree or a piano. No choice.

  I said this to him and he shook his head and laughed. ‘No, not that. Bigger than that.’ He ruminated. Yes, ruminated. ‘No one had a piano, of course.’

  My turn to gawuff.

  ‘Mr O’Connell let us all practise on his piano. He had a timetable on his door which got so faded you couldn’t read it, but we knew our practice times by heart, like the notes of a piece.’

  Oh, the notes of a piece.

  ‘There were always kids coming and going.’

  I did some more silver stitches. The mend was beginning to look very nice, though I say it myself. Very neat. ‘Including Trisha?’

  ‘Yeah, Trisha.’

  ‘The Trisha?’

  ‘Well, she lived in the row. She was the gawky gap-toothed girl.’

  ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘She was fine. But I’m sick of Trisha.’

  ‘You’re sick of Trisha?’ I said. ‘I’m sick of Trisha.’ I was. I hated Trisha.

  ‘Sick of talking about her.’

  ‘Well, why are you here?’ I asked, widening my eyes and offering the costume, which he looked at but not really.

  Where we fetch up.

  ‘Good question. That’s the best question.’

  ‘Because you had no choice. Ah, you see!’

  He was talking over me, shaking his head, ‘Nah. Nah,’ and the chair creaking.

  ‘But you said you had no choice. That first day.’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Okay, but you did say.’ Something occurred to me. ‘One thing. How did you afford the piano fees?’

  ‘Oh.’ He sat back, relieved to change the subject. Creak.

  But he’d said he had no choice. That was what had got me in the first place. No choice.

  ‘Mr O’Connell didn’t charge.’

  ‘That was nice of him. How did he live?’

  At school they told us we could be anything we wanted to be. And I believed them.

  ‘On the dole, like everyone else. There was no work. There were factories around Belfast, but they didn’t employ Catholics. Well, there was a shirt factory my grandmother worked at once. But generally speaking.’

  ‘She’s pretty, isn’t she?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Trisha, of course, who else?’

  ‘Argh!’ He put out his hands as if to strangle me. ‘I suppose she is.’

  Come to think of it, she wasn’t pretty (so I remembered). There’s a funny thing about attractiveness. If you think you’re attractive, you are. It’s quite common to see a woman who’s done up to within an inch of her life in a way that says, I’m gorgeous, and she’s actually quite plain.

  I wish I was like that.

  ‘Did you fall in love with her?’

  He shook his head. ‘No!’

  ‘Is this true?’

  ‘Of course it’s true! Why would I be in such a freaking mess otherwise? If it wasn’t to do with some truth or other?’

  I went to the sideboard and asked him again if he wanted wine, and he said yes, ta. Polite. I poured red left over from the dinner with Glenda and Grant. Offcuts. Okay, going too far. But when I brought the glasses over, their shadows did lie on the table, pressed flat by the angle of the sun.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘But remember I have to go soon.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten. Where is she now then?’

  ‘Don’t know. Didn’t I tell you this?’ He stopped. ‘What were we talking about?’

  ‘Trisha.’

  ‘Mr O’Connell. He’d moved from Dublin to marry his wife, for love people said.’

  ‘For love?’ I had moved for love.

  ‘Yeah. There’d have to be some good reason to move to Clonard, wouldn’t there?’ He laughed. ‘Except it was a good place. It was.’

  I nodded. The room seemed suddenly like a room I remembered from a long time ago, but it was just the late rays of the sun giving it a filmy air.

  Just!

  •

  They were in the squat in Clonard for three years, he told me, and after a couple of years his father had his knee surgery on the National Health. The last winter, his grandparents died.

  ‘First Granny, then Grandpa. Everyone said Grandpa died of a broken heart after Granny died. They’d been childhood sweethearts, growing up in Cupar Street when it was alright to live there. Ma said it wasn’t a broken heart, it was too many years in the damp, and she’d never forgive the FHE, the Brits, the Catholic Church, and the whole fuckin’ lot of them.’

  ‘This is before she’d taken her Valium of course,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, exactly,’ he said. ‘Before she’d had her yellow pill. But seriously, Ma seemed to lose her marbles after Granny and Grandpa died.’

  ‘You hear of that,’ I said. Because you do, you read in the paper about people going nuts after their parents die. Me, I wasn’t going to be losing any marbles over anyone in my family.

  He seemed to brighten a bit. ‘Or maybe she gained her marbles. Anyway, Dad had his compo money coming for his kneecaps, and I remember Ma saying we were moving as far away as possible, when the compo came through.’

  ‘Ah, finally New Zealand comes into it,’ I said.

  ‘No, Liverpool. We were moving to Liverpool.’

