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been waiting for us. The women had slipped their coats on over their nightclothes. Men lowered the tailgate to help out a family in tatters. We’d been able to save two mattresses, four chairs, the kitchen table and some clothes.
    I was carrying a mattress on my head. It was bending down in front and behind me, threatening to topple at every step and blocking my vision. Brian, Niall and Seánie were carrying the table. Róisín, Mary and Áine were laden with bags of clothes. Wee Kevin was dragging a chair along the street. Mother’s load was baby Sara, and also our plaster Virgin, which she held pressed against her child. A woman wrapped them up in a blanket.
    Around twenty young lads rushed towards us with wheelbarrows. They piled up the bags, the table and the chairs. A young man was giving them short orders. They called him Tom. An officer deploying soldiers sprang to mind.
    —You want some help?
    I looked at Tom without responding. He was a tall, dark-haired lad, not much older than I was. He lifted the mattress off my head and we carried it together as far as number seventeen, a black and red door that had been opened for us.
    My uncle was broken. I had never seen him like that. With his back against an orange streetlight, he was staring down at his shadow on the ground. He seemed indifferent to everything. A few men surrounded him. One of them placed a hand on his shoulder. Lawrence had brought us out of the inferno. And now that we were saved, he was trying to pull himself together. He was cold and afraid. His face was covered in grime and soot, like when he came home from work after battling chimneys. He was alone. He had lost everything.
    Tom put the mattress down in a corner of the room. He had carried it on his own in the end and I had followed him. I looked at our new street, the neighbours’ faces, the reassuring Virgins against the frozen windows.
    —It’s not big, but you’ll be able to breathe here, Tom said.
    The guy had his fists on his hips. He was looking everywhere at once, as though surveying the street.
    —There’s no need to be afraid of anything here, isn’t that right? my mother asked him.
    Tom smiled. Here? Nothing would ever happen to us here. We were at home, in the heart of the ghetto. Protected by our numbers and our anger.
    —And also by the IRA, our host added.
    The IRA. I shuddered. Lawrence noticed. He shrugged and asked me to help him carry the table instead of standing around with empty hands.
    The IRA. No longer three black letters, painted in a hateful smear across our wall. No longer a condemnation heard on the radio. No longer something to be afraid of, an insult, the devil’s other name. Now it was a hope, a promise. It was my father’s flesh, his entire life, his memory and his legend. It was his pain, his loss, the defeated army of our country. I’d never heard those three letters uttered by any lips but his. And here was a strapping young lad daring to smile about them in the middle of a street.
    The IRA. Suddenly, I saw them everywhere. In that guy smoking a pipe and carrying blankets. Those women in shawls who wrapped us in their silence. That old man crouching on the pavement repairing our oil lamp. I saw it in the lads who were helping to ease our exile. I saw it behind every window, every curtain pulled to mislead the planes. I saw it in the air that was thick with turf smoke, in the day that was breaking. I felt it within me. In me, Tyrone Meehan, sixteen years old, son of Padraig and of Ireland’s soil. Chased from my village by misery, banished from my neighbourhood by the enemy. The IRA, me.
    I offered Tom my hand. Like two men shaking on a deal. He looked at it, looked at me and hesitated.
    And then he smiled once more. His palm was freezing, his fingers firm.
    —Tyrone Meehan, I said.
    We were in the middle of the street. I would have liked to have seen myself at that moment. I felt certain that this outstretched hand was my first manly gesture.
    —Tom