Gary Corken

The constable's hand came down on Jim's shoulder at half six in the morning, outside the entry to Marquis Street. Jim had been asleep in the doorway of a chandler's, coat pulled over his face, boots tucked under him so they wouldn't walk in the night.

‘Up,’ the constable said.

Jim was on his feet before the word was finished.

He was a broad man with a reddish moustache and a cape dark with the morning damp. He looked Jim over the way a man looks at a dog he's been told to collect.

‘Name.’

‘Jim Donnelly.’

‘Age.’

‘Nine.’

The constable wrote in a small book and said nothing about parents.

Petty Sessions sat in a low building off Chichester Street. Inside, the benches were the same dark wood as a chapel but without the carved ends. The floor had been polished badly, wax pooled in the grooves between boards.

Jim was put on a bench at the side. The constable sat beside him, cap in his lap.

Jim kept his hands in his pockets and held them still. Around him the room filled and emptied, men in dark suits passing papers to other men in dark suits, and nobody looked at him except once, briefly, a clerk with ink on his fingers who glanced over and then away.

A small man in a dark suit. White hair close to his skull. He set down his papers, adjusted his spectacles, and read something to himself before he looked up.

Two cases before Jim's. A woman fined for disorder. A man whose cart had blocked a public way. Five minutes, both of them.

Then: ‘James Donnelly.’

Jim stood. His legs felt wrong.

The constable read from his book.

Found sleeping in the entry, Marquis Street, at six twenty-two in the morning. No home. No fixed abode. No visible means of subsistence. Both parents deceased. No kin in the parish.

‘Come here, boy.’

Jim came to the front of the dock. The magistrate reached over the bench and pressed two fingers along Jim's jaw, tilting his chin up. The fingers were dry and cold. Jim held still.

‘Open your mouth.’

Jim opened it. The cold fingers, the tipped chin, the whole room watching: heat came up his neck.

The magistrate looked at his teeth and sat back.

‘Nine. Near enough to nine.’

The clerk wrote.

‘Roman Catholic?’

‘Baptised, sir. St Peter's, Chapel Lane. Record from the parish.’ The constable produced a folded paper.

The clerk took it without leaving his stool. The question mattered: Catholic boys went to Catholic schools, Protestant boys elsewhere. The law was particular about that much at least.

The magistrate dipped his pen and signed without looking at Jim again.

‘St Joseph's Industrial School, Enniskillen. Detention until the age of sixteen, for the purpose of industrial training.’

He set the pen down and reached for the next folder.

They held him two nights in a cell at the rear of the building, then put him on a train to Enniskillen with a constable he had not seen before and a length of rope between their wrists.

They sat in a third-class carriage with a coal merchant who slept from the first whistle, cap pulled over his face. The constable was asleep within twenty minutes, the rope loose between their wrists.

Jim did not move.

The city came apart slowly outside the glass: tanneries and linen yards, then red terraces stepping back from the line, then fields and stone walls and the hills going pale and wide. He had never been on a train before. The motion of it was strange, then became ordinary.

He pressed his forehead to the cold glass and watched the fields go past until the light flattened and the carriage filled with the smell of wet earth and, somewhere distant, turf smoke.