‘Jays, it’s a bit early for ice cream, no? Oh fuck, shit,’ she wailed out.

‘Oh … ya OK, Mags?’

‘Yeah, grand, just bit me cheek. Shit. Am I bleeding?’

She patted her face and attempted to open her mouth wide, while Jim took a look inside and scrunched up his nose.

‘Jaysus, you’d want to go aisy with that stuff, Mags,’ Jim said, lowering his voice. ‘Yar man said it’s not good the amount yar at it. Ya could hit a nerve,’ he hissed, looking around anxiously.

‘Isn’t that what I’m hoping far?’ she said, laughing with one side of her face paralysed. ‘Ah, don’na start now you, not you as well. I’m delirious with tiredness … and have I any other choice?’ It was a rhetorical question. ‘No. So ’nuff outta ya.’

I liked when she showered first, leaving the bathroom warm and homely. The windowless square box, coated in its rectangular white tiles with a shower that had no border or boundary, only a dark brown drain that ran close to the toilet bowl, so that if you showered for any length of time the entire place flooded, and sometimes the water gushed out under the gap in the door, so much that the bottom of the door was mildewed and warped. There was the obligatory white plastic chair plonked there like a sun-bleached Van Gogh painting and an SOS cord hanging from the ceiling. That people sat to shower in the chair unnerved me. The door also unnerved me for it opened straight out onto the Ward, and there was far too much white ceramic space to comfortably shove your leg up and out to double-lock it, maintain dignity. Though here, thinking about dignity was naive at best.

Jim listened to her hushed instructions as the two of them sat out on the edge of the bed, clearing his throat once or twice after he had finished the cone’s wafer. He plucked a tissue from her elaborate gold tissue box with red flowers dotted all over it, and wiped his large hands. Bits of dry tissue clung on between his fingers, sticking to the ice cream. I pretended sleep. He took instructions on tickets, collecting his brothers, the Maughans, and they would carry Paddy home he said, if they had to, even in a zipped-up bag, and yes, he reassured her that all of her brothers, according to Jim, were most concerned she’d have another stroke, and yes, even the ones not talking to her seemed the most irate about the situation Paddy had left her in, everyone was talking about it, especially after the Facebook post, which they both agreed was utterly humiliating to everyone in the family. And they were all up for righting a terrific wrong, even though there was a car auction in Ennis tomorrow night, but they were more than willing to forgo this and head over and drag Paddy home. For the wedding, and to console his sick wife, like a husband should.