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but he caught the side of the plate and said to her in a loud voice: No.
    There was silence in the caravan until his mother forced her lips into half a smile and said that she would practice on her lonesome. She found room on the table by propping the end of the board out over the edge, so it looked like some sort of precipice. She lined the white pieces along the edge of the board, close to her stomach, and the boy was reminded of a biblical story where animals were shoved over the edge of a cliff.
    She reached forward and moved one of the white pawns, then shunted a black pawn upward in the same corridor of squares. She hummed very softly. Soon the pieces were spread out all over the board.
    Check, his mother said to herself.
    The boy poked at his plate and saw the soggy heart of bread that lay there. He moved the lump around in the red sauce with his knife, bored at first, until it began to take shape. He mashed the bread with the tip of the blade and then saw what it could be. His father, a carpenter, had once told him a man could make anything of anything if he wanted to. The boy began to mold the bread quickly. He moved it around the plate with the knife and it soaked up more sauce, took on a definite form. He thought of his uncle in prison: a single cell, the darkness outside, the sound of boots along a metal catwalk, the carving of days into a wall.
    He dropped the knife and began molding with his fingers.
    *   *   *
    IN THE LATE EVENING , when she struggled up from the sofa, he was still awake at the table and he had created a chess piece, a knight. It was stark and red from the tomato sauce it had been dunked into. She pulled up her chair to the table and smiled at him as he lowered his eyes. Holding the shaped bread, she smiled again, put her hand on his shoulder, and told him the knight looked delicious.
    It’s not for eating, Mammy, he said.
    *   *   *
    THE NEXT MORNING , when he waited outside the green phone box near the pierside, he found out for sure. His mother replaced the receiver and opened the door. The hinge squeaked and it sounded like a keen, and when she stepped out her face contained such sadness that she looked like she had been on a journey containing the forecast of her own death.
    He’s on, she said.
    The boy didn’t reply.
    She moved to hug him but he stepped away.
    I’ll not go back, said his mother. They want me back but I’ll not go.
    I’ll go back, the boy said.
    You’ll stay here with me.
    In her voice she was saying: Please.
    He stood silently and watched her scan the beach road. Some forlorn tourists stood with their hands in their pockets. A middle-aged couple hauled deck chairs from the back of their car, placed them with great deliberation on the sand, tightened their coats around themselves. A young girl was being pulled along by an anemic wolfhound. An ice-cream truck upped the volume of its song. His mother appeared to be remembering things from a shapeless past, and in her eyes she couldn’t seem to make sense of how she had gotten here, this town, this street, this patch of seaside outside the phone box. She looked down at her shadow, which pooled at her feet, and she toed at the ground.
    Come on, we’ll go back to the caravan.
    No, said the boy.
    We’ll make a nice cup of tea.
    I don’t want tea.
    Come on back. We’ll dump loads of sugar in it and rot our teeth to hell and sing songs into the evening. Are you on? Let’s go back. Please.
    Will he die, Mammy?
    Of course he won’t, she said.
    How do you know?
    I don’t, she replied softly.
    There’s four already dead, he said.
    Yes, I know.
    The boy stared a moment beyond her shoulder and then bit his lip and walked away and she watched him go, his shirt moiling around him.
    The sea wind blew bitter and she felt it cold at the edges of her eyes and she followed his movement, beyond the pier and up the far hillside, becoming just a small speck of white in the distance.
    The boy wandered in a stupor for an