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don’t even like them. You talk about them behind their backs.’
    Jenny looks appalled but Seán just keeps going. Now his spar of an arm has swung to point at Jenny’s friends and he’s saying, ‘And you two only hang around with her because you think that people will look at her and see you. But they don’t. They see Jenny and her ugly friends. And you know it and you cry yourself to sleep knowing it.’
    His arm finally lowers and his voice slows and he says, ‘You’re all horrible people. You’re not really friends so you try to make everyone else feel as horrible as you do.’
    He stops then and he mumbles, ‘Friends don’t do things like that. Friends are nice.’
    The three girls all sit with their mouths open and you can actually feel the tension between them. The slimmer of Jenny’s friends, her nose a fleshy hook overhanging her mouth, is going bright bright red. The truth in Seán’s words has tugged at something raw between them and over the next few weeks everyone notices that Jennifer O’Riordan finds herself more and more on her own.
    That’s my friend Seán. Like I said, he’s not stupid and he’s not some kind of a monster.
     
    In the dark it’s hard to peel myself out of my football gear and tog back into my clothes. My skin is slick and clammy and every fibre of my football gear clings to me like it’s feeding off me. I’m sitting on a wooden bench and I’m trying to yank my socks on over the cold blocks of my feet. Seán is standing in thedark sniffing and dragging his sleeve across his face.
    I look at him and then I’m going, ‘Any chance of a bit of light? Use your phone or something.’
    Seán blinks at me. Even in the dark I can see his white lids flicker down over the inky pools of his eyes, blotting them out like petals on black water. Now he’s shrugging and now he’s saying , ‘I don’t have it. Da took it on me.’
    I stop with my sock half on and my shoulders slumping forward and I go, ‘Why did he do that?’
    Seán shrugs again and he says, ‘He says I’m not getting it back until I cop on. It’s quare annoying.’
    He says this last in a flat voice of dead lead. He couldn’t sound less annoyed if he tried. I’m thinking, that’s what Seán knows you should say when your Da takes your phone on you. Annoyed is how you should feel.
    Then he goes, ‘Where’s yours? I’ll hold it for you.’
    I’m struggling with my jeans now and I say to him, ‘Why would I bring my phone to training? I don’t even have any money on me. They don’t lock these dressing rooms.’
    Seán nods, slowly and deliberately and says, ‘So we’re in the dark?’
    I smile up at him and I go, ‘We’re used to it.’
    We sneak out of the dressing rooms. Off to our left the lads are all still slogging their slog on a patch of grass that they’ve churned to quag. The floodlights are dousing the scene with a bitter light and the cold smoke of their body heat haunts their every move and footstep. Paul Cullen is a black crepe cut-out against thelight. His voice bells out and drowns out all the slopping, all the squelching, all the panting, all the parched whooping for breath.
    The driveway leading from the pitch is covered in loose chippings of this hard grey stone that’s flecked with little winking dots of quartzite. This means that as we walk away from the pitch and Paul Cullen’s training session we kick sprays of gravel out in a fan and we leave shallow gouges in the carpet of stones behind us. The only noises are our breathing, the rattle of my gear bag and the steady hiss and crunch of our footsteps. As you get to the bottom of the driveway you start to hear the sounds of traffic and a haze of orange light starts to filter across the stones from the sodium arcs angling over the road. The lights are at the end of these long arms that jut out perpendicular to the lampposts just like the gallows you draw when you play hangman. In their Halloween-orange light Seán is the biggest