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Late summer in Cedar Vale had a dampness that didn’t commit itself to rain until the very last second. It hung over the gravel and the grass in a grey shine, gathered on caravan steps, darkened the hems of tracksuit bottoms, and made every loose bit of metal around the site smell faintly of rust. Children ran through it anyway, as children did, chasing a football that had gone bald on one side and soft in the stitching. It clipped stones, skidded through weeds, bounced off a wheelie bin, and sent three smaller boys after it with the ferocious seriousness of a county final. Women called from doorways without getting up. A kettle shrieked somewhere. A dog barked once, was told to shut up by three different voices, and then barked again because he’d clearly been raised with democratic principles.
Kat Ward sat on the step of her cousin’s caravan with one foot planted on the ground and the other hooked against the metal edge beneath her, a battered car manual open across her knees. The manual had oil-smudged corners, pages softened from use, and diagrams so dense they looked to some people like drawings of organs. Kat liked them for exactly that reason. Machines had insides that admitted to being insides. A belt was a belt. A pulley was a pulley. If something didn’t turn, there was a reason for it. If something shrieked, slipped, seized, or failed, you could look closely enough and eventually find where pressure had gathered. People were much less decent about their workings.
She had a biro tucked behind one ear and a streak of grease under one thumbnail though she’d only been in Limerick a handful of weeks. That had already become one of the things people noticed about her. She could look half-starved, tired, uncertain of where to stand, and still somehow have the hands of someone who knew what she was doing. The older women had not quite decided whether to fuss over her or leave her be. Some did both, which was the most dangerous kind of affection because it came with food and questions. Kat had learned to accept the food and dodge the questions when she could. Sixteen was old enough to leave Middlesbrough and young enough to feel the leaving in her stomach when no one was watching.
She read a paragraph about timing belts three times without absorbing all of it because the site was still new to her ears. The sound of Cedar Vale had its own pattern. It wasn’t quieter than the places she’d known, but the noise moved differently. It had Limerick in it, family in it, road life in it, women’s voices moving between irritation and care without needing to declare the difference. Kat still carried Middlesbrough in her vowels, in the way she tightened her shoulders when called from behind, in the little pause before she answered someone whose friendliness she hadn’t yet measured. She was Traveller by blood and bone and habit, and yet newly arrived enough that children watched her as if she were a cousin produced from a drawer no one had opened before.
Darragh was one of the watchers. He was seven, maybe nearer eight if anyone counted by confidence rather than years, small and serious with knees gone grey from the ground and hair flattened in a cowlick that resisted all adult effort. He had been circling for several minutes under the pretence of chasing the football. Kat saw him without looking up properly. She saw his shadow cross the manual once, then retreat. She saw him lean sideways to inspect the diagram upside down. She saw him hesitate because he was curious but not rude. That counted in his favour.
Eventually he came close enough that she could smell grass and damp wool off him, and he stood with both hands tucked into the front pocket of his hoodie, rocking on his heels. Kat kept one finger on the line she’d been reading and looked up with the slow patience she reserved for children, animals, and engines that had at least tried before giving out.
“What’s tha’ wantin’, wee man?” she asked, her voice low and roughened around the edges, Middlesbrough still sitting under the Traveller lilt like old paint under new.
Darragh looked at the manual first, perhaps hoping the question might ask itself if he stared hard enough. “Is tha’ a car book?”
“Aye. Sort of. Engine book, like.”
“D’you know all them bits?”
“Not all. Enough to know when summat’s pretendin’ to be more complicated than it is.”
He frowned, because that sounded wise but not immediately useful. “Can ye fix vans?”
“Some vans. Depends how dead they are.”
“My uncle says no van’s dead if there’s a Traveller near it.”
Kat’s mouth twitched. “Your uncle sounds like a man who says things after other people’ve done the hard part.”
Darragh considered that and seemed to store it away, perhaps not understanding it fully but recognising the shape of an adult truth. Then he shifted his feet and looked toward the other children before looking back at her, his courage gathering itself. “Why don’t ye have the blue flag?”
Kat blinked once. The question arrived so cleanly that for a second she thought she had misheard. “The what?”
“The blue flag,” Darragh said, with the faint impatience children had when adults failed at obvious matters. “The one from England. With all the lines on it.”
