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returned, but all he had with him was the Democrat . I figured it must be one that he had gone and bought himself.
    When Christmas came around again I asked for a slingshot.
    â€˜Why do you want a slingshot?’ Mam and Dad asked.
    â€˜To be like Cúchulainn,’ I said. They thought this to be bit of a laugh, and they repeated it to all our relatives and callers.
    â€˜Going to be like Cúchulainn, this boy,’ they told everyone.
    â€˜I need a good one,’ I said to Mam when she was alone in the kitchen. ‘A strong one, like a kind of sports-shooting one.’ And I showed her models I’d found in books that I’d borrowed from the library.
    Christmas brought the slingshot, and I had my plan made.
    I spent the next six months with stones and marbles. I used footballs and tennis balls as targets, and I practised every day until the target was a golf ball and I could hit it from across the length of the garden. I was ready.
    Between our housing estate and the next one were hilly fields. One hill had been part chiselled away at some time, leaving a face of rock exposed. It wasn’t very high — perhaps some twenty feet — but to us children it was huge, and we called it the cliff. Anna and I climbed there when there was no one about.
    The summer holidays came, and the children from both estates gathered in the common ground of the hilly fields. Jimmy McCusker and his gang held a raised patch near the height of the cliff like a pride of lions might hold some higher mound in the African savannah. The rest of us children, like a grazing herd, kept a distance. That year, McCusker’s crew comprised the two Breen boys, and I waited for a day when the three boys were at the cliff height and no other children were near. I had my place in the long grass prepared, where I knew I couldn’t be seen. On previous mornings, before anyone got there, I had checked the cover, I had measured the distance, and I had practised the range.
    I first took one of the Breen boys. I hit him in the forehead and he fell. The other two had no idea what had just happened, and stood around him open-mouthed. I then took the second Breen boy, catching him in his open mouth, and he went down screaming. I could see McCusker was panicked as he searched out into the field for some solution or reason. He found neither, and I hit his right shoulder and then his right knee as I worked him backwards to the cliff. He was moaning and desperate for cover. But there was none — the long grass was all mine — and when he reached the cliff he looked over it as if unsure whether to jump or scramble down, and so he turned again to face me, and I hit him in his left eye, and he fell back and away.
    What happened on the cliff that summer was a mystery that became a street legend. Nobody really believed the Breen boys’ report of an attack from nowhere, and the cliff was full of stones anyway, so nothing could be found or proved. Most believed that there had probably been some row or incident among the gang and that the story was a cover-up, though some thought the Breen boys to be too young and their injuries too severe for it all to be a fiction. But nobody cared enough to give it a serious investigation.
    Jimmy McCusker survived, though he’d broken his neck in the fall, and when he got out of hospital he joined his father in the daily vigil on the front porch. I got a new bicycle the next Christmas — a blue Raleigh — and when dry weather came I took it for a ride around the block. When I passed the McCuskers I stopped and looked at the boy in the wheelchair as his father shouted abuse at me. But something had changed: the tightening in my back and the sore grip to my middle were gone, and I was no longer afraid of them. I waved to the McCuskers as I rode away.
    We moved to a new house later that year, and I never saw Jimmy McCusker or my red bicycle again.

A black flag flying
    IT IS THE SECOND WEEK