Trains? No. It’s the camel. Do you know what a camel is? It has a hump. It has more than a hump. It has a nasty, mean disposition and its teeth are green with gangrene and it bites. Do you know where it bites? In the Sahara? No, you omadhaun. It bites your shoulder, rips it right off. Leaves you standing there tilted in the Sahara. How would you like that, eh? And what class of a spectacle you’d be strolling down the street,lopsided in  Limerick. What  girl  in  her  right  mind  will  look  at  an  ex-White Father with one miserable scrawny shoulder? And look at your eyes. They’re bad enough here in Limerick. In the Sahara they’ll fester and rot and fall out of your head. How old are you? Thirteen. Go home to your mother. It’s not our house and we don’t feel free in it the way we did in Roden Lane, up  in  Italy  or  down  in  Ireland. When  Laman  comes  home  he wants to read in his bed or sleep and we have to be quiet.We stay in the streets till after dark and when we come inside there’s nothing to do but go to bed and read a book if we have a candle or paraffin oil for the lamp. Mam tells us go to bed, she’ll be after us in a minute as soon as she climbs to the loft with Laman’s last mug of tea. We often fall asleep before she goes up but there are nights we hear them talking, grunting, moaning.There are nights when she never comes down and Michael and Alphie have the big bed to themselves. Malachy says she stays up there because it’s too hard for her to climb down in the dark. He’s only twelve and he doesn’t understand. I’m thirteen and I think they’re at the excitement up there. I know about the excitement and I know it’s a sin but how can it be a sin if it comes to me in a dream where American girls pose in swim- ming suits on the screen at the Lyric Cinema and I wake up pushing and pumping? It’s a sin when you’re wide awake and going at yourself the way the boys talked about it in Leamy’s schoolyard after Mr. O’Dea roared the Sixth Commandment at us,Thou Shalt Not Commit Adul- 291