Kat’s gaze moved from his face to the damp site, to the bit of tricolour ribbon tied to a nearby aerial, to a plastic bag snagged against a low fence, blue letters flapping in the wind as if mocking the whole conversation. Then she understood. The Union Jack. In Darragh’s mind, England came with that flag the way Limerick came with green, the way a match came with colours, the way a child came with a mammy shouting after him to mind himself. He hadn’t asked it with malice. That made the question more delicate, not less.
She let the manual rest open across her knees and nudged a loose stone with the toe of her boot. “Blue flag, is it?”
“Aye,” he said, pleased she’d caught up. “You’re from England, aren’t ye?”
“Born there,” Kat said.
“So why no blue flag?”
Kat exhaled through her nose, not quite a laugh. She was sixteen and tired in ways she’d no intention of explaining to a child. She had left England with her belly tight and her fists tighter, carrying a change of clothes, old anger, a relative’s address, and the belief that if she stayed where she was, the life ahead would close around her like a bad lock. She had not come to Limerick to become a lesson in flags for small boys with grass stains on their knees. Yet the question deserved an answer because it had been asked honestly, and Kat had been hurt too often by adults who treated honest questions as insolence.
“See this?” she said, turning the manual toward him a little and tapping a diagram with her grease-dark nail. “That’s an engine there. Looks like one thing, yeah?”
Darragh leaned closer. “Looks like a mess.”
“It is a mess, if ye don’t know what you’re lookin’ at. But it’s not one thing, not really. There’s bits from all over in a motor. Some made one place, some made another, some changed out, some kept, some old, some new. Then some fella sticks one badge on the front and says that’s what it is.”
Darragh stared at the diagram with enormous concentration, his brows pulling together. “So the blue flag’s like a badge?”
“Kind of,” Kat said, careful, because she could feel history crowding behind the simple words and she didn’t want to let it fall on him. “It’s a badge for a big arrangement across the water. England, Scotland, Wales, the north, all them names people stick together and pull apart and argue over. They call it Britain, or the United Kingdom, dependin’ what they’re talkin’ about. But a badge on the front doesn’t tell ye everythin’ about what’s under the bonnet.”
Darragh’s eyes widened a little. “Countries can be under a bonnet?”
Kat gave him a quick, surprised smile. “No, clever clogs. I’m sayin’ people are messier than flags. Places too.”
“Oh.”
He looked mildly disappointed that no country was hidden under a bonnet. Kat turned the manual back, but didn’t return to reading. The air around them seemed to have quietened, though it hadn’t really. The football still bounced and skidded. Someone still shouted for a child called Niall to stop tormenting his sister. A woman laughed somewhere with a sharpness that carried.
“I was born in England,” Kat said, keeping her voice even. “That’s true. Middlesbrough. Can’t rub that out, and I wouldn’t be needin’ to. But me people are Irish Travellers. Me family, me blood, how I was raised, all that. So I can be born one place and belong in another way too. The blue flag doesn’t explain me.”
Darragh put that through the workings of his mind. “But does it not have England in it?”
“It has England in it.”
“So if England’s in it and you’re from England, would ye not have to like it?”
Kat shook her head, gently rather than sharply. “No. Ye don’t have to hate a thing to know it isn’t yours.”
He looked at her then, properly, and she saw the exact moment the answer touched seriousness without becoming fully understandable. Children were like that. They could feel depth before they could swim it. His mouth opened, shut, opened again. “Would ye get in trouble for not havin’ it?”
A different girl might have laughed too hard, turned it into a joke, or snapped that nobody told her what to do. Kat only moved her finger along the spine of the manual, feeling the cracked paper under her skin. “Not that kind of trouble.”
“What kind?”
“The kind where people think they know ye before ye open your mouth.”
Darragh nodded as if that made sense because in some smaller way it did. Children knew being misread by adults. Traveller children knew it earlier and more deeply than most. Still, his mind went back to the colour because colour was easier than belonging. “But blue’s nice.”
“Blue’s grand,” Kat said. “So’s green. So’s red, if it’s not on a warnin’ light.”
He leaned nearer again, the flag matter temporarily losing ground to machinery. “What’s that bit there?”
Kat glanced where he was pointing. “Fan belt. Well, near enough for you. See, if that goes, other things stop workin’. One little thing can make a whole motor act like it’s cursed.”
“Can ye fix it?”
“If I’ve got the right belt.”
“What if ye haven’t?”
“Then ye find one close enough, or ye wait, or ye swear at it till somebody brings ye tea.”
