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Burgess. They could be good craic, but you wouldn’t want to kiss one. With boys, the higher your parallels, the harder you were. My big brother’s parallels were always higher than mine. Of course, you had to be very careful. If your trouser legs went above your knees, then they just became shorts and that meant you were a fruit.
    The wee hood’s hair looked like his ma had cut it. He looked like he couldn’t afford to get it feathered in His n’ Hers beside the graveyard. He was spottier than anyone in my class in school. He had even more spots than Frankie Jones in French who played the drums, liked heavy-metal music and hid dirty magazines in his schoolbag.
    My assailant had a bizarre speech impediment. In all of his brief communications with me, he started every sentence with the word ‘f**kin’ ’. It was supposed to sound hard, but it just sounded peculiar:
    â€˜F**kin’ wee lad, have you any money on ye?’
    â€˜F**kin’ you there, who do you think yer looking at?’
    â€˜F**kin’ when do you collect the f**kin’ money here?’
    He was seriously interfering with the execution of my professional duties. So I slipped through a hole in the Coopers’ fence. All the Coopers had blonde hair and a turn in their eye, but their granda was brilliant at bowls and they got the Weekly News and a TV Times . I jumped over a few red-brick walls, landing uncomfortably on a bootful of loose change, and eventually arrived at my own back door.
    â€˜Dad, there’s a robber!’ I said breathlessly as I burst into the house, kicking off my boots and launching a fleet of coins across the sitting-room shag pile. My father had just changed out of his dirty blue foundry overalls into his new beige trousers from the Club Book.
    â€˜Right!’ he barked angrily. ‘Where is the wee bastard? Show me!’
    I knew he meant business when he stubbed out his cigar in the seashell ashtray from Millisle. He had given up chain-smoking cigarettes because they gave you cancer. Now he chain-smoked Hamlet cigars instead. The living room was just as smoky, but I preferred the smell. Daddy particularly enjoyed smoking a Hamlet cigar, while sipping a black coffee and sucking cherry menthol Tunes as he watched a documentary on BBC 2. ‘Your father’s a very clever man,’ my mother would say. I think she was referring to the documentaries.
    Dad went upstairs straight away and took out the large wooden pickaxe handle from under his bed. This had appeared under my parents’ bed when the Troubles started. I think it was meant to be our family’s protection against a rumoured IRA invasion of our estate. The Provos seemed somewhat better equipped, so I had worked out an escape plan to hide in the roof space when they attacked. I had devised the exact same plan should there ever be a Dalek invasion, because I knew they wouldn’t be able to use the stepladders.
    Within seconds, we were in our red Ford Escort respray on the trail of the wee hood. I was now more shaken by the commissioning of the pickaxe handle than by the robber. I didn’t regard my father as a violent man. Yes, he gave me a few hidings with the strap for my cheek, but he wasn’t a fighter and he scorned the paramilitaries. ‘No son of mine will be getting involved with any of those paramilitary gabshites!’ he would pronounce regularly.
    We drove around the estate a few times, searching for the robber. I got a surge of excitement with the realisation that the predator in parallels had now become the prey. My father would grab the wee hood, bring him back to our house and phone the police. The police would bring him home to his wee two-up, two-down. His Da would give him a good hiding and he would never attempt to rob a paperboy again.
    But what happened next shocked me. I spotted the robber at the top of another paperboy’s street. I pointed him out. My father abruptly stopped