Alone London was now my new home and moved easily among it. Night life was fun and money never went far only the hangovers that went with it. When out, I was flash and generous with my wages and nothing was too expensive. The next day I would be trying to get the cheapest apples or milk on sale as if my very life depended on it. If someone asked me then what was the best way to save money, I would imagine my reply would have been that the price of apples would have to come down first. On the wrong side of nineteen years old economics was not my strongest point, and never lost the appreciation that I was free, really free. I was also mindful of the road that was travelled in my life so far.

Ghosts still walked with me and who is perfect from a perfect world. The surrogate parenting of all those books that I had read and the movies that I had seen had served me well and helped keep me strong. I missed Galway sometimes, even the bad weather along with the general kindness of the place. Here not so much. Too many people in one place, all in the same hurry every day, and often the worst that I thought was in people would converge with the best to help me keep the faith.

It was tested one time when an elderly man lay breathless and motionless, lying on a footpath as his wife tried to comfort him while people stepped over and around him. At last a passing nurse stopped to help while I was trying to loosen his tie.

What she did next simply astounded me. This attractive woman started to give him mouth to mouth resuscitation. If that was all that was needed to keep life in his weary bones then this man would most certainly have died if it depended on me to french kiss him. But this nurse had done just that and restored my faith that little bit more. I left sheepishly after an ambulance arrived but not before the man coughed himself back to life and was looking right into the eyes of the angelic face of the nurse. He was sure he was in heaven already.

There was a general prejudice against the Irish in England back then. We were seen to be all a bit thick, drank too much, fought even more and worked like donkeys.

Racist Jokes supported the myth and the truth lay in between. Irish people were marginalized and helped draw the line too. United as psalm singing Catholics on Sundays, the rest of the week went downhill. If you did not drink or fight you were not one of them even if you were, the rougher you acted the better the audience. Even those Irish accents seen to be a little posh or educated were out, and reading a book was a betrayal in itself. All of these things had been symptomatic of a people on the margins largely forgotten in their own land. They were now left with a deep feeling of betrayal and insecurity and struggling hard to find an identify in an otherwise foreign one. I managed to career between their two worlds with ease. I am told it is hip to be Irish in England to - day, but back then my time there was only separated by little more than a decade from an earlier generation that could remember signs on boarding houses that read, NO BLACKS NO IRISH AND NO DOGS, and in no particular order. The Irish 'did not forget their shovel if they wanted to go to work' as sung by Christy Moore, while now they do not forget to carry a briefcase. For me, I preferred working with Englishmen as it was upsetting to see Irish treat each other so badly because of their own fears. As with most people a meeting of the minds with respect thrown in is all that is needed to get past any prejudice or hang ups that one might have. It's the learning of that that can prove the hardest. If all that does not work all hell can break loose, like one night in a pub called the Five Bells in New Cross when I was chatting up a girl while making small talk to an elderly englishman.

"You must meet my mate, Pairic, " he encouraged as if he was doing me a favour.

"He will be here soon and is great fun". I can't wait I thought to myself as I eyed up the girls breasts and replied thoughtfully, "that would be nice". Sure enough, big and ignorant Pairic came in and sat down beside the girl, as his mate happily ordered a pint for him. We made small talk but I knew instantly that he did not like me for I represented youth and change. As he cradled his pint of beer, I turned my attention back to the girl, now called Susan, when he lent himself to enquire of both of us, "who is the girl, you or her" I ignored him, giving a dismissive wave to emphasize the point while he was about to make one with the pint in his hand. He threw the beer into my face and mercifully the glass did not follow with it. I cleaned myself off slowly while he waited for a reaction. He should not have waited. I pounced with fast and furious hands until he fell off the seat looking for balance. I was not about to give it to him for speed was my weapon against his size, and the anger I carried was much stronger than his. Had it not been he would have cut me with that glasses the first chance he had and not waited around to admire his handywork. He was just a bear that usually got his way but just not to - day. Before I knew it, a bouncer had his arm around my neck while whispering, "let it go mate, let it go".

Another one finished off my handiwork by giving Pairic a few more slaps and chucked him out of the pub. The manager was down in a flash and said, "It's okay, mate, we saw the whole thing" Next thing I knew I was offered free drinks for the night and the girl thought I did it all for her. Then there was another type of Irishman that I would meet from time to time, the armchair members of the I R A .