Darragh laughed at that, delighted by the permission of it, and Kat’s smile came easier the second time. She shifted the manual fully onto one knee and angled it so he could see. She showed him the difference between the belt and the pulley, between the picture and the thing itself, between a line on paper and a part that had to hold under pressure. He asked questions with increasing confidence. Could a van explode if the belt broke? Could an engine fall out? Could he fix a motorbike if someone gave him one? Did Kat know how to start a car with wires like lads did in films? Kat answered with a mixture of truth, evasion, and caution. Yes, no, depends, don’t be touchin’ wires, and if he repeated anything about hotwiring she’d deny it before God and every auntie on the site.
By the time his name was shouted from across the gravel, he’d forgotten to be solemn. He straightened up with the proud importance of a boy who had been allowed near knowledge and trusted not to swallow it wrong. “So you’re English-born but not blue-flag,” he said, testing the phrase.
Kat considered it. “That’ll do for now.”
“And engines aren’t just badges.”
“That’ll do even better.”
He grinned, then ran backward two steps before turning properly. “I’ll tell Mikey.”
“Don’t tell Mikey about the wires,” Kat called after him.
“I won’t,” Darragh shouted, in the exact tone of a child who would absolutely tell Mikey about the wires if the conversation became dull enough.
Kat watched him run back toward the others, his small body cutting across the damp grass, his shoes flashing dark at the soles. He reached the football crowd and immediately began talking with his hands, pointing once toward her, once toward the manual, then making a circular motion that might have been an engine or a country under a bonnet. The other children looked over. Kat lowered her eyes before any of them could catch her watching.
The manual had blurred slightly, not from tears, nothing as dramatic as that, but because the question had settled in the wrong place under her ribs. English-born. Irish-Traveller. Middlesbrough behind her. Limerick around her. The blue flag nowhere near her hands. She didn’t hate England in the simple way children might understand. Hating a place that had shaped your mouth, your weather sense, your first memories, your escape route, and your worst years took more energy than she had spare. She didn’t need to hate it. She just needed it not to own her.
Someone shouted for tea, and another voice answered that they could make it themselves if their legs hadn’t fallen off. The football hit the bin again. Kat turned the page in the manual and found the timing-belt section. The diagram steadied her. Lines, wheels, pressure, sequence. If a thing was fitted wrong, it failed. If it was forced into a system that didn’t suit it, it wore down faster. That was not politics. That was mechanics. She leaned over the page, put the biro back between her teeth, and read until the ache became quieter than the engine in her head.
Four days later, the weather had improved only in the sense that the rain had stopped pretending to be uncertain. It had fallen hard before noon, cleared sulkily by mid-afternoon, and left Cedar Vale gleaming under a low white sky. Puddles sat in the wheel ruts. Wet washing hung stubbornly because women had decided the day would dry whether the day agreed or not. Somewhere nearby, a radio played from inside a caravan, turned low enough that the song came through as rhythm more than melody. Dogs had taken the rain as a personal insult and were now making their feelings known to anyone passing within ten feet.
Sinead Joyce was outside beside a low shed, one knee braced against the side of a reluctant terrier while she worked a brush through a knot behind his ear. She was fourteen, though she carried fourteen like a temporary clerical error. Her hair was scraped back hard enough to pull at the corners of her eyes, her hoodie sleeves were pushed to the elbow, and her expression suggested she’d been born halfway through deciding whether the world was worth the bother. She had Newcastle in her voice still, broad vowels and a quick upward music tangled now with the faster Traveller speech of Cedar Vale. A year on the site had not worn England out of her. It had only taught the old sound new routes.
She had a lit cigarette between two fingers, held awkwardly away from the dog’s coat. It wasn’t elegant smoking. It was a girl imitating adult women, already too practised at some things and still young enough to look guilty if caught by the wrong person. She took one drag, made a face as if the cigarette had personally disappointed her, and returned to brushing with grim authority.
“Stand still, ye hairy little eejit,” she muttered to the terrier. “I’m not after murderin’ ye. I’m after savin’ ye from lookin’ like a wet sweeping brush with notions.”
The terrier twisted his head and looked at her with deep accusation. A second dog, a black-and-white mutt with one ear permanently folded wrong, circled her ankles and sneezed at the smell of smoke. Sinead gave him a look. “Don’t you start. You’ve rolled in worse and called it a hobby.”
She heard the child before he spoke. Small shoes in wet gravel. Hesitation. A breath drawn in too seriously. She turned her head and saw Darragh approaching with the same expression he’d worn before asking Kat questions, only now sharpened by the confidence of a boy conducting an investigation. Sinead’s fingers tightened around the cigarette. In one swift movement she bent, pressed the lit end against a damp patch of earth, and pinched the ember dead with the sort of speed that made concealment more obvious than confession.
