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You’re a disgusting article. Get away out of here now before I put me boot in your arse.’
    As he walked back into the house with Junie, his arm around the sobbing woman’s shoulders, Cathy followed him inside. In the neat and tidy front room she stared around her for a moment in wonder. Through a doorway she could see a polished wooden table set for two people with a holly centrepiece and a proper cloth napkin beside each plate. Everywhere was polished or scrubbed, and the warmth was somehow clean, not the stuffy cloying warmth to be found in her own home. It was a room to aspire to, a room of which Cathy admitted deep inside herself she would love to be mistress. The anger left her abruptly. Who could blame Eamonn for wanting this, laid out on a plate for him, without even having to pay towards the rent? He was a man who used women, lived off them. Junie could offer more than her mother. It was an easy choice to make.
    ‘Eamonn will bring your clothes round, OK?’
    The big man held Junie in his arms and shook his head in distress. ‘I’m sorry for what I said, but you’re a sensible child. You can see how it is.’
    Cathy smiled nastily. ‘I can see how it is, all right. You fell on your feet here. I wouldn’t advise knocking her from pillar to post like you did me mother, though. Do you know what I can’t understand in all this?’ She looked into the little woman’s face. ‘I don’t get what it is exactly that you see in him. Because my mum might not be Woman of the Year, I accept that, but I always thought even she was too good for him. He’s Irish scum, lady. But then again, so are you, I suppose.’
    She walked out into the hallway. Then: ‘Oh, by the way, you’d better set another place, his son will be here soon. My mum wouldn’t give him house room after this.’
    Outside she looked at her mother crumpled in Betty’s arms and felt the first stirrings of a headache. As they walked down the neat pathway to the gate, Cathy glanced at the neighbours standing curiously on their doorsteps. Brazenly she bent down and picked up a stone, hurling it through the front window of the neat and tidy little house.
    ‘Had a look, have you? Want a bleeding photograph!’ she called to the onlookers.
    Betty, despite herself, started to laugh. ‘You’re a girl, Cathy Connor, and no mistake.’
    She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s Christmas fucked. Another fun day in the Connor household. Here, give me an arm and I’ll help you carry her home.’
    The three women walked along with as much dignity as they could muster, which as they all secretly acknowledged wasn’t much.
     
    Eamonn Junior had left and Madge was in bed sleeping off the bottle of Scotch she had put away soon after getting home. Cathy tidied round and then, finding she was hungry, opened the oven door.
    All that was left of the chicken was the bones: Eamonn had picked the bird clean. Putting her head in her hands, she cried.
    Looking around the tiny cramped kitchen, with the damp on the walls and the faded lino on the floor, Cathy Connor saw the rest of her life.
    In her mind’s eye, she saw once again the tidy house with its clean curtains, polished furniture and newly papered walls. Eamonn would be in his element there after years sleeping in a bed piled high with coats, her own haphazard cleaning and her mother’s cloying scent pervading the house. The boy would think he had died and gone to heaven.
    Much as she hated to admit it, Cathy envied him.
     
    Junie was over the worst of her shock, and a few sherries later was dishing up the dinner and chatting twenty to the dozen about how everything would be grand. Madge would understand now, and they could start life together in peace.
    Young Eamonn’s eyes nearly popped from his head as a plate was piled high for him with turkey, stuffing, carrots, cabbage and roast potatoes. He saw his father smile and smiled back happily. After wolfing down the turkey dinner, he was further amazed to see a huge