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door. Dad is there, bent over Siobhan’s brand-new racer trying to fix the timing on her shimano gears. It’s late, and he’s wheezing and sighing to himself, more tired than ever. There’s sweat on his forehead, and I’m guessing that it takes every bit of strength he has in his bodynot to just collapse over the upturned bike and fall fast asleep on the dirty concrete floor in front of him.
    I pass him and say, really gently, Night night. Straight away he sniffs the air and barks, Have you been boozing?!
    I ignore him and march quickly into the kitchen, right over to the press where Mam keeps the biscuits. Dad follows.
    I’m asking you a question, have you been out boozing like a common tramp?
    Still silent, I bend down, pull out the biscuit tin and shove a handful of jammy dodgers into my mouth, hoping to disguise any booze fumes with the thick wheaty smell of biscuit juice. It’s at this point that I answer. It’s the best excuse I can think of, but it’s totally thick. I say that I’ve been down with Saidhbh Donohue and I’ve been drinking Cidona fizzy apple drink all night. I say this because Dad always says that Cidona smells like booze whenever we drink it, and then he makes jokes about rearing a whole family of underage alkies.
    Either he believes me or he’s just too tired to take it any further, but Dad nods, grunts, and then shuffles with another wheeze and a sigh back out to the garage to fix Siobhan’s bike, like a man going to the gallows.

6
The Last Supper
    It begins with the thum thum thum of
Hooked on Classics
. It’s Dad’s favourite record and it has all the best classical songs ever made squashed together on to one big song that’s got this thum thum thum drumbeat banging through it. And every Sunday, after Mam, Dad, me, Claire and Susan get home from Mass, Dad slaps it on at full volume. Then, usually after about ten minutes, either Sarah or Siobhan, who’ve both been out at Blinkers nightclub in Leopardstown till really late the night before, start banging down on the floor coz their bedroom is right above the sitting room where the stereo lives. Fiona’s also been out at Blinkers, but she never bangs down even though she can hear it too. If things are really bad, sometimes Sarah will come charging down the stairs in the old skanky T-shirt she wears to bed and with Sudocrem all over her forehead and around her chin to stop spots growing. And, like a mad Comanche in warpaint, she’ll stand inside the sitting-room door and demand that Dad turns his
Hooked on Classics
down. She’ll never actually go as far as the stereo, coz she knows that would be breaking the rules, but she’ll stand and holler from the door all the same.
    Dad just sits there, half-reclined on the couch behind his
Sunday Independent
, and grumbles to himself. Says that if theywanted sleep the girls shouldn’t have been out carousing with boys till four in the morning. It’s like the
Hooked on Classics
is his way of getting back at them for being girls. Or for being girls who are messing about with boys.
    Sarah mutters Nazi under her breath and charges back upstairs. Dad doesn’t do anything because he doesn’t mind being called a Nazi because he thinks that in the war they were wrong and they were mad and evil, but the Nazis were respected and that’s all he wants. In fact, he wants respect so much that it’s become one of his trademark jokes – every year we ask him what he wants for his birthday and every year he says, Just a bit of respect. But he says it in a soft, smiley way.
    Mam shouts up after Sarah that it’s time she was getting up anyway and that dinner’s almost ready, and that Sarah is to tell that rip, meaning Fiona, to come down immediately! Sarah snaps back, Jeeeeeesus!
    Sarah and Siobhan have both got Leaving Certs and they do job interviews every week with different firms, but haven’t got anything proper yet, except for some part-time work in Dad’s office. Now that they’re becoming