The black-and-white dog watched her do it and then looked at Darragh, as if preparing to testify.
Sinead narrowed her eyes at the dog. “Not a word out of you.”
Darragh stopped just short of the shed. “I didn’t say nothin’.”
“I wasn’t talkin’ to you, was I?”
He looked at the dog, then back at her. “Were ye talkin’ to Patch?”
“Patch knows what he’s done.”
Patch wagged his tail, which did not help his case. The terrier under the brush used Sinead’s distraction to attempt escape, but she caught him with one hand around his middle and pulled him gently back into place. Her hands were firm and careful, even when her mouth was dry as old smoke.
“What’re ye wantin’, Darragh?” she asked. “If you’re here to tell me that dog belongs to your uncle and your uncle says he likes the matted look, your uncle can come brush him himself and lose three fingers for the privilege.”
Darragh smiled, encouraged. “No. I’m askin’ somethin’.”
“God help us all.”
“Why don’t you have the blue flag either?”
Sinead understood faster than Kat had. She had been expecting something, though not exactly that. Darragh had clearly been carrying the question around like a stone in his pocket, taking it out now and then to see if it had changed shape. Kat must have given him one answer. Now he wanted another, because children trusted the world more when separate adults made it line up.
“The blue flag,” Sinead repeated, drawing the brush through the terrier’s coat with slow deliberation.
“The England one.”
“The England one, is it?”
“With the red and white on it too,” Darragh added, perhaps worried she was picturing a fully blue square and would therefore answer wrong.
Sinead glanced down at the dog, then at the grass, then at the bit of tricolour bunting drooping from a nearby window where someone had left it after a match or a birthday or a row about decoration no one had bothered finishing. Her face remained serious for one beat too long. Then she said, “Because I prefer green, don’t I?”
Darragh blinked. “Just ’cause green?”
“Aye. Sensible colour. Grass is green. Shamrocks are green. Good apples are green if ye don’t mind a sour gob on ye. That collar there’s green and Patch hasn’t been arrested yet.”
Patch wagged again at the mention of his name.
“The flag isn’t all blue,” Darragh said, trying to protect accuracy now that he knew he possessed some.
“Enough blue to cause bother,” Sinead said. “Too much blue in the air and the rain’ll think it’s been invited. We’ve enough wet in Limerick without hangin’ out a welcome sign for it.”
Darragh laughed, partly because Sinead had said it with such solemn authority that it sounded almost like weather knowledge. The laugh pleased her, though she hid it by pulling another knot from the terrier with exaggerated focus. She didn’t want the child frightened away from the question. A laugh could make a hard thing easier to carry. Her mam had known that. Most Traveller women she knew had known it, even when the laugh came through exhaustion, grief, hunger, or fury. Laughter didn’t soften truth. It gave truth somewhere to stand.
“But Kat said it’s ’cause badges don’t tell ye what’s under the bonnet,” Darragh said.
Sinead looked up sharply enough to make him worry he’d betrayed a confidence, but her face changed before fear could settle. “She did, did she?”
“Aye.”
“That sounds like Kat. She’d explain a baptism through a carburettor if ye left her long enough.”
“What’s a carburettor?”
“Ask Kat. I’m not takin’ her work off her.”
“Is she right?”
Sinead sat back on her heels, keeping one hand on the terrier’s side. The dog had given up resisting and now stood in long-suffering martyrdom, his eyes fixed on nothing. “Aye. She’s right enough.”
“So why don’t ye have it?”
“The blue flag?”
“Yeah.”
Sinead wiped the brush against her thigh, leaving a faint trail of loose hair on the dark fabric. She was fourteen and still new enough that questions like this found bruises. She had arrived at Cedar Vale with two bin bags and a face set against pity, carrying Newcastle in every word, carrying her mother’s decision, her father’s absence, and the strange fear of being kin and outsider at once. The site had begun to accept her because she worked, turned up, minded children, brushed dogs, and didn’t ask to be made special. She had not charmed her way in. She had earned her footing inch by inch. And now a seven-year-old was asking why the state named on her birth papers did not fly out of her like a ribbon.
She could have made another joke. She nearly did. Instead she looked at Darragh and softened only by making the truth small enough for his hands.
“Listen here,” she said. “See Patch?”
Patch, hearing his name again, sat down in a puddle.
