I remember how I couldn’t and she began to haunt me. Images of the vibrant nail polishes she wore. I woke often in the middle of the night with an ache in my stomach and a feeling that I was hungry but then that feeling would pass and I would lie on the bed beside Jenny and I would clench my hands into fists and I would imagine my mother holding on to my hand as we crossed the road together. Her grip was tight and strong. I started to push her hand away from me when I was ten years old. I wasn’t a little boy any more and she wasn’t to kiss me at the school gates. I suppose it was normal, natural even, but still I felt as though I disappointed her. And I would lie beside Jenny listening to her breathing beside me and what I wouldn’t give now to have another chance to touch my mother’s hand.

The photograph captures wonderfully the stretch of Dog’s Bay and the brightness of the day and Jenny’s face, in between the children. Jenny’s hair – windswept by the Atlantic wind and I can feel the wind. I can almost feel it touching my face but that is not true, it is not the wind but it is my hand and I touch my face and I feel the beginnings of stubble. Perhaps I will allow myself to fully regrow my beard, perhaps I will not.

The children continue to watch the rest of the documentary about the tsunami. Jenny goes to her desk. After a while I go to her to see what she is doing and she is sketching an outline of the sea and I place my hands on the desk. There is a certain roughness to her sketch as she adds an outline of a kite and I hope she isn’t going to add small blobs that are meant to signify young little people on the beach. I hope she’s not contemplating that, not now.

But she does. She uses her brush to signify the little people. Each little person is comprised of two blobs of paint, one vertical blob and a smaller blob placed on top, horizontally like a clumsy cross. I remember her teaching Maeve how to paint people. And I remember that she mentioned potato figures or butterflies, I’m not entirely sure, the crosses were enough to represent people and she told Maeve not to bother with features per se. It was all in the eye and, Jesus what am I doing?