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way when he’s warning me about my sisters. It like he’s saying, If you want to get your hands on these girls you’ll have to come through me first! I feel like telling him to get Mam to put some initials on the girls, and that’ll keep them safe from harm.
    He’s never been this bad with me before. Even when I accidentally knocked Susan out with the thick wooden rolling pin, or when I was caught nicking three plastic rulers from Deveny’s, or when I called Old Mrs Dolan a ‘Fucker’ for scaring us out of her garden, or even when I got all D’s in my summer report. But now it’s different. He can fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Just looking at me can set him going. Like when Deirdre Brown from work came for dinner last Sunday. Mam had spent all morning doing the chicken in a brand-new roasty way that she got from the papers, which meant cooking it upside down without any tinfoil, then turning it over at the last minute. Mam had to check it the whole time – open the oven, take it out, prod it, pour the juices over it, and slip it back in. And each time she took it out she told the whole house how it was getting drier and smaller by the minute and how this new fancy fella in the papers didn’t have a clue about anything to do with cooking. Eventually, just as Deirdre Brown arrived, the chicken pops out like a tiny cremated pigeon, and Mam has to scrape all the meat she can on to a single dinner plate and pass it round us in a dead embarrassing silence. Deirdre Brown makes a joke about me being a growing boy so,to keep the chat going and to show her that she’s dead right and that I’m growing like a monster a minute, I take loads of meat and pile it high on my plate, next to the potatoes. I dip a piece of breast meat into the gravy and pop it into my mouth with my fingers, but before I even have a single chew done there’s a massive bang on the table. It’s Dad’s fist. And when I look up at him he’s glaring at me, like he wants to run me through with a fork. ‘Disgusting,’ he says, hissing through his teeth.
    Mam says that I’ve to be patient with Dad these days because he’s so tired. She says that providing for six children and a wife with a keen eye for the fashions has taken it out of him. He sleeps any chance he can, anywhere he can, and it’s never enough. Even on Dun Laoghaire walks, he’ll stay in the car and have a nap, while we race to the pier and jump on to the big brassy cannon. Or when we go to Silver Strand in Wicklow, he’ll lie down on the red check rug and spend the whole day asleep, and miss the rounders, and the swimming and the moat-digging on the sand. He’ll just about rouse himself for cheese-and-tomato sangers, crisps and Lilt before another doze. He’s even been to the doctor, but all they say is that he’s a ‘tough old Dub’, and is working all the hours that God has given him. Which means that he’s entitled to forty winks every now and then. Case closed.
    Usually Mam breaks up the room-swap discussion by talking about the meal.
    Lovely bit of pork, isn’t it, folks?
    Everyone, all seven of us, including Dad, nod and grunt and say, Yes, lovely.
    Mam then says that Tom the Butcher’s getting married.
    Dad says, To who?
    Mam says, To Moira Ni Kennedy’s young one.
    Then Sarah dramatically flicks her silky hair out of her eyes and goes, all shocked, Julie Kennedy?
    Mam goes, Yes.
    Then Sarah goes, Jesus, she was in my year in The Sorrows!
    And then they’re all at it, full pelt. Five sisters and Mam, bashing away, covering the Kennedy clan, the wedding dress, the extended families, the connections to who and who, where they met and who they know in common and why they ended up with each other. Sometimes, when it’s going really loud, and they’re all talking together, me and Dad look at each other and, joking, roll our eyes to heaven. It makes me feel brilliant, coz it’s like we’re part of a secret club. Like when we watch
Benny Hill
together and