Sinead closed her eyes briefly. “Patch, ye ruin me in public, so ye do.”
Darragh giggled.
“Right,” Sinead continued, deciding the puddle was now part of the lesson because life gave examples whether they behaved or not. “Patch there, he was born out by Ennis, wasn’t he? Then your auntie had him a while. Then your lot took him. Now he answers to Patch, Gobshite, Come Here, and Leave That Alone, dependin’ who’s shoutin’. Is he only one thing?”
“He’s Patch.”
“He’s Patch to you. He’s probably a menace to half the women here. He’s a good dog when he remembers God is watchin’. He’s from Ennis, but he belongs where his bowl is and who minds him. Bein’ born in a place matters, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, does it?”
Darragh looked at Patch with renewed interest. Patch began licking rainwater from the ground, which lowered the dignity of the example but did not destroy it.
“I was born in Newcastle,” Sinead said. “That’s England. I know that. I’m not after pretendin’ I popped out behind a hedge in Moyross with a rosary in one hand and tayto in the other.”
Darragh laughed so hard he had to put a hand over his mouth.
“But I’m Irish-Traveller,” she continued, and now the humour stayed in her voice but the line beneath it went straight. “That’s me people. That’s me mam’s side and me family and the road that brought me here. That’s the women who’ll feed ye and skin ye in the same breath if ye’re actin’ the fool. That’s the stories, the dead, the livin’, the way we know each other. British doesn’t fit me. It’s a word other people can wear if they like, but it’s not mine.”
Darragh stopped laughing. He studied her with that same look he’d given Kat, the look of a child standing near seriousness and trying not to step on it. “But if ye’re from England, are ye not British?”
Sinead’s mouth twisted, not cruelly. “On paper, maybe some fella in an office might say so. Fellas in offices say all sorts when they’ve got chairs under them and no one’s asked them to use sense. But paper’s not always the boss of a body.”
“School says it is sometimes.”
“Aye, well, school says plenty. Did school tell ye Patch has four names and still won’t come when called?”
“No.”
“There you are then. Incomplete education.”
He grinned again, relieved by the joke but still holding the question. “Do ye hate the blue flag?”
Sinead thought about that. The easy answer would have been yes, and she was old enough to feel the pull of easy answers. The Union Jack had travelled through too many histories, too many doorways, too many uniforms and assumptions, for her to treat it like a harmless bit of cloth. Yet Darragh wasn’t asking as a man with a flagpole. He was asking as a child who thought colour explained origin. She would not hand him hatred just because it was nearby.
“I don’t need to hate it,” she said. “I just don’t need it over me head.”
He looked upward as if imagining the flag physically hovering there.
Sinead followed his gaze and nodded gravely. “Exactly. I’d be duckin’ all day.”
Darragh laughed again. “You would not.”
“I would. And it’d clash with everythin’. Me hoodie, the grass, the dogs, me whole face. Some women can carry blue. I’m not sayin’ they can’t. But me, I’d look like I’d lost a fight with a school uniform.”
“Kat didn’t say anythin’ about clashin’.”
“Kat’s kinder than me.”
“She’s nice.”
“She is,” Sinead said, and there was no joke in that. “Kat’s very nice.”
“She talks quiet.”
“Aye, because she’s got thoughts lined up proper before she lets them out. I’ve only got the one thought at a time and it comes out fightin’ for its life.”
Darragh smiled, but he was still watching her. “Are ye angry I asked?”
Sinead’s hand slowed on the brush. For a second she saw herself from outside: a fourteen-year-old with a dead cigarette hidden badly in the mud, a dog between her knees, a child looking up at her as if she already belonged to the category of older girls who could wound him with a careless word. She was not soft by instinct. She knew that about herself. But she had no desire to make children pay for asking their way through the world.
“No,” she said. “You asked proper. There’s no harm in that.”
“Some people get cross.”
“Some questions come with a shove behind them. Yours didn’t.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means ye weren’t askin’ to make me small. Ye were askin’ because your head wouldn’t leave ye alone.”
“My head does that.”
“Mine too,” Sinead said. “Terrible tenant, the head. Never pays rent.”
Darragh seemed delighted by that and looked down at Patch, who was now chewing thoughtfully at nothing. The terrier sneezed. Sinead resumed brushing, her fingers gentle around the knot she was easing apart. The conversation had done what conversations sometimes did: opened something too large, shown its edge, and then covered it again with ordinary work. Darragh crouched to stroke Patch’s wet head, and Sinead looked away long enough for the question to land where she’d been keeping it from landing.