They were so full of bullshit you could smell them a mile off for if they were members you would never know it. I would not have been their profile for recruitment anyway and being an open book they could see that I had my own personal gripe with the Irish government and the industrial prisons still home to over five thousand children. Their war was all a bit foreign to me but I understood it. It just was not my war. I suppose we are all shaped primarily by circumstance and we ended up respecting each others differences. The few strong nationalist friends that I had made for good fun as I danced around their political point of view and found more interesting ones.

I met up with Paddy again and moved in with him and his friend to a bigger and better apartment. It made for interesting times and the crac was mighty. I settled down for a while and decided at last to meet Dillie. From her letters to the prison I already knew where she lived and had her phone number. She invited me around for Sunday weeks dinner and said Anthony and Brian would be there too. I had nothing to lose and maybe a family to gain. That was my Achilles heel, trying to re - invent a past that never existed. So like an excited child, I looked forward to meeting them not knowing they dreaded meeting me.

It started off promising, at least with the Sunday roast. I felt out numbered and under scrutiny and new something was up, I just could not put my finger on it. Anthony was charming as was his way. His good looks was carried with it a caddish quality that could only be British, while Brian came across more pink and defensive, and Dillie's obese husband, Mark, was equal to their politeness and reminded me of a man who was not there.

The problem was something was not right with the lot of them and I had a feeling what it was. I decided to ask a question about someone that they wanted answers about, Michael. It cut the tension straight away and let free their fears on me. I simply asked had he been here.

By asking it I became, at least to them, their fraternal brother and nephew. By their answering it, they became at least to me, my enemy. Michael had done the rounds alright starting with my father.

Michael had punched him a few times, slapped my mother once and Dillie twice. If this was the only price they paid for what happened to him and me, then it was a real bargain. They just did not know it. It had all happened in the comfort of the home that I was now in. I politely listened to them and even gave sympathy with a determination to make this work, and naively believed that this would blow over, and if given time we could all be happy campers again, forgetting that we never were. My delusions ran deep, very deep.

The day was long and by the time it was over, I had a handle on who these people were.

Anthony and Brian fawned over Dillie for she was clearly the matriarch, She was elected to this lofty position long since by the wealth she represented, and the money used as bait to keep these well trained seals in place. Over the coming months I get to know my half brothers well and their story did gain real sympathy with me, though I now knew our boundaries for they had painted the line. A few wild nights drenched in alcohol can loosen the most closed mouths. especially if they believe you are family.

Our mother left them in a boy's home in London as infants, one after the other and less than a year after their births. Father or fathers were unknown. This children's home had money but were not spending much of it, but they learned to speak posh and go hungry most of the time. Mother would sometimes visit with Dillie a couple of times a year. This was the best of it and they quickly learned to sing for their treats from Dillie. Each of them had no visible means of support with both pretending they were going through college, which was through the front door and out the back in the same hour. Brian was supposed to be studying history, while Anthony was supposed to be studying law even though he was quite busy breaking it. I liked Anthony.

He was easy to like and both of us had a lot in common. When we hung out together he was always great fun. There were many women in his life and he was usually a kept man by all of them, and if they were not giving him enough, he would move on. He also ran a cottage industry of stolen credit cards given to him by a friend who managed an upmarket hostel. He was a rogue but to me a lovable one. Alongside of that he was athletic, articulate, generous, and loved books and movies. Brian was an opposite and everything Anthony was not, an un - talented 'Mr. Ripley.' Brian depended on his brother, looked up to him and wished he was him.

Though he spoke posh and was book smart too, he could not carry it further. Mousy, slight of build and still un - interesting, he needed carrying and Anthony carried him as far as he could. He was spoilt by expectation and somehow was alway's able to get his way. Tissy tantrums laden with guilt was how he usually got it.

Dillie was the cash cow they milked as best they could and there was a lot of milk. After inheriting first the parents home in Roscommon, she then married money but it came with a husband. She tried hard to have a child but remained childless and gave her maternal love instead to a cat she called fluffy. Both had well paid jobs and money was someone else's problem. The torment of no children turned her against her husband where separate bedroom became the norm after too many years trying, and much more changed with it. She could not understand her life, and like my mother, had no point of reference.

Their parents had a loveless marriage, and their being here at all was the product of little more than a mechanical driven human action. Dillie had watched her year old baby brother die screaming from burns from a vat of scalding water over a two day period when she was a teenage girl. Though it was an accident, she watched him being buried with little more ceremony than of the death of a farm animal as if the baby was an accident himself.

