The hour with the nurse became for Jack a spiritual reprieve. As he spoke to her he fell in love with her. And he knew that this was an old medical cliché, but he didn’t care. He let his love for the nurse wash over him. The nurse told him that she trusted him. Why she said this to him he could not remember. That was when he fell in love with her. And when she was gone, the hairdresser would step in again. Then Jack would begin on her story. Word for word. From her birth in Ballyhooley on Clare Island until the moment she was apprenticed to a hairdresser in Sligo town. That was when the trouble began. Then would come the dark gaps, the single words, the silences. Silences to questions you ask yourself. He would sit pen in hand as the nurse had sat before him. And the hairdresser, brimful of love, would look away from him. And after the hairdresser left, Bohola would walk in, direct him to a clean sheet and recall his days in Finsbury Park in London, “It being somewhere near autumn and me having emerged from a locked ward in the north of England. Have you got that?” he’d ask Jack. “Me and London town. The Paddy in London in February of ’62. Me down at Beachy Head in Eastbourne. Have you got that? I like to hear it ring along like Shakespeare,” said Bohola.

As Rita the nurse listened to his confession, he had a great urge to put his arms round her. She said: “It must be a struggle for you to say these things.”

“Because you are here it makes it easier,” he told her.

“Is there self-pity in it?” he asked. She said not. He knew there was, but didn’t care. He thought Rita looked very beautiful. For a while they’d sit together saying nothing. Across from him she smelt very human. They’d start again.

“You have to live with evil. It will not go away. It will steal your energy. It must be faced. It’s serious,” the hairdresser said. “It’s a serious business. Let no one tell you otherwise.”