‘Really? He has more children?’ Margaret Rose said, surprised.

‘Oh, yes. Two. Joan’s in Saudi for years, teaching, and John married a lovely woman from Colorado and they set up a music shop. John loved music but he was tone deaf, I used to have to ask him to mime in the choir, only move your mouth, good boy, John.’

Lucid.

‘Would you like a chocolate?’ Margaret Rose said, and shoved a box shaped like a blue coffin towards us both in turn, rattling around a few red-wrapped ones. A lone orange one held Jane’s attention. She jumped up, reached in and fished it out.

‘No, no, ah sure, I’ll take this orange one, is it a hard one? Oh, wait, Jesus no, no, it is not, it’s soft,’ she said, grimacing and bruising it with her fingers first, then opening it, and placing the cracked chocolate volcano on her tongue to melt like Jesus, the syrup dripping into her throat. Cu. GU. Cu. GU.

‘But who’s Ann? Did they have another daughter?’ Margaret Rose asked.

‘No, no. Ann Hegarty was the most beautiful woman,’ Jane replied.

‘Hegs’s wife?’

‘No, no, no, not his wife at all, his mother!’

‘What?’ I said. ‘You knew his mother?’

‘Of course I do,’ she said and blessed herself. ‘She was born on July fourth, six days before myself and that was trouble. Independence Day, see, wild as a March hare, and the first chance she got she left for New York.’ As Jane spoke her eyes darted towards the ceiling, as though she were bringing up files. The past wasn’t difficult. The present impossible.

‘Ah, so many left,’ Margaret Rose said, sadly.

‘Ah, they did sure, nothing for many really, but to get away. We’d all grown up together. They were the next house over from us. Ah, they were lovely times really, we were mostly left to ourselves … head to the beach. I loved school, but Ann, well, you see, Ann hated it, always trying to take me away from learning. She was wild. We loved going out off on the bikes, especially to go as far as Roundstone. Do ye know the lovely beach, Dog’s Bay? Ann loved to swim.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Ah, ya, so beautiful out there, isolated,’ Margaret Rose said, twisting open a red foil paper by pulling it with both her hands like a Christmas cracker, ‘but I never gets in the water, freezing.’

We all agreed.

‘There’s never enough sun to heat the water,’ Jane said. ‘We did what was asked of us at home. I loved the books, and Ann loved the music. She played guitar. She’d sit in on her bed for hours just strumming it, while I’d lie there, listening.’ Jane made an odd noise and began to lift her shoulders up and down and again.

‘You OK, Jane?’ I said. ‘Jane?’

She paused, sat still, eyes frozen fixed straight ahead of her, her right foot going around and around in a fast circular motion. Margaret Rose glanced fast at me, unnerved, ‘Jane, ya were saying, the guitar and Ann, lying on the bed … remember …’