‘You have? That’s fine. What are you going to be?’
‘A revolutionary.’
‘I hope I never have to arrest you.’
‘Yu couldna,’ said Pat simply.
‘Why not?’
‘A’ll be good, man,’ said Pat, dipping the spoon again.
‘I’m sure that’s the sense Queen Victoria used the word in,’ Laura said, removing the jam from her son’s possession.
It was for that sort of thing that he had loved her. The odd glinting detachment that shot the texture of her maternalism.
‘I have a fish for you,’ Pat said, scraping the jam to one side of the slice of bread, so that it would, over at least half the surface, achieve the required depth. (What he actually said was: ‘Ah hiv a fush forrya,’ but Pat’s phonetics are no pleasanter to the eye than they are on the ear, and may be left to the imagination.) ‘Under the ledge in the Cuddy Pool. You can have a len’ of my fly, if you like.’
Since Pat possessed a large tin box full of assorted invitations to slaughter, ‘my fly’ in the singular could only mean ‘the fly I have invented’.