orders on Friday nights and all day Saturday and that’s when we get the good tips.The minute we deliver one batch we’re out with another. The worst lanes are in the Irishtown, off High Street or Mungret Street, worse than Roden Lane or O’Keeffe’s Lane or any lane I lived in. There are lanes with channels running down the middle. Mothers stand at doors and yell gardyloo when they empty their slop buckets. Children make paper boats or float matchboxes with little sails on the greasy water. When you ride into a lane the children call out, Here’s the telegram boy, here’s the telegram boy.They run to you and the women wait at the door.If you give a small child a telegram for his mother he’s the hero of the family. Little girls know they’re supposed to wait till the boys get their chance though they can get the telegram if they have no brothers. Women at the door will call to you that they have no money now but if you’re in this lane tomorrow knock on the door for your tip, God bless you an’ all belongin’ to you. Mrs. O’Connell and Miss Barry at the post office tell us every day our job is to deliver telegrams and nothing else.We are not to be doing things for people, going to the shop for groceries or any other kind of message.They don’t care if people are dying in the bed.They don’t care if people are legless, lunatic or crawling on the floor.We are to deliver the telegram and that’s all. Mrs. O’Connell says, I know everything ye do, everything, for the people of Limerick have their eye on ye and there are reports which I have here in my drawers. A fine place to keep reports, says Toby Mackey under his breath. But Mrs. O’Connell and Miss Barry don’t know what it’s like in the lane when you knock on a door and someone says come in and you go in and there’s no light and there’s a pile of rags on a bed in a corner the pile saying who is it and you say telegram and the pile of rags tells you would you ever go to the shop for me I’m starving with the hunger and I’d give me two eyes for a cup of tea and what are you going to do say I’m busy and ride off on your bike and leave the pile of rags there with a telegram money order that’s pure useless because the pile of rags is helpless to get out of the bed to go to the post office to cash the bloody money order. What are you supposed to do? 316