Dillie was deep, very deep and had suffered much with my mother, and covered most of it in silence. In time I became more understanding of her. My mother slept with many men looking for love while Dillie would sooner bury them given the chance. A story of un-requited love in her youth from a man from her town that had promised to come back to her but never did, cemented her hate for them. She would have been happier if her nephews more dresses and I believed Brian sometimes did. More often than not she thought she was the puppeteer but was really the puppet depending who was pulling the strings, and Anthony and Brian were the best I had ever seen at this particular game. I was an outsider looking in and it suited me best that way and I could not break down this wall. I also represented trouble to a small fortune that these two scallywags believed to be coming their way. It would prove to be a long wait.

On an evening in November of 1975, in London, I went to visit my mother at her latest address. I felt maybe I might have been a bit harsh with her the first time around, and recognizing soon afterwards she was a little off. What I did not know was that it was a homeless women's hostel housed in a huge depressing old workhouse. The Victorian ages screamed from its walls as rows of beds lay before me, each separated by tattered hanging curtains acting as a thin veil of privacy afforded each woman from the other. Voices bounced off tiled walls and tired floors where old and young women converged. Some stood around lost in thought while some lay in their beds, dribbling in saliva with vacant stares. Most of the women wore drab and old clothing, uniformed only by their poverty. A people set adrift in a "Promised Land." Their eyes were without hope or dignity, left only with a distant and uncertain memory.

For me, at age nineteen, this was only the third time in my life to have met my mother and been aware of it, and it was a hell of a fright to find her in this place.

She had been chatting away to an elderly lady just as I came in and both were fighting to get a word in edgeways. Looking at them I felt they had a lot in common, listening to them I knew they had. This old dear once may have been titled but had since fallen from grace and was living on aristocratic musings of days gone by and little else. As I watched her talking to my mother, she reminded me of the song, Like a Rolling Stone, by Bob Dylan. "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose; You're invisible now..." Her face still showed evidence of a long since faded youth and beauty. Neither of them now had "secrets to conceal." This lady still spoke in a clipped posh accent and still carried herself with a certain refinement and a touch of class. I wondered to myself as to what treachery or greed was acted upon to have put the old lady in this waiting room for judgement day. A faint sparkle of life came to my mother's eyes when she saw me before her. She tugged at the old lady's sleeve and said excitedly, "This is my son, Barry." She dropped the sentence proudly. "He is a policeman," she added, beaming from ear to ear. I just nodded pleasantly at the old lady. M y mother was happy in her fantasy world; the fact that she was happy at all; mattered. In the coming weeks I got to be a doctor and the odd occasion I even turned up as myself. At times it was a make believe world for me too, trying to play happy families to a mother who never knew me and never shown she wanted to unless she needed something.

I studied my mother intensely then, perhaps in judgement. She was fifty-six years old in an eighty-something year old body that lay shapeless under the weight of ill-fitting clothes. Her hair hung limp, grey and lifeless, and her teeth had long since lost their colour.

All of her features were set in a pale and sickly face. Often she grimaced in agony caused either by bitter regret, arthritis, or other messages of pain racking her body. A rasping cough racked her chest every now and then and from it came a droning voice that was used to being ignored, which I was now doing too. Mechanically, I was able to answer in all the right places, but I was not at peace. Was she ever aware of the suffering she had caused by abandoning her children and betraying her maternal instinct? A question I never asked her, for I knew she did not have the answer.

In those moments, I forgave my mother, if there was anything to forgive.

Understanding had replaced anger and only a great and constant pity lay with me. The realities of her life past and present with all its pain had long ceased mattering to her. She found solace in her make-believe world, and as her present state and surroundings would seem to indicate otherwise, I was happy for her. Shortly after this meeting, my father decided he would come and see me. It did not go well.

The Saturday he was due to arrive I had asked Paddy and his friend to vanish for the day. They happily obliged. I worked a half day in order to be home early for my father and bought a few eggs and sausages that would be the culinary delights of the dinner I had planned for him. As I rounded the corner to the apartment, I met my father lying down on the pavement outside it with a flow of urine trailing from his pants. His humiliation exposed to all on the street and known only to them for he was completely unaware of it, or had long since stopped caring. His genie in a bottle called red wine hung out of a pocket in his old coat where his hand cradled it in case someone might take it. Most of the people on the street were watching their children who were playing up and down footpaths with some even jumping over my fathers pee as if in a game. My anger hit hard and I hit him harder, not even sure was this man doing this just to embarrass me for I simply could not understand how far anyone could go down in themselves or care so little about others. Children looked on and shocked as I ran up the steps to my apartment. I lay in my bedroom still fuming and after a few minutes I went back down and hit him again. Everyone scattered and he was left there alone.

