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all the other proper farmers. And then you did something
with the money – invested it back in the farm somehow, made some strategic decisions about the way the next year was going to go. You sold your animals, and you bought new ones, and you
bought new machinery, and maybe you bought new land, and you expanded, you extended, you excelled, and all the other farmers and all the other farmers’ sons welcomed you to the club.
    But Mark was writing a doctorate on a nineteenth-century novelist, and when he finished it, he wanted to do the things that you did after you finished a doctorate on a nineteenth-century
novelist: maybe write a book about a nineteenth-century novelist, maybe teach a course or two on nineteenth-century novelists, or maybe run the hell as far away from nineteenth-century novelists as
he could. He didn’t know. He had to get his thesis finished first, and he had to publish many more papers, and present at many more conferences, and he had to ingratiate himself with the
English departments of various universities, which was something he kept meaning to get around to but had not yet quite achieved. As a teacher – or, more accurately, as a teaching assistant
– he suspected he was terrible; he had recognized, in his students’ eyes, the same slow dawn of scorn and incredulity of which he had been a master in his own undergraduate years. He
suspected, too, that he was writing an appalling excuse for a thesis, but still he felt sure that he wanted to have a career as an academic, to spend his days reading and researching and writing,
figuring things out and pinning things down. What those things were, he no longer felt sure, but they were the things he wanted to do; he knew. And he knew that what he did not want to do was to
live in Dorvaragh, even half of the time, even a quarter of the time, and farm with his father, and fight with his father, and watch himself becoming more and more the image of his father every
day. But still he could not turn his back on him. He could not refuse him. He tried to be honest with him – he told him, over and over, that his life would be in Dublin, and that his trips to
the farm would be occasional, but they would be as often as he could manage, and that that was the most and the best he could do. He knew that, with his father, the words were not taking. But he
could not find in that fact justification to stay away, justification for anything like a final break. And, besides, a final break was not something that he even knew how to want.
    In all of this, Mark’s mother was sympathetic. She told him to do what he had to do, to concentrate on his own work, to take with a pinch of salt his father’s air of being winded by
his leaving, confused by his inability to stay. And yet, after a couple of weeks had passed, she would be on the phone again, wondering when he would be coming down. In the spaces between her words
he felt he could almost hear his father’s breath.
    ‘Monday,’ his mother had said on the phone that morning, when he had explained to her about the deadline. ‘Monday, you’ll be finished? Monday we’ll see you,
so?’
    He had said yes. Or he had made some noise that sounded like it. Then he had said goodbye and, looking to the clock radio beside his bed, he had discovered that there were technically three more
hours left in the morning, despite the sharpness of the sunlight splaying itself through the blinds. He had slipped back into a heavy, dream-crazed sleep, and when he had gone down to the kitchen
more than three hours later, Mossy had cooked breakfast and had planned for them both what he called a knockout of a day.
    And this was the knockout. A back yard in the Liberties, barely bigger than the sitting room of their flat, heaving with the sun-blistered bodies of strangers and skangers and shits like Nagle,
and a bar that looked populated entirely by jailbirds and jailbait, with a few pissed grandmothers and breastfeeding