‘Cormac, I was just saying, doesn’t Mammy look peaceful?’

Maggie was standing over him.

He told himself he didn’t need to answer. He couldn’t help himself.

‘I wouldn’t know, Maggie. Does she look peaceful?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I don’t wish to see my mum as a corpse. I don’t wish to have a lasting memory of that, thanks!’

‘But that was Mammy’s wish, to have an open coffin, to have a Catholic burial, to have family around her.’

‘Maggie, please let’s not argue – not now, of all times. Just respect the fact I don’t wish to take part in that part, OK?’

‘Frankly, Cormac, it’s not OK! It’s not OK that you haven’t been home to see her for 22 years. It’s not OK she broke her heart every day for you. It’s not OK you’ve forgotten who you are. It’s not OK you’ve lost your soul. And it’s not OK to call her Mum. She always has been and always will be Mammy, OK?’

He rose to face her.

‘Listen you stupid….’

‘Cormac! Maggie! For Christ’s sake, stop it!’

Cormac turned to see his older brother Tom standing in the hall. He felt his eyes sting. He felt like a little boy again. He took comfort in his brother’s arms.

‘Now then, hotshot, how does it feel to be the talk of the town?’

Tom and Cormac sat at the kitchen table while Annie and Maggie produced endless cups of tea and sandwiches for a multitude of strangers who now seemed to have taken control of the house.

‘Hopefully I’m not.’

‘You’re far too modest, brother. Your arrival has been the talk of this shit-hole since Mum died.’

‘Don’t you mean Mammy, Tom?’

‘Don’t tell me Maggie is already giving you a hard time for selling out to your English ways. Ignore her, she’s grieving.’

‘She just winds me up, Tom.’

‘Listen, Cormac, there are things you don’t know about, things that happened a long time ago and Maggie hasn’t had it easy, just trust me on that and cut her a bit of slack.’

‘What things?’

Tom sighed and patted his shoulder.

‘I’m afraid today, my brother, isn’t the time for such talk, and we must instead bury our mother.’

Maggie arrived in a flurry of plates.

‘Father Mackie is here to say the rosary. Are you two coming into the living room?’

Cormac, who even as a child never understood the Catholic faith, with all of its rules and chanting, was about to have his second fight of the day with Maggie, when his big brother came to the rescue again.

‘Maggie, love, you go on in and me and Cormac will kneel in the hall.’

He mumbled his way through the prayers he hadn’t said for two decades and was astonished that he remembered every word, every pause, and every part of the ritual. He thought back to his childhood, to the many times his father made them kneel in the living room after dinner while they recited the rosary. He contemplated the endless nights he lay in bed and would be sprinkled with holy water when his father thought he was asleep. He cringed at the embarrassment of confession. Of turning from boy to man and telling the red-faced priest every detail. He thought of his mother, fiercely proud of her family and devoted to her Catholic God. The God he wished also to be devoted to. The God he prayed to every night in the small bedroom upstairs. The God that no matter how hard he tried, he’d never really believed in.