I don’t. And you’d like to help your mother? I would. Well, now, that very chamber pot is full since this morning. I want you to climb up and get it and take it to the lavatory and rinse it under the tap abroad and climb back up with it. I don’t want to empty his chamber pot but I dream of cycling miles on the road to Killaloe, fields and sky far from this house, a swim in the Shannon,a night sleeping in a barn.I pull the table and chair to the wall. I  climb  up  and  under  the  bed  there’s  the  plain  white  chamber  pot streaked brown and yellow, brimming with piss and shit. I lay it gently at the edge of the loft so that it won’t spill, climb down to the chair, reach for the chamber pot, bring it down, turn my face away, hold it while I step down to the table, place it on the chair, step to the floor, take the chamber pot to the lavatory, empty it, and get sick behind the lavatory till I get used to this job. Laman says I’m a good boy and the bike is mine anytime I want it as long as the chamber pot is empty and I’m there to run to the shop for his cigarettes, go to the library for books and do whatever else he wants. He says,You have a great way with a chamber pot. He laughs and Mam stares into the dead ashes in the fireplace. It’s raining so hard one day, Miss O’Riordan the librarian says, Don’t go out in that or you’ll ruin the books you’re carrying. Sit down over there and  behave  yourself. You  can  read  all  about  the  saints  while  you’re waiting. There are four big books, Butler’s Lives of the Saints. I don’t want to spend my life reading about saints but when I start I wish the rain would last forever.Whenever you see pictures of saints, men or women, they’re always looking up to heaven where there are clouds filled with little fat angels carrying flowers or harps giving praise. Uncle Pa Keating says he can’t think of a single saint in heaven he’d want to sit down and have a pint with.The saints in these books are different.There are stories about virgins, martyrs, virgin martyrs and they’re worse than any horror film at the Lyric Cinema. I have to look in the dictionary to find out what a virgin is. I know the Mother of God is the Virgin Mary and they call her that because she didn’t have a proper husband, only poor old St. Joseph. In the Lives of 285