V Grandma won’t talk to Mam anymore because of what I did with God in her backyard. Mam doesn’t talk to her sister,Aunt Aggie, or her brother Uncle Tom. Dad doesn’t talk to anyone in Mam’s family and they don’t talk to him because he’s from the North and he has the odd manner. No one talks to Uncle Tom’s wife,  Jane, because she’s from Galway and she has the look of a Spaniard. Everyone talks to Mam’s brother Uncle Pat,because he was dropped on his head,he’s simple,and he sells newspapers. Everyone calls him The Abbot or Ab Sheehan and no one knows why. Everyone talks to Uncle Pa Keating because he was gassed in the war and married Aunt Aggie and if they didn’t talk to him he  wouldn’t  give  a  fiddler’s  fart  anyway  and  that’s  why  the  men  in South’s pub call him a gas man. That’s the way I’d like to be in the world, a gas man, not giving a  fiddler’s fart, and that’s what I tell the Angel on the Seventh Step till  I  remember you’re not supposed to say fart in the presence of an angel. Uncle Tom and Galway Jane have children but we’re not supposed to talk to them because our parents are not talking.They have a son and daughter, Gerry and Peggy, and Mam will yell at us for talking to them but we don’t know how not to talk to our cousins. People in families in the lanes of Limerick have their ways of not 132