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cramped quarters swelled with the rarefied pizzicatos and tiptoeing melodies of ‘Summer’. The cackles and chatter resumed, escaping out to the bewildered street below.
    It also decided something in the vertiginous Goyaesque beauty holding a lonely glass of Cinzano that was Sinead Mary Maguire. Here was a man, she mused, with whom she could fall in love; a man of sensibility, intellect (‘slung out’—she loved that! And, over the years, it would become a phrase she would grow to hate more than any other on earth). Here was a man not afraid to give his opinion, to fight for it (again, a quality that would eventually drive her to paroxysms of Irish distraction). Above all, he sported leather patches on the elbows of his diseasedly brown corduroy jacket. This, for her, denoted adulthood. She had finally arrived. Sure, he was almost shoulder-height to her and she had seen newborn babies possessed of more hair, but in that split-second … (that manful struggle over the record, representing the battle between two extremes; of high culture with low, of black rollnecks with professorial corduroy, of Ringo Starr with Vivaldi—plus the sexy ‘snap!’ made by the vinyl in the stultifying night) … in that split-second something had been decided: here was the man who would father her child.
    And that child was me.
    They married within the year and moved first to the blighted satellite town of Luton, then to neighbouring Hamford on realising that a concrete post-nuclear wasteland of piss-filled underpasses (and where, indeed, most of the buildings resembled public urinals) was no place to bring up a child. Hamford, with its broad avenues of deciduous trees, placid, murky river and Norman church, its outlying estates that promised (and delivered) unimaginable violence, would soon become a mythical place for me; but for newly-wed regular hardworking Desmond and his attractive wife it was just a place to send a kid to nursery school that wasn’t Lewisham. Things were good in Hamford for a couple of years. After I appeared, Sinead took eighteen-months’ leave from the local junior school where she was again making fast progress with the magic wooden letters. And Des, tired from a day analysing a new commando-strength laxative, would appear every evening with his tie askance, hungry for the phenomenal Irish stews that had played such a vital role in Sinead’s wooing of him. Every night at six p.m. she would hear his key in the lock and there he’d be—every night (if that were possible) slightly balder and ready to rest his head where it most naturally fell due to their height difference: on her sternum.
    Yes, things were good for a couple of years in Hamford, if not a little … well, boring. In retrospect, this could have been the end-of-life-as-she-knew-it for Sinead Easy (the atrophying of those vital energies) if it wasn’t for what happened when she returned to the school. She met a man. She met a man who would eventually (and literally) sweep her off her feet—that most destructive of female aspirations. To quote my namesake, maidens, like moths, are ever caught by glare. His name was Delph. Delph Tongue. Scandinavian in origin, so I’m told. And he was (very Lady Chatterley’s this) the assistant caretaker, the man who painted the glutinous, supernaturally straight pure white lines on the football field every summer. And also a man who had watched her—married, unavailable Sinead Easy—walk through the low gates every day like a galleon-tall, devil-black vision of erotic invitation.
    I’ve often wondered why my mother—so nurturing, so at home in the bewildering polytheistic universe of the under-five—only ever wanted one child. It has taken a number of years to realise that, for her, dealing with children every day brought her close to tearful and justified mass murder. It looks like an easy gig, teaching: those endless holidays that stretch long into scorched August; the early finish to the day leaving the