and when they come back Paddy says, I have to go home. Me mother’ll kill me. I’ll wait for you outside, Frankie. Now I have to go to the lavatory and Fintan leads me to the back- yard. He says, I have to go, too, and when I unbutton my fly I can’t pee because he’s looking at me and he says,You were fooling.You don’t have to go at all. I like to look at you, Francis.That’s all. I wouldn’t want to commit any class of a sin with our Confirmation coming next year. Paddy and I leave together. I’m bursting and run behind a garage to pee. Paddy is waiting for me and as we walk along Hartstonge Street he says,That was a powerful sangwidge, Frankie, an’ him an’ his mother is very holy but I wouldn’t want to go to Fintan’s flat anymore because he’s very odd, isn’t he, Frankie? He is, Paddy. The way he looks at it when you take it out, that’s odd, isn’t it, Frankie? ’Tis, Paddy. A few days later Paddy whispers,Fintan Slattery said we could come to his flat at lunchtime. His mother won’t be there and she leaves his lunch for him. He might give us some too and he has lovely milk.Will we go? Fintan sits two rows from us. He knows what Paddy is saying to me and he moves his eyebrows up and down as if to say,Will you come? I whisper yes to Paddy and he nods to Fintan and the master barks at us to stop waggling our eyebrows and our lips or the ash plant will sing across our backsides. Boys in the schoolyard see the three of us walk out and they pass remarks. Oh, Gawd, look at Fintan and his ingles. Paddy says, Fintan, what’s an ingle? and Fintan says it’s just a boy from olden times who sits in a corner, that’s all. He tells us sit at the table in his kitchen and we can read his comic books if we like, Film Fun, the Beano, the Dandy, or the religious magazines or his mother’s romance magazines, the Miracle and the Oracle, which always have stories about factory girls who are poor but beautiful in love with sons of earls and vice versa and the factory girl ends up throwing herself into the Thames with the hopelessness only to be rescued by a passing carpenter who is poor but honest and will love the factory girl for her own humble self though it turns out the passing carpenter is really the son of a duke, which is much higher than an earl, so that now the poor factory girl is a duchess and can look 159