I went back up to the apartment and stayed there doing nothing while not trusting myself anymore. Several hours later he rose from the dead, not knowing where the blood came from that ran from his mouth and limped off into the slowly approaching darkness. Several weeks later we would do it all over again with a different outcome, and it would turn out to be the closest we would ever become because of it.

Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, my father understood what might have happened the last time he had come to visit, and what he did not understand, I told him. Guilt had consumed the both of us and we had set up another family dinner date because of it, and I even got some beer in a desperate bid to make this work somehow. I need not have worried.

There is an old song written by Kris Kristoferson, called Sunday 'Morning Coming Down' and best sung by Johnny Cash with no disrespect to Kris. Some of the more poignant lyrics tell of a homeless man remembering glimpses of a life he once had, but now was repeating a daily grind of hopelessness, Sunday itself always bringing it home to him. On this particular one my father looked everything in that song with his combed hair and cleanest dirty shirt, and I knew then that he carried every emotion of those lyrics too for the other fifty one Sundays of every year before, and the ones yet to come.

My father put on the best performance of his life that day being polite, courteous, gregarious and very funny, while refusing the beer I offered. It might have been the nearest thing to who he really was too and became a watershed for us both. I never called him daddy and he never called me son for neither of us had earned that right, but what was gone before us was now understood. We neither kissed or hugged or even shook hands and the greatest words that passed between us were those that we did not speak for they had become the unspeakable, joined to memories that for the both of us were too hard to bear or hear about. A line was drawn in the sand and as it should be for to be repetitive in the same old memory makes less sense than a mouse running on a treadmill.

My mother and father were now real to me and the itch was at last scratched and their lives was best left to them for I was too young to be their parents. What made it easier in a less painful sort of way was that they seemed almost blameless to me for they were more victims of who they were rather than what they had become. There was no rewards for their actions and could never be, and with them, they carried a distinct absence of malice. They were more to be pitied than hated and the latter came a lot harder to me, and in the end did not come at all.

Several months after that they moved in with each other again, despite more break ups behind them than get togethers, I would visit them sparingly to spare myself the pain of watching their sad existence. They had moved into the fifteenth floor of a graffiti scrawled tower block where the smell of urine in the elevators that never worked told you were close to what they now called their address. This was an area so bad that crime was almost accepted as a social past time and rodents had to set up a democracy to share their spoils for so much garbage had collected in this wasteland that anarchy threatened their very existence.

Michael, my brother, only ever met them that one time, now over a year ago, and never wanted to meet them again, and the feeling was mutual. His reason was hatred and theirs was fear, and that was alright with me. I saw less and less of him over the coming months as he began to develop a deeper paranoia over Sammy that he might come and get him, when the paranoia itself was the real enemy. The stress of it all got to get him and in the end we stopped seeing each other altogether for he thought now that I was against him, but not before we had one last fun outing together to see another former inmate of an industrial prison who was now a patient of a mental hospital. His name was Eamon.

Eamon had no relations to speak of, or that he had ever found out about. He could only communicate with other people from Industrial prisons, a common denominator with many of them, and was now at the mercy of kindness for he was a voluntary patient here. We were to meet him at the front gate of the hospital.

There was a sentry in battle dress on duty at the gate. This was a hint that this place was different. He stood about six feet tall, was bluey black in the shade, wore a german world war two helmet on his head, brown combat boots on his legs, and a british army trenchcoat with nothing on underneath. What hung in the wind as the coat flapped around looked dangerous as his smile that told you with no words at all to, 'fuck off'. He then narrowed his eyes, jutted out his chin and gave a nazi salute. Eamon walked around him as if he was not there and led us through. Entering the building, we had to get an elevator manned by one gentleman wearing a nice suit, trimmed beard, a trilby hat, and sweating profusely. My suspicious face made Eamon explain that the man had been a psychiatrist who had a mental breakdown and now was the self appointed elevator man of this place. He elevator man did this everyday, seven days a week, and the only words he spoke was to ask, "what floor". It happened to be the fifth one, and when I stepped out a man came charging in my direction. I quickly stepped into a defensive position but he just kept coming........... and coming. As he passed he touched me on the shoulder and shouted, "tag", and kept running.

