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of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. This Christmas, my dearly beloved children in Christ, I wish …’ Mullins woke to applaud with a hearty, ‘Hear, hear. I couldn’t approve more. You’re a man after my own heart. Down with the hypocrites!’ The Monsignor looked towards the policeman and then at the stewards, but as he was greeted by another, ‘Hear, hear!’ he closed his notes and in a voice of acid wished everybody a holy and happy Christmas and climbed angrily from the pulpit to conclude the shortest Midnight Mass the church had ever known. It was not, though, the end of the entertainment. As the communicants came from the rails Mullins singled out the tax collector, who walked down the aisle with closed, bowed head, and hands rigidly joined, to shout, ‘There’s the biggest hypocrite in the parish,’ which delighted almost everybody.
    As I went past the lighted candles in the window, I thought of Mullins as my friend and for the first time felt proud to be a ward of state. I avoided Moran and his wife, and from the attic I listened with glee to them criticizing Mullins. When the voices died I came quietly down to take a box of matches and the airplane and go to the jennet’s stable. I gathered dry straw in a heap, and as I lit it and the smoke rose the jennet gave his human squeal until I untied him and he was able to put his nostrils in the thick of the smoke. By the light of the burning straw I put the blue and white toy against the wall and started to kick. With each kick I gave a new sweetness was injected into my blood. For such a pretty toy it took few kicks to reduce it to shapelessness, and then, in the last flames of the straw, I flattened it on the stable floor, the jennet already nosing me to put more straw on the dying fire.
    As I quietened, I was glad that I’d torn up the unopened letter in the train that I was supposed to have given to Moran. I felt a new life had already started to grow out of the ashes, out of the stupidity of human wishes.

Hearts of Oak and Bellies of Brass
    ‘If Jocko comes today I’ll warm his arse for this once.’ Murphy laughed fiercely. The hair on the powerful arms that held the sledge was smeared to the skin with a paste of dust and oil. The small blue eyes twinkled in the leather of the face as they searched for the effect of what he’d said. There was always the tension he might break loose from behind the mixer with the sledge, or, if he didn’t, that someone else would, with shovel or with sledge.
    ‘A disgrace, worse than an animal,’ Keegan echoed. He wore a brown hat that stank with sweat and dust over his bald head. Keegan was very proud he had a second cousin who was a schoolmaster in Mohill.
    ‘I want to be at no coroner’s inquest on his head,’ Murphy said and started to beat the back of the steel hopper out of boredom as the engine idled over.
    Jocko came every day, crazed on meths and rough cider, and usually made straight for the pool of shade and water under the mixer.
    ‘He’d be just a ham sandwich if you brought down the hopper with him lying there and we’d all be in the fukken soup,’ Murphy continued.
    ‘Likes of him coming on the site anyhow would give it a bad name in no time,’ Keegan tiraded, while Galway rested on his shovel, watching the breasts of the machinists lean above their sewing in the third-floor windows of Rose and Margols, gown manufacturers on Christian Street. Galway was youngest of us all. I’d worked the whole of the hot summer with Galway and Keegan behind the mixer Murphy drove like some royal ape, and in the last two weeks Jocko had come every day. The mixer idled away. On the roof they were changing the bays.
    ‘Talkin’ about given the site a bad name, the way you came in this morning was disgrace to the livin’ daylight,’ Keegan said to me.
    ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep about it if I were you.’ My griptightened on the handle of the shovel, its blade was silver-sharp from a summer of gravel and