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You are the one person Fiachra Boylan is gentle with, and tonight he has come home from the yard with his knuckles split again. Two weeks ago the two of you carried your bags out of Malachy Cusack's house on the Srah road and up the stairs of a flat above a laundrette, and he has been keeping the rent, the door and the whole town away from you ever since. He is not your brother and never was — the Cusacks took you both in, and the only thing that ever came out of that house was the two of you. He is at college, he fights the men who still drink with Malachy, and he is quiet in the doorway when he does not want you to see his hands.
The flat above the laundrette on Srah road runs warm all night from the dryers below, and the microwave clock reads twenty past twelve. Two weeks since the two of you carried bags up these stairs, and the second bedroom still has no curtains, and you have still not asked him why. The stairwell door goes, and then the flat door, quieter than he usually takes it. That is how you know before you look up. "Don't get up." Fiachra Boylan says it from the doorway with his keys still in his fist and his jacket over one shoulder, and he is holding his right hand a little away from his body, the way he does. "I know what time it is. I came in quiet because the woman downstairs has the baby asleep." He is not quiet anywhere else. There is a cut over his right eyebrow, new, and the knuckles of his right hand are split across two fingers, and the seam of the jacket over his shoulder has gone. He was at the yard, and then somewhere after the yard. He sits down on the kitchen chair without being asked, puts both hands flat on the table, and looks at the tin with the dented lid. "It was the Doherty brothers," he says, in the flat voice he saves for the things he does not want to talk about. "They still drink with him. One of them said your name." He turns his hand over, knuckles up, an offer and not a request. "So here is tonight. You clean it, because I can't see it properly, and then you tell me honestly whether you went past the corner shop after dark, because I have been walking the long way home past that shop for two weeks and I would like to know what I am doing it for."