Relieved he had put some distance between us, I started walking through the corridors of the floor, relaxing as I strolled along and started to notice the most amazing paintings and woodcarvings that adorned the walls,along with some marble mosaics lovingly created by the hands of the inmates here. All of the artistry was of animals in their natural splendour relaxed in wild beautiful settings and none were of humans. It made me understand that these patients would have been of the most sensitive kind, and it was those non- visible humans in their art that was part of the reason that they ended up here at all. When I left a couple of hours later I felt really humbled by these lost souls and hoped they would find their way back, while not quite knowing from where or even sure it was a good idea. Though I never saw Eamon again my thoughts are sometimes with him too, and if he is reading this, I wish you the best and hope you made some kind of life for yourself. It does take all sorts to make a world.  ALL SORTS If there was any more excitement, I wanted none, and boredom was a definite luxury that I only dreamt about. As always it found me again. In the transient world of building sites, characters come and go, sometimes leaving a trail of there being here not easily forgotten.

One of them worked along side me on site in New Cross. He was from Belfast, Northern Ireland and carried the anger that came with it for being reared in the west of that great city.

His name was Billy. We were both the same age at twenty years old and about the only thing we had in common. His frustrations was shown in the hyperness that carried himself, and his favourite song was an Elvis one called, 'Rag To Ritches' which gave the hint of his ambitions when he decided to rob the boss that we both worked for.

On friday, pay day, I was working with Billy as usual, rubbing shoulders beside him in a trench with the contractors two brothers about one hundred feet away, also bricklayers. We faced the front gate of the site and where the boss usually pulled up with with a bagful of cash for our wages. In his friday tradition, the boss would put on a display of power by slowly counting cash into various envelopes as he straddled the seat of his car and the footpath, enjoying any drooling audience that might be watching. This day, he got the wrong audience.

Billy had not given a hint of what he was going to do as he was always hyper.

As agile as a cat, he jumped out of the trench, crossed the few hundred yards in seconds that separated him from the boss, knocked him cold in less time than that, grabbed the bag of cash, and hot footed it down a side street. The brothers still were not sure as to what happened to their sibling as they ran to help him who was still stretched and straddling the open door of the car minus his ego and our money, save for a few notes on the ground. That evening, the brothers returned with more cash to pay us our wages for sympathy ran short around here for these two loud mouthed bullies knew they would join their brother in hospital if they did not pay up. I never found out what happened to Billy after that or ever saw him again, and every time I hear that Elvis song, I do think of him and wonder did he go from 'Rags To Riches' or a one way ticket to prison.

The building sites offered hard work and the money was good, and new faces came around often. What was a constant was the danger of these places that too often ignored safety rules. One day on another site, I fell from loose scaffolding about twenty feet of the ground and landed in a pit of earth being prepared for concrete, tons of it. As I tried to get on my feet being helped by the resident drunk who actually worked here and who was now shouting to all around that he had saved me, from what I did not know, I suddenly felt a boot on my chest pressing me back down. It was the foreman telling me to "stay the fuck where you are".

"Why" I muttered groggily "So you can sue the bastards" I was more concerned that I was still alive and got to my feet. By the time I reached the front gate with the help of a few workmates, an ambulance was waiting for me. At the hospital they found a hairline fracture to my head and offered a sick note with a load of pills that would keep me out of work for months. I Threw them and the note in a bin on the way out and went back to the site to get a lift home from a friend. What I saw there made me realize just how lucky I was. In the spot where I had fallen, there now stood hundreds of steel rods bolt upright and rigid, sticking out of the ground waiting for the concrete that would pour over them in the morning. If these rods had been in the ground earlier in the day, I would have been literally speared to death many times. I was so happy to be alive after seeing that, and I was back to work the next day and not looking for any compensation. At twenty years old it was all about the living and death only happened to others. A month later on a different site, I would change my mind about that and appreciate what compensation was all about and what friends are for.

This new site was in Lewisham and I got on well with all the other fellows as usual. One man stood out for all the wrong reasons. His name was Harry and in his early fifties who suffered from a bad heart shown in the rings around his eyes and the daily breath that he fought for. He battled on in a kind of panic, stressing about his wife and still young children, and was often inconsolable as to what might happen to them if something happened to him. He could not get life insurance for they did not think he had much of a life left. It was as if he knew too that the end was near and he was right, and I was not too far away at the other end of this big site when it ended.

