They went on to Tuam and her chauffeur drove on through the town and stopped his motor car out on the Athenry road, a little way past the railway bridge, where the trains brought sugar beet up and down the line, and told her she was on her own. If she wasn’t up for anything then why should he shame his car and drive her to the gate of the Home, and abandoning her on the side of the road, he gave her scant directions to find her way back the route he’d just driven out, and up and into the right.

It was dusk when Ann made her way to the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home.

Good Help.

Good Help to Those in Need.

Bon Secours.

And it is said that sometime after the birth of a little boy, with beautiful skin, Patrick James Hegarty, Ann was eventually flung in through the doors of the Magdalene Laundry at Forster Street in the city, driven by the same chauffeur, and although rumour has it that she protested, she’d serve out her time for the sin of sex, for no one would pay or could pay the one hundred pounds bounty or release fee, demanded by the Church for her keep while in confinement, one hundred pounds to release her back to a life of hanging her head down, or leaving for England if she could raise the fare and never return. But how could an incarcerated woman raise such a fare?

A life of incarceration for Ann as Bishop Browne and his army of virtuous brought down any good man or woman who sought better health care for women. And wasn’t it only what was best? For what were women only donkeys? And what was a donkey only a working ass? And what was an ass but a fool? And what to do with a fool but stick her in the corner and point fun at her, make her your slave and what was the child of an ass but an ass fool, and a chattel to sell or starve? And what of it? We should all forget it now. Bastards. Malthus indeed. And isn’t incarceration only your own fault? And how we are all so convinced by each machine that replaces the last that all lost ambition is to do with the self. The self. Regulation. Impulse. Self. Live. Your. Best. Life. Everything. Is. Possible. Fight your illness. Come now. H’up off your knees. Christ.

‘It was a Martin, the guitar …’ Jane said, eventually. ‘She’d gotten in harm’s way beyond in America. And the nuns weren’t really used to the backwards way of this now.’

I agreed.

Usually girls stayed out in America. Ann should have stayed. For better or worse, girls stayed out abroad, for if it maimed them, it could mind them. And they were never heard from after. But Ann Hegarty gave herself back to the Irish prison.

Patrick was eventually given out to a family member. Which was the strangest thing of all. It was also said, the Hegartys were lucky the laundry took in Ann, for the girl wasn’t raped by her brother or interfered with by a priest. The father was an American. And for all intents and purposes the sex could have been decent. American sex, where you could fuck and come without a criminal investigation.