She didn't really see this man here, this older man she'd married but had been too young herself, and too unhappy, and too in love – just not with him – to have taken up with him. So he was a piece of dirt and she was in a bad way with being pregnant, with still loving her long-term man and not believing what he'd done to her, disbelieving he wasn't missing her, for he wasn't. All the same, his predatory nature pushed me into frozenness every time.

In those days, in that place, violence was everybody's main gauge for judging those around them and I could see at once he didn't have it, that he didn't come from that perspective. On the plus side, I wasn't physically frightened of him. Always, whenever she'd leave the room, it was a switch turned on inside him.

He never made his comments when my sister was in the room. So he made his remarks and felt entitled to make his remarks and I did not speak because I did not know how to respond to this person. That was a twenty-three years' difference too. He knew I didn't understand them but that I knew enough to grasp they were sexual. He made lewd remarks about me to me from the first moment he met me – about my quainte, my tail, my contry, my box, my jar, my contrariness, my monosyllable – and he used words, words sexual, I did not understand. When I was younger, when I was twelve, when he appeared on my eldest sister's rebound after her long-term boyfriend got dumped for cheating on her, this new man got her pregnant and they got married right away. In his compulsions he made things up about other people's sexlives. I did not like first brother-in-law either. I did not like the milkman and had been frightened and confused by his pursuing and attempting an affair with me.

But I had not been having an affair with the milkman. It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman. I knew his age, not because he got shot and it was given by the media, but because there had been talk before this, for months before the shooting, by these people of the rumour, that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years' difference was disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there were plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, 'knew me to see but not to speak to' and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in- law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man. The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.

Milkman novel book review