Two floors from the ground, Harry passed out on the scaffold among his friends, having laid the last brick he was ever going to lay. The last beat of his heart passed too when his pulse died. Solemnly, his friends did the only thing they could do. They pulled a scaffold safety bar from its position and rolled Harry out through the opening. As he fell two floors down, a loose pallet of bricks was pushed off as well and followed with him thudding on to a body already dead. His death was eventually ruled an accident and months later his family did quite well out of it, and for me it meant, 'no greater love can one man give another than cover up his natural death and make it look like an accident'.

On another site, I was wishing another man had one. This was the ganger or foreman of an Irish navvy gang who ruled men that did back breaking work nine hours a day, seven days a week. This man, short in stature, wearing black wellingtons that carried the look of nazi jack boots, and sporting a Hitler moustache that bridged thin lips which smoked cigarettes through a long filter, looked what he was. A lick arse capo that only became human when he slept in a drunken stupor, unable to hurt anybody. When he awoke, dressing carefully for the desired look of his hero, Mein Fuhrer, he sowed misery during working hours among the men under his supervision. This man was never far from my sight and I hated him for the idiot that he was and the man he was not. He crawled and clawed for approval from his boss, another thick who was just as maniacal as himself, and these navvy men suffered because of it. One day, one of the workers collapsed from deep fatigue in a trench on a saturday morning after spooning one too many shovels of earth. It seemed like it would be his last one.

The man was hauled off on a gurney, worn out dazed and confused and I am sure terrified that his job left with him on the stretcher. The diging went on uninterrupted as if this man had not been there at all or his service of ten years in sweat meant anything more than a line on a profit margin sheet. Men dared not look up in case they could be fired by little Hitler too for their reasoning was ring fenced by their fears. Unable to break out of tradition or stand up to a man much smaller than them in every way, they kept digging. A couple of weeks passed when the man who had collapsed returned, begging for his job from Adolf. For his part, he relished the man begging while admonishing him for getting sick in the first place and gave him his position back as if he done him the greatest favour in the world.

Maybe he did for most of us were only a couple of days from stone broke anyway, and the only collateral we carried around was the change in our pockets. But I knew an evil head when I saw one, and would not have cared if Adolf was dropped as a baby or someone stole his mars bar when he was two years old. This or whatever other meally mouthed excuse he would have tried to give on his death bed would have cut no ice with me. It was one job I was glad about when it was over for my sleep had been interrupted too much with fantasies of killing him. That was always one of my problems, trying to sort out other peoples, fretting and worrying about theirs as if I did not have enough of them to carry around. That was the problem, me, and it was more who I was rather than where I came from, an impracticable make up of my ancestry. One night it came very close to having me murdered.

My friend, Paddy, almost became the man that carried it out. Drink never sat well with him and became the devil on his shoulder. It did not sit well with his sometimes girlfriend either. Her name was Karen. She was very pretty, sultry and italian looking and carried the passion and fire of one too. She never backed down from him and one day paid a terrible price for it, landing herself in hospital, beaten beyond recognition even to me. This was love that was not only blind, it was obsessive, and drinking had become their infidelity.

Still, they could not get enough of each other, even after that beating the stage was set for things to get worse. I was naked in bed when it did and all hell broke loose in the next room after another night of their drinking.

. Paddy was a heat seeking range finder as he dragged Karen into my room, looking to add me to his murderous rage. He was encouraged by an early spat between us that remained unfinished and where I did not back down, and thankfully it went no further. Now it seemed he intended to finish it to - night, offering an open invitation to test my mettle as he began punching Karen in front of me after he had already head butted her. She was cowering on her knees still firing back with the only weapons she had, words. This one sided affair gave me just enough time to put my clothes on.

I roared at Paddy, "why don't you take on a man instead"? "Where the fuck is he", he roared back, letting go of Karen's hair. The battle was on.

Fifty pounds and four inches in height separated us and it was all on his side. His style was to throw punches from above in a head hunting manner. To compensate, mine was to throw from below when the head was not easily found. I was under Paddy as most of his punches landed on my back and went for his manhood, the physical part anyway, and punched rapid fire. His shrill cry of agony came just before the fall, and I did not stop there, kicking and stomping him as he tried to crawl under the bed for refuge. Then I went to comfort Karen and held her in my arms while forgetting about Paddy, and was not too bothered either when he ran out of the room. I should have been. He came back with the glint of steel, a carving knife in his hand aiming to do what it said on the tin. For the next few seconds he slashed at me from an invisible line, afraid to cross it in case he would lose the advantage. His gamble was in the thrusting of the knife and that was my only chance, a tiny sliver of light that might turn things around. When he came again, I hit his nose hard while drop kicking on his manhood again. Air came from his mouth like a deflated balloon, curling up like some giant road kill clutching his balls while groaning softly. If it was sympathy he was looking for he was at the wrong address. Blood trickled my arms and face reminding not to make the same mistake again bringing with it a new energy that drove home my missiles of hurt to this animal. The police mercifully arrived to save one of us from a marble slab and the other from putting him there.

