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my Mammy:
    ‘You’re barred, Annie! Get out! Don’t come back!’
    This was a big blow to her – in those days women sometimes cherished a good butcher more than their partners. Good sausages were to be revered and good men were rare.
    When we were clear of the shop, I thought Mammy would be absolutely livid, laden down with various bags of food, saddled with a dishevelled child and a barking dog, barred from her butcher’s. I thought she would slap me round the head. But, instead, she laughed all the way home. In all the fracas, the butcher had forgotten to charge her, so she knew he would let her back into the shop because she owed him money.
    On another cold, wet, windy day, she huddled me under her coat and pulled me into a particularly dirty shop. There were voices all around and, in the dark of my Mammy’s coat, I could hear men shout and swear, while the sound of a TV or radio blared in the background. The commentary was being done by a very fast-talking man; I couldn’t make out the words. The room smelled of smoke and wet coats. I looked down and saw piles of cigarette butts on the floor. My sandal shuffled them into neat little piles until all the strewn fags made perfect little squares. Suddenly my Mammy spat out: ‘Fuck it! Fucking shitty horse! Shoot the bastard!’ as she spun me round, took me out from under her coat, pulled me by my arm and swore all the way up the road. I wanted to hate horses too, just like my Mammy. ‘Fucking horses!’ I whispered under my breath into the driving rain.
    * * *
    My Mammy’s sister Rita was totally different. She came home from the Isle of Man aged about 30 to stay with her dad, my Granda Davy Percy – the father of Uncle David Percy, her brother and my abuser. Rita was very thin and always coughing, but she was good to all of us. My Dad was very fond of her and built her a radiogram – a long box, which housed a radio and a record player. On the inside lid of the radiogram, Rita pasted pictures of current pop stars: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Gerry and the Pacemakers and lots more I didn’t recognise.
    Rita got married when I was around ten years old. Robert was his name and the only defining thing I can recall that made him different from us was that he was a Catholic. He lived with his dad and mentally handicapped brother just one street away and we kids treated their house like a big extension to ours; wherever Rita went we followed. After she married, Rita became a bit more like my Mammy – she had cash problems and was always living on her nerves. I loved to be with her when it was just the two of us, but I never felt that she was ever really happy. There were always problems for her to deal with: she had to look after Robert’s mentally handicapped brother and her own ageing father – my Granda Davy Percy – whom I used to like going to see coz he was full of stories about the Second World War which fascinated me at the time. He did seem a wee bit creepy, though.
    All this to-ing and fro-ing between homes was commonplace. My extended family always seemed to be coming and going through our house. Whenever he ran out of money – which was often – my Mammy’s younger brother Uncle James stayed in our home – he was the one who’d taken me to hospital after Mr McGregor’s dog had attacked me. Uncle James regularly came to stay in our two-bedroomed flat which already housed my Mammy and Dad, me, my sister Ann, my brothers Vid and Mij and Major the dog. It was a crowded home. Uncle James would arrive with his wife ‘Crazy Katie Wallace’ and their two kids Sammy and Jackie, who were virtually brought up alongside us. Our crowded home became an even noisier one filled with the sounds of raised human voices and Major’s distinctive bark: he always barked quickly in short, two-bark bursts –
Woof-woof … bark-bark … woof-woof … woof-woof
– like it was in a code. Major and I were best friends in a big throng of people.
    * * *
    One rainy