married nine months before there’s a sign of a child. Here I am born into the world in half the time.That means I must be a miracle and I might grow up to be a saint with people celebrating the feast of St. Francis of Limerick. I’ll have to ask Mikey Molloy, still the expert on Girls’ Bodies and Dirty Things in General. Billy says if we’re to be great soccer players we have to practice and we’re to meet over in the park.The boys complain when I hand out the hearts and I tell them if they don’t like it they can go home and cut up their own mother’s dresses and blouses. We have no money for a proper ball so one of the boys brings a sheep’s bladder stuffed with rags.We kick the bladder up and down the meadow till there are holes and rags start falling out and we get fed up kicking a bladder that’s hardly there anymore. Billy says we’re to meet tomorrow morning which is Saturday and go out Ballinacurra to see if we can challenge rich Crescent College boys to a proper game, seven a side. He says we’re to pin our red hearts to our shirts even if they’re red rags. Malachy is going home for tea but I can’t go because I have to see Mikey Molloy and find out why I was born in half the time. Mikey is coming out of his house with his father, Peter. It’s Mikey’s sixteenth birthday and his father is taking him to Bowles’s pub for his first pint. Nora Molloy is inside screeching after Peter that if they go they can stay gone, she’s done baking bread, she’s never going to the lunatic asylum again, if he brings that child home drunk she’ll go to Scotland and dis- appear from the face of the earth. Peter tells Mikey, Pay no attention to her, Cyclops.The mothers of Ireland are always enemies of the first pint. My own mother tried to kill my father with a frying pan when he took me for the first pint. Mikey asks Peter if I can come with them and have a lemonade. Peter tells everyone in the pub that Mikey is there for his first pint and when all the men want to stand Mikey a pint Peter says, Ah, no, ’twould be a terrible thing if he had too much and turned against it entirely. The pints are drawn and we sit against the wall, the Molloys with their pints and I with my lemonade.The men wish Mikey all the best in the life to come and wasn’t it a gift from God that he fell off that spout years ago and never had the fit since and wasn’t it a great pity 253