Colm Tóibín

And it's a very long time ago.

It's 1971, and it happened.

And it always struck me, I wonder what happened to that guy.

In other words, that somebody was stealing, things were being stolen from lockers.

I was the one who saw him on the dorm, but I never told anyone.

I didn't think it was any of my business to tell anyone.

But he knew that I knew.

And one day he was gone and his cubicle was empty and everybody said, he's the guy who got caught.

And that's how he got caught.

There was a match on and he had to get some money from wherever he was hiding it so he could go on the bus with all the rest of us.

And two guys started to watch him to see where he was going to get the money from.

Now, I haven't been on that dormitory.

I slept, that was my dormitory, the attic.

And incidentally, I put another character into the story who's out of Nora Webster.

He's her son, Donal, who's also another version of me.

So I have sort of two versions of me as part of the student body.

But I haven't put a thought into that dormitory that I left for years.

But I was stepped in it in 1971.

And so I'm back in my old boarding school, in my old dormitory, with a little story that stayed in my mind forever of something that happened, that a boy got caught stealing.

And my thing is, what happened next?