My mother laughs, For myself? Lord above, if I didn’t nurse her I wouldn’t be able to get near her the way he wants to be holding her day and night. Minnie says it’s lovely, all the same, to see a man so charmed with his little girl for isn’t everyone charmed with her? Everyone. The twins are able to stand and walk and they have accidents all the time.Their bottoms are sore because they’re always wet and shitty.They put dirty things in their mouths, bits of paper, feathers, shoelaces, and they get sick.Mam says we’re all driving her crazy.She dresses the twins, puts them in the pram, and Malachy and I take them to the playground. The cold weather is gone and the trees have green leaves up and down Classon Avenue. We race the pram around the playground and the twins laugh and make goo-goo sounds till they get hungry and start to cry. There are two bottles in the pram filled with water and sugar and that keeps them quiet for awhile till they’re hungry again and they cry so hard I don’t know what to do because they’re so small and I wish I could give them all kinds of food so that they’d laugh and make the baby sounds.They love the mushy food Mam makes in a pot, bread mashed up in milk and water and sugar. Mam calls it bread and goody. If I take the twins home now Mam will yell at me for giving her no rest or for waking Margaret. We are to stay in the playground till she sticks her head out the window and calls for us. I make funny faces for the twins to stop their crying. I put a piece of paper on my head and let it fall and they laugh and laugh. I push the pram over to Malachy play- ing  on  the  swings  with  Freddie  Leibowitz. Malachy  is  trying  to  tell Freddie all about the way Setanta became Cuchulain. I tell him stop telling that story, it’s my story. He won’t stop. I push him and he cries, Waah, waah, I’ll tell Mam. Freddie pushes me and everything turns dark in my head and I run at him with fists and knees and feet till he yells, Hey, stop, stop, and I won’t because I can’t, I don’t know how, and if I stop Malachy will go on taking my story from me. Freddie pushes me away and runs off, yelling, Frankie tried to kill me. Frankie tried to kill me. I don’t know what to do because I never tried to kill anyone before and now Malachy, on the swing, cries, Don’t kill me, Frankie, and he 31