pipe that leads to the tap has to be held to the wall by a piece of twine looped around a nail. Everything around the tap is damp, the floor, the wall, the chair the basin sits on.The water from the tap is icy and our fingers turn numb. Dad says this is good for us, it will make men of us. He throws the icy water on his face and neck and chest to show there’s nothing to fear.We hold our hands to the fire for the heat that’s in it but we can’t stay there long because we have to drink our tea and eat our bread and go to school. Dad makes us say grace before meals and grace after meals and he tells us be good boys at school because God is watch- ing every move and the slightest disobedience will send us straight to hell where we’ll never have to worry about the cold again. And he smiles. Two  weeks  before  Christmas  Malachy  and  I  come  home  from school  in  a  heavy  rain  and  when  we  push  in  the  door  we  find  the kitchen empty.The table and chairs and trunk are gone and the fire is dead in the grate. The Pope is still there and that means we haven’t moved again. Dad would never move without the Pope. The kitchen floor is wet, little pools of water all around, and the walls are twinkling with the damp.There’s a noise upstairs and when we go up we find Dad and Mam and the missing furniture. It’s nice and warm there with a fire blazing in the grate, Mam sitting in the bed, and Dad reading The Irish Press  and smoking a cigarette by the fire. Mam tells us there was a ter- rible flood, that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door.They tried to stop it with rags but they only turned sopping wet and let the rain in. People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks we should stay upstairs  as  long  as  there  is  rain. We’ll  be  warm  through  the  winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if there is any sign of a dryness in the walls or the floor. Dad says it’s like going away on our holidays to a warm foreign place like Italy.That’s what we’ll call the upstairs from now on, Italy. Malachy says the Pope is still on the wall downstairs and he’s going to be all cold and couldn’t we bring him up? but Mam says, No, he’s going to stay where he is because I don’t want him on the wall glaring at me in the bed.Isn’t it enough that we dragged him all the way from Brooklyn to Belfast to Dublin to Limerick? All I want now is a little peace, ease and comfort. . . . 96