Irregulars by Kevin McCarthy Page B

fears his Uncle John. There are few in the tenements who don’t. But he fears more for his sisters when the man is around, and this is what has brought him home, if for only a few hours. It never occurs to him that it might not be safe to return home for any other reason.
    ‘Jerry! Ma, Jerry’s home!’ One of his sisters greets him as he reaches the first floor landing outside the flat.
    The girl is six years old, as blonde as her brother and she hugs him tightly. Jeremiah hugs her back, something warm and liquid flooding his insides; the first touch of another human being since he’d stuck the knife in the fella in the laneway.
    ‘Sarah, pet. How’s me dote?’ he says, wondering briefly, as he has done in the past, if it was her hair, being so much like his own, that makes her his favourite. They are the only two of his mother’s five children who have blond hair, and Jeremiah also wonders if they share the same father. It is a question that can never be answered, and so is never asked, though many times, on the docks or on the streets of the city, Jeremiah will see a man with hair like his own and wonder, Is that me da? Mine and Sarah’s da?
    ‘I’m grand, Jerry,’ the girl says, pulling away from him and taking his hand. ‘We got a flitch of bacon! Ma got it. I don’t know how she got it, but she got it and she told me fuck off and don’t be asking questions but we got it. Bacon, Jerry.’
    Jeremiah knows how she’d got the bacon, and the butcher knows too, he thinks, and so will the butcher’s missus when she gets the itch. He musses Sarah’s hair and then smooths it back into place, his fingers lingering for a moment on the faded, frayed ribbon in her hair.
    The poor thing could have a new ribbon, for jaysus sake , he tells himself. Next time I’m out I’ll reef it out of the hair of the first girl I see. A young girl could have a new fuckin’ ribbon at least.
    He pulls his sister back by the hand before entering the flat. ‘Is Uncle John Keegan in, Sarah? Tell us quick ’fore I go in.’
    Sarah shakes her head, the joy of the coming meal and her brother’s return washing from her features at the mention of her uncle’s name. ‘No, he’s out, Jerry, but he’ll be back, he will. He’s carting on the quays. He’s not in jail no more, Jerry.’ She looks up at her brother, her grip tightening on his hand, fear and worry in her eyes. A lump rises in Jeremiah’s throat at the thought of the man. The thought of him harming a hair on her head, the bastard. Her or any one of his sisters, nieces or nephews. The way he had harmed him. The beatings were only the half of it.
    The bastard . His mother and aunty—Jeremiah couldn’t give a ha’ penny ride for either of them. But the little ones. He wishes now that he hadn’t left his fish-knife stuck between the ribs of that fella in the lane the night before; thinking how he might have used it on his uncle, given half the chance.
    He lets Sarah lead him through the tacked-up sheet that serves as a door into the one-room flat where his mother is sitting on the dwelling’s single chair at a table fashioned from a packing crate. She is drinking tea—Jeremiah thinks it is tea—from a cup with no handle. She wears her hair tied back, a thick swatch of grey at her crown from where her hair has grown since she last had it dyed the shade of brown she favours when she has the money. In front of her on the packing crate table, blood seeping through its wrapping of day-old newspaper, is the lump of bacon.
    His mother turns as he enters, watches him as his youngest sister and two of his nephews now hug him and hang from his legs and arms, asking what he has brought for them. He smiles and tells them he has nothing for them.
    Without speaking, his mother returns to staring out the open window at drying clothes dangling in the soft autumn air on a line that bridges the building across from their own.
    ‘Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m back and all, I am.’
    His aunt