I wasn’t the type of person that could even consider writing letters to the children, or baring my soul to my husband like they do on shows like Love Island. It’s so intense, that level of public declaration, intense and crazy. I loves ya, babes. Hun babes, I so do and I’m the luckiest girl alive to have found you here in this house with all the cameras and the dorms and all that, and hun babes, loves ya. Besties. Yeah. 4eva and eva.

Fuck that.

The longer we were together, the harder it had become to gush promises. A gathering resentment perhaps, or cynicism, exhaustion or protection? Never say for ever. It’s very risky in any case, that kind of self-exposure. I can share my life story with a woman on a train journey but I can’t repeat it to my mother. Even looking Alex in the eye had gotten quite difficult. I can’t quite remember when this began, this oddity I feel when I look into his eyes. But to be frank, I had begun avoiding eye contact with people for some time now, long before Magpie.

We were ‘strictly’ curtailed to two visitors at Visiting Hours, until half past nine, and the most excitement I could hope for on the Ward was Margaret Rose’s stay opposite me. Her visitors passed no heed on the poorly laminated Visitor Instructions sellotaped to the wall, and she enthusiastically encouraged the passing-of-no-heed. She had oddly olive skin, Mediterranean, and a substantially thick bob of platinum hair. The hollow rattle of her chest was not her main complaint. One eye dropped until it rested on the sharp edge of a prominent cheekbone and her forehead skin on that side was taut and unreactive, like a Phantom of the Opera mask. She spoke out of the side of her mouth in a raspy whisper. A blessed sacrament of Our Lord and the Most Blessed Virgin Mary and the ebony rosary beads hung like large caviar eggs on a frayed leather cord beside her head frame when not in use. A large charcoal Dell laptop sat on her meal table. Every night after her visitors, Margaret Rose watched the computer’s screen until dawn, mostly photos of her family, playing hypnotically, large neon love hearts bursting out here and there. She spoke gently, in a curiously cautious manner, especially when speaking about herself or her children.

It was luring to watch her hold court and for now, the wedding of Jonathan O’Keefe with her daughter Niquita Sherlock required her full attention, as she ran the day and night of her family from the Hospital bed, simultaneously attempting to smoke out her husband, Paddy.

Margaret Rose Sherlock, finally, had had enough.

First the young men came. Early evening. Jovial, good-natured, full of energy, and energy drinks, pasty arms outstretched, limbs loosely held away from the body, bright colourful sports tops, baseball caps perched up on their heads, sometimes sitting like young giddy children moving up and down on a see-saw. Sitting or standing, they were constantly moving, while their feet remained rigid to the same spot like that giraffe toy where you squeezed the base and the animal’s legs buckled in a heap. They were awkward but most earnest and over-eager to help, as though their presence on the Ward somehow depended on their behaviour, which it did. And they were inclined towards a deep interest in us all. They were interested as they filled Hegs’s empty water jug, checked out my iPhone screen grab, made faces and sounds wearing my blobfish slippers on their hands, asked about the pictures of my kids, names, ages, interests. They’d take off on several trips to the loo, praying a decade of the rosary with Jane, mumbling prayers, nudged on by their mother but not quite remembering if they were the call or the response.