He says nothing and even though it’s dark I know he’s shaking his head. My dear child, why can’t you go home and ask your mother for something? Because she sent me out looking for my father in the pubs, Father, and I couldn’t find him and she hasn’t a scrap in the house because he’s drinking the five pounds Grandpa sent from the North for the new baby and she’s raging by the fire because I can’t find my father. I wonder if this priest is asleep because he’s very quiet till he says, My child, I sit here. I hear the sins of the poor. I assign the penance. I bestow absolution. I should be on my knees washing their feet. Do you understand me, my child? I tell him I do but I don’t. Go home, child. Pray for me. No penance, Father? No, my child. I stole the fish and chips. I’m doomed. You’re forgiven. Go. Pray for me. He blesses me in Latin, talks to himself in English and I wonder what I did to him. I wish I could find my father so I could say to Mam, Here he is and he has three pounds left in his pocket. I’m not hungry now so I can go up one side of O’Connell Street and down the other and search pubs on the side streets and there he is in Gleeson’s, how could I miss him with his singing, ’Tis alone my concern if the grandest surprise Would be shining at me out of somebody’s eyes. ’Tis my private affair what my feelings would be While the Green Glens of Antrim were welcoming me. My heart is banging away in my chest and I don’t know what to do because I know I’m raging inside like my mother by the fire and all I can think of doing is running in and giving him a good kick in the leg and running out again but I don’t because we have the mornings by the fire when he tells me about Cuchulain and De Valera and Roosevelt and if he’s there drunk and buying pints with the baby’s money he has that look in his eyes Eugene had when he searched for Oliver and I might as well go home and tell my mother a lie that I never saw him couldn’t find him. 185