‘I reckoned ya need to see the body dead,’ Molly said. ‘It’s no use hilping the living if you weren’t willing to face up to the consequences of them dead. See, I have such respect for the dead.’

Margaret Rose retched as Jane nodded, her head high up and then her chin tipping on her sternum, top of the class for Jane.

‘Washing the body, fixing it. It’s so special. That’s an honour, ya’naw?’

That was all she missed, avocados. When Molly spoke about her parents, she spoke rapidly in the third person. Molly’s mam drinks, ya’naw? Molly’s dad was always very busy, ya’naw? Yeah, sure, she Skyped her parents the odd time, her mother preferred phone calls so she could continue sipping nips of Sullivan’s Cove, her bent over a moonbeam granite worktop, so that after an hour or two on the weather, the Hospital, old school friends, her daily routine, the arrogance of her father, her speech became so slurred that she was perfectly incoherent. The disclosures were embarrassing. So in an effort to balance the awkwardness, or perhaps due to the steroid concoction that made me buzzy, I told Molly and Margaret Rose about the time my grandfather drank a house. It was the first time I’d spoken about it – how he drank it brick by brick until nothing was left save for a child’s rainbow spinning-top on the linoleum when they shut the door on it and a woman that never spoke to him again. Ever. Then, in free fall, he drank away the clod-wet site the house lay on. I understood how this could happen. I also understood that this was something to be both afraid and ashamed of.

‘I’ve never taken ta the air, mind you,’ Margaret Rose interrupted, changing the subject, but I felt she was protecting me, not berating me. ‘Boat’s as far as I could go, ’tis unnatural I always think, something so large in the sky. Drink’s a terrible thing,’ she added, acknowledging me almost as an afterthought, unable to avoid it. ‘Just terrible. Has the country ruined and more countries too. Yar both not alone. Every family’s affected. Does terrible damage, just terrible. They say they canny help it, mind you, but it’s terrible, especially on children.’

It was dusk. The air was lumpy and heavy, and it was hard to get a decent breath in.

Or out.

‘Oh no, hun, I think this is blocked, see if I can flush it through for ya, ’K?’ Molly said, sitting on my bed, as she slapped hard the swollen watery back of my hand. ‘Sorry. Shit. Shit. Sorry.’ She slapped it again as she told us about the day she decided to travel to Ireland. She’d watched a man soak a hunk of pork in a big plastic bucket. He looked Irish, and that was the sign she needed. My mind was on the juicy pork joint, the crackling lid of hide left on top of the muscle, mother telling me to mind my teeth. The bolus flushed through me, fast gushes now, stinging the life out of my hot veins. The cannula was always angry.