Cushla Lavery and Tommy McGeown

Cushla Lavery and Tommy McGeown are connected first through Cushla’s work as a teacher: Tommy’s younger brother, Davy McGeown, is her pupil. Their relationship develops from that school-based link into direct contact, but remains marked by an imbalance in age and role. Cushla tries to offer support; Tommy both seeks her attention and recognizes the limits of how she sees him.

A Teacher’s First Intervention

Cushla first encounters Tommy when she turns a corner and sees other boys closing in on him. He steps away, but one boy pushes him off the pavement into the road. Cushla slows beside him and opens her car window. The incident brings her into his life through an act of concern, though it does not immediately make her someone he confides in: afterward, Tommy does not tell his mother what happened, and Davy does not mention it either.

Cushla later recognizes that she has failed to protect Davy from a different kind of intimidation. When she visits the family, Tommy imitates a priest’s voice and recalls the taunts directed at him as a boy. As Cushla leaves, she sees him watching from behind the downstairs curtain and understands why he had laughed at her: she had allowed Slattery to frighten Davy with jibes Tommy himself had experienced. Her support for the brothers is therefore not uncomplicated; it includes an awareness that good intentions do not undo the harm she has overlooked.

Contact, Books, and Unequal Expectations

After giving Tommy her phone number, Cushla becomes someone he can contact directly. He records it in a small black notebook and later calls, first checking whether it is all right for him to ring her. Their conversation turns to books, giving them a subject beyond his younger brother’s welfare and school. Tommy asks whether a book Cushla has recommended is really so good, testing her judgment while seeking a more personal exchange.

The attention does not erase the difference in how they understand their connection. Tommy is conscious that Cushla sees him as a teenager, even as he hopes she will notice more than his age. His interest surfaces in the way he watches for her response and in the private account he keeps of their conversations. Cushla, meanwhile, remains in the position of teacher and adult supporter: when she encounters him at the family home, she urges him to stay in school long enough to sit his exams. Her encouragement is practical, but it also shows the limits of the relationship he is trying to deepen.

The Notebook and the Limits of Her Account

After Michael Agnew’s murder, Tommy’s small black notebook becomes evidence that complicates Cushla’s account of their connection. An investigator produces the notebook, which Tommy had kept in his back pocket, and points to his record of their exchanges. Tommy had noted that Cushla spoke with him about books rather than merely asking after his father or offering messages; he also recorded how keenly he watched for her attention and how Mandy’s calling him a child interrupted that moment. In another entry, he describes a phone call on Easter Sunday when Cushla mistook him for Michael. His private notes reveal a young man interpreting ordinary contact as emotionally charged, while recognizing that Cushla sees him as a teenager and does not know everything about him.

Cushla explains that Michael sometimes phoned her in the evenings, and that she had not given him her surname. She denies having a relationship with Tommy, but acknowledges that she had told him she might go out with him because she did not want to hurt his feelings. The notebook thus exposes a gap between the professional, protective connection she describes and the significance Tommy privately gives their contact. It does not establish a relationship between them; instead, it shows how his attention and her efforts to be kind could be understood differently by each of them.

Her defense also returns to the practical circumstances that brought her close to the McGeown family. She says Davy was her seven-year-old pupil and that she tried to help after his father was assaulted. Over Easter, while Betty visited Seamie in hospital, Cushla sat with the children and drove Davy to and from school. When Davy later phoned to report the fire at their home, she drove to the estate and took the family away, but says they stayed with her for only one night. She did not know Tommy had been arrested. These acts of care explain her presence in the family’s crisis without resolving the emotional ambiguity in Tommy’s notebook or making her account of their relationship identical to his.

Care Within the McGeown Family

Cushla’s connection with Tommy is formed inside a family crisis, where care is shared and often practical. When she visits after Seamie McGeown has been attacked, Davy presents the news of his father’s victimization almost like a classroom announcement. Later, Cushla sees the lasting effects of the assault, but Betty McGeown quietly directs her toward the kitchen when watching becomes too much. The moment places Cushla not as the family’s sole rescuer but as a visitor whose wish to help is shaped by the family’s own knowledge and needs.

After the fire at the McGeown home, care again takes the form of immediate tasks. In the kitchen, Gina Lavery prepares sandwiches and tea; Cushla pours orangeade for Davy and Mandy, while Betty recounts how the family escaped the flames and says that police have taken Tommy away. The domestic work continues amid the consequences of violence and arrest. It clarifies the ground of Cushla’s bond with Tommy: her presence arises from sustained concern for his family, even as his private interpretation of their exchanges exceeds the protective role she understands herself to occupy.