The lice are disgusting, worse than rats. They’re in our heads and ears and they sit in the hollows of our collarbones.They dig into our skin.They get into the seams of our clothes and they’re everywhere in the coats we use as blankets.We have to search every inch of Alphie’s body because he’s a baby and helpless. The lice are worse than the fleas. Lice squat and suck and we can see our blood through their skins. Fleas jump and bite and they’re clean and we prefer them.Things that jump are cleaner than things that squat. We all agree there will be no more stray women and children, dogs and old men.We don’t want any more diseases and infections. Michael cries. Grandma’s next-door neighbor, Mrs. Purcell, has the only wireless in her lane.The government gave it to her because she’s old and blind. I want a radio. My grandmother is old but she’s not blind and what’s the use of having a grandmother who won’t go blind and get a government radio? Sunday nights I sit outside on the pavement under Mrs. Purcell’s window listening to plays on the BBC and Radio Eireann, the Irish sta- tion.You can hear plays by O’Casey, Shaw, Ibsen and Shakespeare him- self, the best of all, even if he is English. Shakespeare is like mashed potatoes, you can never get enough of him. And you can hear strange plays about Greeks plucking out their eyes because they married their mothers by mistake. One night I’m sitting under Mrs.Purcell’s window listening to Mac- beth. Her daughter, Kathleen, sticks her head out the door. Come in, Frankie. My mother says you’ll catch the consumption sitting on the ground in this weather. Ah, no, Kathleen. It’s all right. No. Come in. They give me tea and a grand cut of bread slathered with black- berry jam. Mrs. Purcell says, Do you like the Shakespeare, Frankie? I love the Shakespeare, Mrs. Purcell. Oh, he’s music, Frankie, and he has the best stories in the world. I don’t know what I’d do with meself of a Sunday night if I didn’t have the Shakespeare. When the play finishes she lets me fiddle with the knob on the radio and I roam the dial for distant sounds on the shortwave band, strange whispering and hissing, the whoosh of the ocean coming and 274