The butcher boy door Patrick McCabe

Francis Brady is a young boy living with his parents in a small Irish town. His best friend is Joe Purcell. His great hero is his uncle Alo who lives who lives in London and has ten men under him. With the arrival of the kind of snobby Nugent family in town the trouble starts. Mrs. Nugent calls the Brady family a family of pigs (The word ‘pig’ becomes an obsession to Francie) and her son, Phillip, ‘steals’ Joe from Francie. The marriage of Francie’s parents appears to be bad, and while Francie runs away (to Dublin) because his Uncle Alo vanished after a row with his father (Alo came over for Christmas), his mother commits suicide. Francie thinks it’s his fault. His father goes all numb and the house becomes a mess. (His father suffered from a complex – he spent his childhood in an orphanage) The obsession for PIG, the guilt he feels for his mother’s death and maybe the jealousy at the Nugent family slowly makes him mad. One day he breaks into the house of the Nugents, half-hallucinating, and he is put into a corrective school. The school is lead by priests. He doesn’t care about the other pupils. He starts a paedophilic relationship with Father Tiddly, who thinks Francie is able to see holy men, in change for candy. When Tiddly asks him about his home he attacks him. Then Francie is released, in the hope he will not tell everyone about Tiddly. When he is back in town, it’s not the same between him and Joe, but he doesn’t realise that. As he doesn’t go to school anymore and his father doesn’t work anymore, he starts working for the local butcher, Leddy. He also starts drinking. He turns madder and madder. One day he is taken away from his house by concerned village-people. The reason for that is the death of his father, which he hadn’t noticed. He is put in a hospital where doctors give them a chemical treatment. When he comes back home he finds that his house is cleaned by Mrs. Connelly. He doesn’t appreciate her help though and threatens her. He manages to fake he is mentally healthy again, but there is still the obsession for Joe and Mrs. Nugent. Meanwhile he visits the boarding house (Over the Waves) where his parents spent their honeymoon. His father had told that everyone there admired his parents, but he hears from the owner that his father was drunk all the time and insulted a priest. Joe is at a boarding school now, with Philip, and when Francie visits this school in the middle of the night Joe says they are no friends. Now Francie is really mad at Mrs. Nugent, because he blames her for losing Joe and making him turn his back on his mother. He breaks into her house, shoots her with the gun the butcher uses for killing animals (pigs), cuts her open and writes ‘Pigs’ all over the walls of the room with her blood. He hides her body in the slaughterhouse. Of course he is suspected of the murder and arrested. He doesn’t want to tell where the body is. He manages to escape and hides in the hideout he and Joe made when they were boys. The policemen didn’t find him and he goes back to his house where he makes a huge bonfire. The police catch him again and this time he brings them to the slaughterhouse. He is sentenced to treatment in a mental institute for the rest of his life.