As they tried to piece together what happened, a lot got lost in the telling with Paddy still nursing his privates, a fat lip, and now carrying a very different story. He was blaming me for everything and said that I attacked him with the knife. The police pretty much did not give a flying fuck. As far as they were concerned it was just 'two thick paddy's fighting with one 'Irish bitch' in the mix, and unless one of us were dead, it was no big deal.

They took notes and nothing else while advising one of us to leave the premises in case any more trouble started, and if there was they would arrest all of us for disorderly conduct. They conveniently forgot about the trouble marked in blood all around them.

Leaving a bloodied piece of humbled pie behind me, I left with Karen to stay at her friends house, a girl, who lived at the other side of London. Before the break of dawn, Karen broke too. Leaving in a taxi to return to the man who had beaten her black and blue and almost knocked out my lights permanently. Oscar Wilde was close when asked about love, considering it 'no more than a misunderstanding between two people'. While Ann thought she had found it, I stayed with the girl still looking for it.

I never did go back to stay under the same roof as Paddy again. I was sure he would try to kill me given the chance, and sleeping under the same roof would have given it to him. I stayed with the girl instead. Carving out a life of domestic bliss and not worrying who was stealing the toilet paper or the ham meant for the sandwiches, life became a little settled.

Michael rarely came to visit. I sometimes saw my father and mother, but that was rare enough too, but Brian and Anthony turned up now and again to see me, only I did not know why for we were never that close. It turns out out I would soon find out for they had an offer where the only winner would be them.

I believed both were joking when they asked me to have Dillie and Mark killed. If they had any morals about it did not show. They rightly presumed I knew a few unsavory characters and wrongly presumed I would ask one of them to have our aunt or anybody else bumped off. Over that first pint of Guinness I still thought they were joking, by the fifth Guinness, I knew they were not. I quickly let these budding business men know that they had picked the wrong man for the job and the conversation was never brought up again. I never was completely sure after that had they been joking and would never find out. But it showed me what I was dealing with all the more and to what length they would go in the pursuit of money, which to them came just before happiness. Still, Anthony was my favorite and one evening we decided to go on a male bonding session to do just that, bond. It all went just a little too far.

That evening his company was easy as it always was. I liked his sophistication, that turn of phrase of his, that intensity he carried when dissecting a movie or book, which fitted with my nature. Anthony was honest that night in the few times that he could be and the dark horse had just gotten a few shades lighter. There was little compliments about Dillie, our aunt who had and still was bank rolling him and Brian. It was a case of either 'eaten bread is soon forgotten' or something deeper. That deepness I feel was a feeling of betrayal by the two of them that Dillie should have done a lot more for 'them' over the years. A confusion made all the more by the fact our mother had so little and she had so much, a resentment born out of nothing more than twisted jealousy. Anthony reminded me too that his loyalty was to his brother, Brian, telling me that I was stronger than him and would do okay. It was just that his brother needed more help. He was his brothers keeper and I understood this and and was glad he said it. His honesty carried a certain bluntness that I admired and there was no hard feelings, and how could there be to a man that could charm the birds out of the trees and the ones that wore dresses too. There was an awful lot of forgiving in me for someone that could make me laugh and I laughed hard till I cried that night with the stories that we swapped back and forth. For that little time together he truly was the brother I never had.

