The floor creaks under him and when he pisses for ages into the cham- ber pot we have to stuff our mouths with coats to stop the laughing and Mam hisses at us to be quiet. He grumbles away above us before he climbs down to get his bicycle and bang his way out the door.Mam whis- pers,The coast is clear, go back to sleep.Ye can stay at home today. We can’t sleep.We’re in a new house, we have to pee and we want to explore.The lavatory is outside, about ten steps from the back door, our own lavatory, with a door you can close and a proper seat where you can sit and read squares of the Limerick Leader Laman Griffin left behind for wiping himself.There is a long backyard, a garden with tall grass and weeds, an old bicycle that must have belonged to a giant, tin cans galore, old papers and magazines rotting into the earth, a rusted sewing machine, a dead cat with a rope around his neck that somebody must have thrown over the fence. Michael gets a notion in his head that this is Africa and keeps ask- ing,Where’s Tarzan? Where’s Tarzan? He runs up and down the back- yard with no pants on trying to imitate Tarzan yodeling from tree to tree. Malachy looks over the fences into the other yards and tells us, They have gardens.They’re growing things.We can grow things.We can have our own spuds and everything. Mam calls from the back door, See if ye can find anything to start the fire in here. There’s a wooden shed built against the back of the house. It’s col- lapsing and surely we could use some of the wood for the fire. Mam is disgusted with the wood we bring in. She says it’s rotten and full of white maggots but beggars can’t be choosers.The wood sizzles above the  burning  paper  and  we  watch  the  white  maggots  try  to  escape. Michael says he feels sorry for the white maggots but we know he’s sorry for everything in the world. Mam  tells  us  this  house  used  to  be  a  shop, that  Laman  Griffin’s mother sold groceries through the little window and that’s how she was able to send Laman away to Rockwell College so that he could wind up as an officer in the Royal Navy. Oh, he was, indeed.An officer in the Royal Navy, and here’s a picture of him with other officers all having dinner with a famous American film star Jean Harlow. He was never the same after he met Jean Harlow. He fell madly in love with her but what was the use? She was Jean Harlow and he was nothing but an officer in the Royal Navy and it drove him to drink and they threw him out of the Navy. Now look at him, a common laborer for the Electricity Sup- 279