  What I realised was, I sort of liked this man. I mean, even though he was a prick.

  ‘Dreadful and Frightful had sent Ma a postcard of The Cavern, saying Liverpool was great. Dad didn’t want a bar of it, of course. He’d rather die than live among the swine over the sea. Ma said we lived among swine anyway.’

  He stopped and his face was glowing in the strange slanting light, the last rays of the sun. I asked him if he got the money in the end, his father. Well, I couldn’t leave the client in the squat in Belfast, could I?

  ‘Yeah, in the end Dad got his bloody compo.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Six thousand pounds.’

  ‘Wow.’ I hate ‘wow’. ‘A tidy sum in those days,’ I said. I hate that expression, too. For some reason I blushed and inspected the costume, its neatness. When I looked up I saw a puzzled expression cross his face.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’ I shook my head.

  ‘You just looked . . .’

  I smiled. An idiot. Wow. A tidy sum.

  ‘It was a tidy sum,’ he said, and cleared his throat. ‘Yup. Three grand for each knee.’ He checked his watch. ‘You are . . . sewing, aren’t you?’

  I brandished my needle. He couldn’t tell. He didn’t know anything.

  He went and stood in the window, broodily. Mr blinking Rochester.

  ‘We had roast pork and got new jerseys.’

  And Milly was Bertha Mason, the madwoman in the attic.

  ‘You’d get a fair bit of pork and jersey for six thousand quid,’ I said.

  It wasn’t often you could use the word ‘quid’, but you could when it was a quid. I liked it.

  ‘Some of it would’ve gone in the pub,’ he said. ‘Sometimes Dad came home smelling like the Guinness plant—he’d had a drop courtesy of So-and-so’s right arm. It was good for the Catholic pubs, the compo. Apparently. I was only twelve.’

  ‘Catholic pubs? A font to bless yourself?’

  He shook his head, laughed a bit. ‘It wasn’t about religion. In case you were thinking that.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t.’

  I was of course.

  ‘It was about the haves and the have-nots. But anyway, the Liverpool fund, that was Ma’s idea, and in fact Dad might’ve come around to it. I picked this up, I was twelve.’

  ‘I know you were twelve.’

  ‘She might have persuaded him. But then Bobby Sands died.’

  ‘Bobby Sands?’

  ‘Bobby Sands.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me about Bobby Sands, aren’t you?’

  He looked across at me from where he stood by the curtain in the wincing sun. ‘You’re not slowing down, are you?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m going as fast as I can—and do a good job.’

  ‘Alright. It just looked like you’d stopped for a minute there.’

  ‘Stopped? No. You do want it to be a good job, don’t you?’

  He said he did.

  He’d tell me about Bobby Sands, he said, quickly, because the light was going. The line of sun that ran along the tops of the hills like highlighter disappeared. The yellow room changed into another room, its grey twin sister. As if in keeping, our voices got quieter. I was almost finished, wasn’t I?

  I was.

  ‘One morning I woke up to all this wailing going on out in the lane, and my sisters and I went outside and the men were standing around bawling their eyes out. Our dad was there, blubbing his heart out with the rest of them. They looked ridiculous, standing upright like guards, with the tears streaming down their faces. They weren’t even trying to hide them, like men were meant to. Ma came out, and the other mothers. They were all crying, and Ma told me Bobby Sands had died in Long Kesh. I knew a bit about him. I was only—’

  ‘Twelve. I know.’

  ‘He was a member of parliament, elected in the prison. Young—in his twenties, I think. He’d been on a hunger strike for weeks. Sixty-six days. It took him sixty-six days to die. I remember it was a beautiful day, May, and all the men were crying. And the women, but it was the men that got you. I’d never seen my dad cry before. I went and stood beside him, as if that would stop him, but Dad said, We’re crying for joy. For Bobby Sands, and for joy. So that was alright, then. It was for joy.’

  The client reached out to touch the costume, hesitated, looked at me. After a second I took his hand—gently, it was heavy—and put it on the costume. I know—talk about unprofessional! His fingers curled around mine for a nanosecond. Then gone.

  ‘I remembered Dad sitting at the table that night and saying the newspapers from all over the world were there, parked outside Long Kesh. Eight hundred years, and Bobby Sands had finally got the attention of the whole fucking world.’

  It had felt leathery, his hand, like an Italian purse, but warm. Animal. That was what shocked me.