Being born under a state’s paperwork was not the same as being held by it. She did not have those words yet, not cleanly, not in the adult way she might one day use them when cameras and strangers and officials all wanted her to explain dignity in a language they approved of. At fourteen, she only knew the feeling. Newcastle was real. Her first streets were real. The shape of her vowels was real. But Britishness felt like a coat someone kept trying to throw over her shoulders without asking if it fit, and Sinead had already spent too much of her life dodging hands that assumed they had the right.
Cedar Vale was not easy belonging. She knew that too. She was still watched sometimes as the one from England, still teased for the way certain words came out, still measured by older girls who had been here longer and didn’t mind letting her feel it. But the place held her in ways that mattered. It demanded work and gave recognition slowly. It let her earn trust without pretending the earning was sentimental. It gave her dogs to brush, children to mind, aunties to answer to, women whose humour could flay a man alive and then feed a hungry girl without comment. It was not the whole answer to who she was. Nothing was. But it was closer to truth than any blue flag had ever been.
Darragh stroked Patch with both hands, flattening the dog’s ears. “If I tell Mikey, what do I say?”
Sinead came back to herself and gave him a look. “About what?”
“You. And the flag.”
“Tell Mikey to mind his business.”
Darragh’s face fell slightly.
She sighed. “No, don’t look at me like that. Tell him Kat knows about engines and flags are complicated.”
“And you like green.”
“Aye. And I like green.”
“And British doesn’t fit ye.”
Sinead watched him carefully. “You can say that if ye say it decent.”
“I will.”
“And don’t be goin’ round tellin’ everyone I was smokin’.”
“I didn’t see.”
“Good lad.”
“I smelled it.”
“Then your nose is a liar and I’ll pray for it.”
Darragh burst out laughing, loud enough that Patch startled and the terrier tried again to escape. Sinead caught the terrier with one arm and made a sound of long-suffering outrage, but she was smiling now, properly if briefly, bright and crooked in a way that made her look younger than she liked.
A woman called from a doorway, asking what Darragh was doing bothering Sinead. Darragh stood up at once with the thrilled urgency of a child who had news. “She says she likes green,” he shouted back, reducing the whole tender, difficult structure of identity into the one part that could survive the journey across the site.
Sinead rolled her eyes so hard it became theatre. “That’s me whole soul flattened into a crayon.”
“What?” Darragh asked.
“Nothin’. Go on with ye.”
He ran off, splashing through a shallow puddle and nearly colliding with another child before regaining his balance. “Sinead likes green!” he announced to no one in particular, as if this were community information of great urgency. “And Patch is from Ennis but he’s still Patch!”
“That dog’s never been to Ennis in his life,” someone called.
Sinead looked down at Patch. Patch looked back without shame. “Have ye not?” she said quietly. “Well, you should’ve corrected me, ye fraud.”
Patch wagged his tail.
The terrier gave another impatient twitch under the brush, as if the political matter had gone on far too long and his personal grooming had suffered. Sinead resumed work with exaggerated dignity, drawing the brush through the softened coat, picking out knots, smoothing what could be smoothed. Her fingers moved carefully. Her mouth stayed amused. The dead cigarette lay forgotten in the damp earth until she reached automatically for it, remembered Darragh was still within sight, and stopped herself with a grimace.
The dog sneezed again.
“Aye,” she muttered, low enough that only the dogs heard. “I know. Green’s still the better answer.”
Across the site, Darragh had already folded Kat’s engines and Sinead’s colours into a version no adult would fully recognise. By evening, Mikey would know that Kat didn’t need the blue flag because vans had secrets, and Sinead didn’t need it because it clashed with dogs. By the following week the question would lose its urgency, replaced by a fight over football, a broken scooter, a missing packet of biscuits, a rumour that someone’s cousin had seen a rat the size of a cat near the bins. But somewhere in the boy’s head, below the noise, a small thing would remain: that people could carry more than one place; that a flag could be too small for a life; that an honest question might touch hurt and still be answered kindly.
Kat’s answer would stay in the shape of a machine, steady and precise, all parts and labels and hidden histories under one badge. Sinead’s would stay in the shape of a joke, green against blue, a dog with too many names, a girl refusing a coat that had never fit her. Neither answer would be complete. Complete answers rarely belonged to childhood. But both would be true enough to live with, and in Cedar Vale, true enough was often the beginning of wisdom.