Grandma is wailing at my mother, Mother o’ God, Angela, what’s up with you in the bed? What did they do to you? My mother runs her tongue over her dry lips and gasps for more lemonade. She wants lemonade, says Michael, and we got it for her and bread and marmalade and we’re all outlaws now. Frankie was the first outlaw till we went raiding for coal all over Limerick. Guard Dennehy looks interested and takes Michael downstairs by the hand and in a few minutes we hear him laughing.Aunt Aggie says that’s a disgraceful way to behave with my mother sick in the bed.The guard comes back and tells her go for a doctor. He keeps covering his face with his cap whenever he looks at me or my brothers.Desperadoes, he says, desperadoes. The doctor comes with Aunt Aggie in his motor car and he has to rush my mother to the hospital with her pneumonia.We’d all like to go riding in the doctor’s car but Aunt Aggie says, No, ye are all coming to my house till yeer mother comes home from the hospital. I tell her not to bother. I’m eleven and I can easily look after my brothers. I’d be glad to stay at home from school and make sure every- one is fed and washed. But Grandma screams I will do no such a thing and Aunt Aggie gives me a thump for myself. Guard Dennehy says I’m too young yet to be an outlaw and a father but I have a promising future in both departments. Get your clothes, says Aunt Aggie, ye are coming to my house till yeer mother is out of the hospital. Jesus above, that baby is a disgrace. She finds a rag and ties it around Alphie’s bottom for fear he might shit all over the pram.Then she looks at us and wants to know why we’re standing there with our faces hanging out after she told us get our clothes. I’m afraid she’ll hit me or yell at me when I tell her it’s all right, we have our clothes, they’re on us. She stares at me and shakes her head. Here, she  says, put some sugar and water in the child’s bottle. She tells me I have to push Alphie through the streets, she can’t manage the pram with that bockety wheel that makes it rock back and forth and besides ’tis a disgraceful-looking object she’d be ashamed to put a mangy dog in. She takes the three old coats from our bed and piles them on the pram till you can hardly see Alphie at all. Grandma comes with us and barks at me all the way from Roden Lane to Aunt Aggie’s flat in Windmill Street. Can’t you push that pram properly? Jesus, you’re going to kill that child. Stop goin’ from side to 241