And there it was all over the Sherlocks, shame. It lay heavy in the middle of my marriage bed every night, shame, and Hegs had a face of it, shame danced slowly all over his sad hands as they lay below his belly button, shame, and Shane couldn’t tell us one way or another, but I felt it by looking at him. Jane was too astray in the head maybe to feel it. But it dropped in and out of her like KerPlunk marbles. You needed to be fully astray in the head not to have it. It was the most contagious thing inside and outside Hospital.

Margaret Rose knew exactly what was ahead of her young daughter as she cradled Niquita’s head into her breasts to muffle her crying.

We were all absolutely silent for some time.

Later as both girls eventually slipped into the night, Michaela leading Niquita out the doors of the Ward, rubbing her hand up and down along her sister’s spine, Margaret Rose called her daughter back for one last question.

‘Niquita, love, come here … just a sec … how late?’ she whispered.

At two a.m., a time reserved for bringing news of the dead, Margaret Rose Sherlock made three phone calls.

I played football as a kid in the large field beside the cowshed, repeatedly kicking the heavy leather sack up and back against the pebbledash. My grandmother would sometimes cycle past on her bicycle, and tell me that football isn’t a game for a girl and neither is the way I ride the ponies astride not sidesaddle. I took no notice of her, but her comments about manners and womanhood lingered. When we go to Dooley’s restaurant on a summer’s evening, I order the Farmhouse salad, to remind me of her. I take the cutlery in my hands, like she showed me, elbows inwards, though this isn’t easy as I have a very broad back, and I usually give up halfway through and lump my elbows up on the table, but I try, for a little while, to be ladylike, like she asked. I notice they don’t pickle the beetroot like she used to, so that they look like jellied fruit delights on my plate. I drink gin, because this is the way of me. Alex drinks tea, because this is the way of him.

After Magpie, I was so tempted to lean into Alex in bed with his tea, and tell him all about it, about being terrified, terminal, but I thought it was a dreadfully selfish thing to do to another person, fill him up with worry and uncertainty, to try and make him figure out death, because that’s a dead end, a spiral, even though it’s always there, inside us all, death, creepy and skulking around. I thought if I waited, that I might have some words of consolation to follow Magpie. So I waited, and waited, as big yellow and white daisies returned their withered heads into the tarmac, ditches that overflowed with beginning again started to hush and by September’s end the green blackberries ripened to a deep purple as wild heathers bloomed.