‘I’ve nine fine children. Mind you, they’re all away now. America, Australia, England and I’ve even one in Mexico. Mary didn’t go away though. She was always a good girl, Mary, but I often wished she went too because everyone needs to go. Everyone needs to get away. It would give me great peace if she went away …’ She didn’t finish.

I wondered how a woman could grow nine children and end up here, without a bra or even a clean pair of knickers.

‘D’you know, you’re a lovely girl? That second girl I kissed went away, you know … Did I tell you I could smell St Thérèse of Lisieux. It’s her roses? They’re drifting in off the corridors. I just know he will, he’ll spare you with her help. I know it when I can smell this. It’s the roses, you see. It’s all in the roses.’

She held my fingers in a newborn-baby grip. I closed my eyelids tight, unsure of where to look. I sat, deferential, as though in prayer. But I had no faith. My parents were devout Catholics. Father with Old Spice on his face, at mass on Sundays, not daring to ever sit far up the church or receive the host, a sinning man, but he was proud that he somehow knew this, like all good honest men; this was a good thing, he convinced me. An honest hard-working man that held his wife up by the throat like a raggy doll in our sun-filled kitchen to watch her dance. But that was just temper, everyone needed it. Temper. And sure, couldn’t one repent it? In the end. On the very last day. Judgement.

I had sprayed some of my rose perfume behind my earlobes.

Jane let go of me abruptly, dead-staring at me.

‘Who went away?’ Margaret Rose said.

‘Patrick. Hegarty.’

‘He’s only gone for a scan,’ I said.

‘Ah, good. I know Patrick Hegarty very well,’ she said, ‘and … I know his mother.’ She raised her eyes to heaven and held her hand to her mouth.

Margaret Rose opened her eyes wide. ‘What, ya sure?’

The sheets on Hegs’s bed were tossed. Unmade beds unnerve me. Molly had left without fixing it.

‘Yes, I’m sure, certain that I’d have killed his dirty rotten father.’

Chapter 10

‘I settled on decapitation. Chopping his head off,’ Jane said, her face sweaty.

‘Jane!’ Margaret Rose screamed, and then laughed tentatively.

‘This is no laughing matter, Margaret Rose,’ Jane said, remembering her double-barrel name. ‘First, I’d wash my hands in lavender soap like I do when a cow is calving, cleans them from infection and it’s great for it gets the smell of afterbirth off your hands.’

‘Oh, now, Jane, that’s a dreadful thing ta be saying,’ Margaret Rose said. She lifted herself from the top of the bed to the bottom, and sat there.

‘But you see, you’re not a farming woman. Besides, I have often thought about how,’ Jane went on, ignoring Margaret Rose, ‘but I couldn’t lay my hand on anything that would have done it cleanly, quickly, and to be honest, really, I don’t think I have it in me, to kill a person. Do you think that’s something you’re born with?’