Free All Names Have Been Changed by Claire Kilroy

me down on the ground. I got ontomy hands and knees. The cat was screaming.
    A kick under the ribs flipped me onto my back. The two of us were face to face then. His head was shaved and leathery, burnished orange by the bonfire. He bent down and took hold of my collar. ‘Filthy bollocks,’ he spat, ‘spying on the kiddies.’
    His knuckles connected with my face, just beneath the eye socket, slamming the back of my head into the stony ground. There was a crunch. The stars floating in my eyes merged with the fireworks in the sky. ‘Please,’ I whispered. A girl was shrieking hysterically, but not for me. The wail of a siren approached.
    The man punched me a second time, with greater force. ‘Here, youse,’ he called over his shoulder. There were more of them. I wrenched out of his grasp and scrambled for the hoarding. ‘Get back here now,’ he commanded me.
    The sirens were almost upon us by then. The children rushed off the building site, and I joined their number. We flowed like rats through the gap in the hoarding. A stolen car screeched sideways around the corner, a garda van with lowered riot shield in close pursuit. Locals were out banging dustbin lids against the pavement. The children dispersed into the back lanes and flats, but three men were chasing after me. There was a loud phht not far from my ear, like a huge cat spitting, then a shower of sparks as the rocket collided with steel security shuttering ahead. A fire engine came hurtling along Gardiner Street, followed by an ambulance, and when next I looked over my shoulder, the three men were gone. I was running down a dark empty road on my own.

9
Amongst Women
    The four, my four, the Square of Pegasus, the Northern Cross, were there ahead of me when I arrived at the workshop the following Wednesday. The furniture had been rearranged, on whose instructions, I never asked. The small individual tables had been pushed together into the centre of the room to form one large desk, around which nine chairs were placed. At the head of this expanse of reticulated tabletop, the bulky desk with the drawers was set. Glynn did not register surprise or even awareness of these modifications when he finally darkened our doorway, twenty-five minutes late. Two of the chairs were still empty. They were to remain empty for the duration of the class, and for the duration of the academic year. Already we were down to six in number: the four girls, myself and your man with the ponytail – Mike.
    Antonia was first to read from her work. She’d written a disconcertingly ambivalent short story about a middle-aged man in the numbing wake of his mother’s death. The man returned after a prolonged absence to his childhood home, which, since he was an only child and his father had passed away some years previously, had now fallen to him. He barely recognised the place, it was all so long ago. The son, unnamed (‘The sonscratched his head …’, ‘The son belched softly …’, ‘The son suddenly realised he was an orphan’), hadn’t been close to his mother during her lifetime, had barely known the woman in fact, but after her death he kept finding dressmakers’ pins around the house. This came as a surprise to him. He hadn’t known that his mother sewed.
    He encountered the first pin sticking out of the armrest of her favourite chair, and as he rolled the narrow metal cylinder contemplatively between thumb and forefinger, it occurred to the son that this unanticipated memento should move him to tears. He hadn’t cried at the news of his mother’s death, or at her funeral. Tears, however, did not come, and the son carried on watching The Late Late.
    Antonia’s prose entertained a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether the pins were intended as a symbol of the mother’s creativity in the female domain, as in the burgeoning North American patchwork-quilt genre, or of her cunningly remonstrative spirit railing against an ungrateful and emotionally inert male; see Carter,