The abuse: the late-night ritual, the Da's rationalizing, Micky silent in the cot

pivotal · UNDATED (from Matty's tenth year, ~mid-B.S. 1990s; recurring late nights through boyhood)

• When: UNDATED (beginning "when Matty was ten," recurring through his boyhood; Micky "just five" at the first remembered time)
• What: From the age of ten, Matty was sexually abused by his father, a recurring late-night ritual he recalls in full. The Da would come drunk into the boys' shared room — the crack of hallway light widening, the smell of malt liquor, the weight settling on the edge of the convertible bed — and shake Matty "awake," alternating tenderness and caresses "just over the line" from fatherly affection with an aggrieved, menacing monologue in ethnic-Irish dialect that recast Matty's fear as an insult to the father who "daily broke his back for his family's food." Matty learned early that his visible fear "fueled the thing somehow," yet was "unable not to be afraid." Throughout, five-year-old Micky lay in the cot by the window, face to the wall and hidden, silent. Endnote n278 sharpens the household's other silence — the conspicuous absence of the mother during the late-night abuse.