Happy banter and pints flowed with abandon and by closing time we were both royally drunk, and I was the driver of the night. Back then, drinking and driving hardly raised an eyebrow unless a pile of bodies littered the highway. I pushed the car into gear and lurched forward, trying to keep my eye on the white line in the middle of the road which kept moving about. A little distance now behind us, we spotted a chip shop and pulled over to line our stomachs for the night. Vinegar and chips later, I was sitting in the car when I noticed an alarm sounding in an electronics store across the road. Leaving Anthony in the car I went over for a look to see what this was all about. The front door of the shop had been kicked in and as I entered with tentative steps, there was little evidence to say that anybody had been there at all. With no real damage done save for a splintered door and no one around, I walked back out, got in the car and told Anthony what I found. True to form, he said, "Well, what are you doing here, go back in side and get something" Well, he seemed to be in charge for I did exactly what he said. In the next few minutes I carried two armfuls of electronic goods out of the store and threw them into the back of the car not giving enough credit to a man only feet away in a phone booth phoning somebody and looking quite bothered by my actions. That somebody was the police it would soon turn out, and took them about ten minutes to catch up with us about a mile down the road. By then, on Anthony's orders we had dumped the loot in a back garden of an abandoned house. Had it been left to me we would have been busted for I wanted it left at my house for I was still very much a novice at this game. In seconds we were surrounded by cops, drooling german shepherds, and plain clothes policemen that looked like gangsters. I was taken aback but Anthony was 'cool hand luke' in the making. The car doors were locked and as the police were trying to wrestle them open, Anthony was taking time to wipe his glasses. Then he spoke slowly with a lot of weight in each word.

"Barry, now listen to me." He need not have worried for I was listening intently.

"We came into the shop and there was nobody there. We only went in to see was anybody hurt and nothing else. Then we drove away and do not know any more." I nodded in firm agreement. As the police had us spread eagled against the car, we caught a break. I could hear over the police radio that the witness was not going to come forward to identify us, his good citizen bit ended with the one phone call and was offering nothing more. Anthony had heard it too. Then we were handcuffed and hauled off to jail.

When we got there, Anthony moved quickly. Using the full power of his charm he got the police to talk about themselves, finding key areas to work and exploit, like birth, marriages, death, and sport. Then it was a simple matter of tea and sympathy, or break out the champagne in whatever zone they were in. Through to the wee hours of the morning, they could not get enough of him even though we both gave up nothing, His performance was pure symmetry. As daylight filtered through, we were let go without being charged but the story did not end there.

Before I turned in to bed I saw two policemen outside on the street poking around at my car. They did not see me. For the next several days I saw more than a few policemen tailing me. My paranoia was more than a state of mind when one of them in a patrol car got confused and almost ran into me. I was more amused than anything else but still had that growing ache to find out what happened to the loot. Anthony was really studying law and begged me to forget the whole thing and be grateful that we got away so far. But that itch too had to be scratched, and scratch it I did.

I told a fellow bricklayer my plight and he volunteered his services to help. The plan was not too complicated. I just left my car at the site and when work finished, I got a lift from him intending to stop off at the abandoned house to pick up the lost property on the way home. This time there was no cops about, and if they were then they had a long night ahead of them looking at a parked car in front of a building site. When we got to the old house, the lost property must have been found by someone else for it was not there. In the end it was just a case of thieves robbing thieves.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY After all of that, I was already in love with my girlfriend as only a twenty year old can and proposed marriage after all those months of living in sin. She accepted. In june of 1977 we got married at a church in Dulwich.

My father had been invited to the wedding but got drunk somewhere and never made it. Brian did but Anthony did not for he could not get enough of the latest woman he had. My mother showed up looking almost radiant for one who had suffered so much and Dillie was missing in action because she knew that Michael might be there. He was, but wished he was not for there was too many people about for his taste. Then there was the in -laws and the usual tribe at any wedding. My future looked promising and was as happy as any new bridegroom with my new wife. Everyone had a great time and three weeks later on a saturday morning I was to have the surprise of my life that even topped the wedding.

It seemed a bit coincidental that morning when more than a few people showed up to hang out with me that day, but I was asleep at the wheel. Brian and Anthony called me to meet me at a pub somewhere to talk about something of no importance and a workmate showed up too to talk about a side job. Several hours later we went back to my apartment to get a quick bite to eat before going out again. I ran up the stairs only to be met by another episode from 'this is your life'. Everybody in or on the fringes of it seemed to be there in this one place, even a couple of inmates from the prison gave a surprise visit. In the middle of the room spread on a table was a cake with twenty one candles on it. The absolute shock of it all showed on my face and the party was on. Michael was there, and my father and mother showed up if only for a few minutes, though they stayed out on the street so as not to see my brother. An effort was made by all from in- laws to the outlaws and any in between to organize this. It was such a special moment to know that all these people took the time and trouble to make this happen for me that it almost reduced me to tears, and brought with it a feeling I had at last arrived.

This was my life for better or worse for all that went before and all that was to come, and so far what a life that had been with twenty one candles that littered a cake to tell me that I had come through it all. It was also there to remind me that I was somebody, just like everybody else.

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