  ‘Ma was tight-lipped. I suppose she knew where this was going. Sure enough, now Dad wouldn’t leave. Not now we were actually getting somewhere. Dad was saying, You can take the fucking compo. Ma said she would, that’s just what she’d do. She’d take us kids to Liverpool on her own, and leave Dad to the height that he grew. But Dad wasn’t going anywhere while there were prisoners of war dying in jail. Because a few weeks later, another man died, and another. Ten altogether. And the Brits would pull out of Northern Ireland any day, and Kevin McGrath would be there to see it. That’s what he said.’

  ‘But he wasn’t there.’

  ‘He wasn’t.’

  ‘And they didn’t.’

  ‘They didn’t. They haven’t.’

  And in the end, as he told me, they left in a terrible hurry.

  ‘It was something that happened the next year, on the twelfth,’ he said. ‘To this day, I’m not sure what it was.’

  The client stopped. He said he’d just step outside and have a fag, if I didn’t mind, and I watched him through the wonky glass of the bay window, shifting on the veranda, the smoke flying like a scarf out into the garden. I thought of the Petit Prince.

  •

  Back inside, he scowled out the window. A pale glow from the garden silhouetted him as if he were a plant.

  ‘The twelfth?’ I said.

  The glow of dusk was draining away.

  ‘On the twelfth of July every year the Orangemen paraded through the Catholic areas. Celebrating the downfall of Ireland—where you could walk you could dominate sort of thing. It wasn’t always violent. Ma said when she was a kid the Ulster parade was a bit of fun and they used to run along beside it. Until the Derry parade, 1969. The Bogside fought back against the RUC. They brought in the English army. So what I remember is the Apprentice Boys marching through the streets, the Catholics trying to stop them with barriers, the RUC knocking down the barriers.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said.

  ‘It was fine,’ he said. ‘You can be run over crossing the road. But this particular day, something happened. Dad had been at the parade and was laughing because he’d heard Ian Paisley talking to the crowd and he said—and everyone said this—Ian Paisley was God’s gift to Ireland because after hearing him raving on, half England wanted to join the IRA. And we were all laughing, but there was more to it than that. Dad was in this heightened state. I could tell something was different.’

  He came and sat down at the table, sat back squarely in the bentwood chair.

  I was snipping busily, unnecessarily. Fluff. ‘What?’

  ‘A few days later I came home from school and saw Ma leaning against the kitchen drawer like she’d just shoved it shut that instant. She had this possum-in-the-headlights look, and I knew there was something in the drawer I wasn’t meant to see. So later on, when she’d gone next door (she was always going next door to Aunty Theresa’s), I went and opened the drawer.’

  I smiled and mimed gliding open a drawer with thumb and forefinger. This was great.

  He shook his head. ‘Nah. Like this.’ He mimed wrenching the drawer open. ‘It always stuck. You had to wrestle with it like your enemy.’

  ‘What was in the drawer?’

  The chair creaked. These chairs, antiques, sought after, and flimsy as hell.

  ‘At first nothing out of the ordinary. I knew all the stuff by heart—holy pictures, rosary beads (mine blue, my sisters’ pink), baptism certificates. I’d seen it all hundreds of times, so it was sort of sacred, and sort of nothing. I was just about to give up when I saw, underneath all the other crap, a new thing. It was a card with a photograph stuck on it. I scraped it up off the bottom of the drawer. It was Dad, all blurry, but you could still see it was him coming out of the corner shop, his head sideways, but his eyes swivelled around to the front, starting out of his head. There was a red smudge on the edge of the print. Letters, but I couldn’t make them out. A photograph of Dad! No one had a camera. I stuffed it back in the drawer. By the time Ma got back I was away out the door into the lane.’

  He looked at me and laughed, and I laughed back. We laughed inanely for no reason.

  The thing was finished. I was sick of sewing anyway. Sick to death of it. I decided then that I was absolutely sick of mending and alterations. You could feel this about anything. I’d thought this about reading and writing.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway, later on I was out throwing stones at a Prod and—’

  ‘What’s a Prod when he’s at home?’

  ‘Protestant.’

  ‘No kidding? Did you hit this Prod with a stone?’ (I mean, he might have hurt someone.)

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t even see him.’

  ‘It was dark?’

  ‘It was summer. July, remember. The marching season.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you see the Prod? And was it a boy?’

  ‘Yeah, a boy.’ He sat up. He’d been slouching before. I noticed his hands again. They were square. ‘There was a barricade. We’d toss stones over it. There was a barricade down the middle of the road.’

  I pointed out the window. ‘You mean, like if there was a barricade down the middle of this street?’

  He looked out. ‘Yup.’

  I looked at the villas opposite. Across the road was Electricity. We didn’t know anyone there.

  ‘Made of what, this barricade?’

  ‘Iron, wood, barbed wire. Anything.’