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of his hair, it invariably puffed up into a big, frizzy ball within seconds of encountering precipitation. He was afraid of looking undignified by running, so by the time he reached his flat twenty minutes later, he could have doubled for Ronald McDonald. He had to wash his hair. As luck would have it, it was his night for doing a deep-conditioning treatment anyway. Even as Fintan was giving one last rueful look up and down the road, Lorcan was about to wrap a hot pink towel around his head. He rubbed the last of the conditioner into his ends. Because I’m worth it, he told himself smugly, smiling into the imaginary camera. Because I’m worth it.

*

Fintan went back in.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ Tara sobbed. ‘I’m just finding it a bit hard at the moment. What with Thomas and my birthday and being a fat cow and the awful day at the seaside and my indelible lipstick not being indelible! But everything will be OK when I’ve lost a bit of weight and knitted Thomas the jumper… I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ Fintan shushed her.

‘Of course you don’t,’ Sandro comforted.

‘Not with us,’ Katherine assured her.

‘We’re your friends!’ they said in unison.

14

While Tara and Katherine had been best pals since their first week at school, Fintan was a relative newcomer to the friendship. They hadn’t bonded until they were both fourteen and he was fifteen. Of course, they knew him: it was a small town and you knew almost everything about your neighbours. Especially because Fintan had always been ‘different’ from the other boys. His kindness to his mother, his dreadful hand-to-eye co-ordination and his lack of enthusiasm for pulling the legs off frogs were testament to that.

But it wasn’t until 1981 when he discovered the New Romantics that Fintan’s ‘specialness’ got out of hand altogether. (The New Romantic phase had arrived in the rest of the civilized world some time previously but Knockavoy was in a different time zone, about six to nine months behind.) Suddenly he was parading the two streets of Knockavoy draped in shiny yellow fabric. (Even then he was calling material ‘fabric’, a sure sign that a career in fashion awaited him.) He wore a silk headband around his asymmetrical bob, purple lipstick and earrings that he’d made himself by stealing feathers from his brother’s fishing kit, and dying them red and blue.

‘Fintan O’Grady’s had his ears pierced!’ The rumour spread from house to house like wildfire. There hadn’t been so much excitement since the last time Delia Casey had done something mad. There was great disappointment when it turned out the earrings were only clip-ons.

Despite that, Fintan continued to intrigue the townsfolk. ‘Look at him,’ they muttered from the dim, low-ceilinged interiors of bars, shops and the sub-post office. ‘Strutting up and down like a paycock. And is that JaneAnn O’Grady’s good tablecloth he’s wearing? Jeremiah O’Grady must be twirling in his grave.’

In the normal course of events Fintan could expect to be beaten to a pulp by the other young men of the town. Certainly there was bitter hostility. A couple of corner boys were moved to shout, ‘Ah, yuh maggot, yuh,’ at him, as he floated past in his saffron silkiness. One of them even went so far as to yell, ‘Yuh durthy bindher, yuh.’

But when Fintan replied, ‘Oh, Owen Lyons, you weren’t saying that last Sunday up behind Cronin’s cowhouse. Or you, Michael Kenny,’ the crowd of lads abruptly ceased their accusations. Despite the flurry of panicky denials from Owen Lyons and Michael Kenny – ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, the lying bindher’ – suspicion and fear of each other were cast into their midst.

Fintan had a sharp and scathing tongue. He was tall and well-built. He had four older brothers who were also tall and well-built, and very protective of him. All in all, the lads of the town nervously decided, best to leave him be.

Because he’d chosen the position of outsider, or had it thrust upon him, Fintan had no friends. Which tore lumps of anxiety out of Tara. ‘It’s desperate,’ she told Katherine, as they watched Fintan