Now the heel of a hand bangs me and I’ve pissed myself. Again. I want to pull a face.

I consider diving one last time.

‘Oh, sir, shit. Look, sir, I have her notes, she didn’t return, she said she was moving, would get treatment elsewhere, or something?’

‘OK, charge again, it’s the least we can do.’

I can do the dead man’s float for ever.

I’m gathering up some Connemara ponies in the Railway field, they usually run with a couple of older horses, or a donkey, to calm them down, the ponies dart among the heavier horses, no good for anyone now, their stumbling legs slowing them down, heavy swollen hocks from wallops off the stone walls, old hunters, but still the sun shines on their dappled rumps and over the strawberry-roan arches of their backs. Sheep run with them, pick and graze, shiny greased maggots wriggling at their back openings as the soil is heating up with fine weather. The dark grey ponies will turn a snow white as years go on, and sometimes, after they’ve left us, I’ll no longer recognise them, that’s if I’m fortunate enough to ever come across them, but I rarely am, fortunate. I’m not there to watch them turn into old reliable ponies for kids with ribbons in their hair who do ballet or play piano in Devon or Shropshire. Father always sold the stock without telling me, no goodbye, we didn’t get one to keep, we broke them, bridle, bit, saddle, rider, ground poles, cross poles, stone walls, and then moved them on. He sold them off to a Rose Cottage or Amble Lane Farm, far from the rough west coast of Ireland with gates rusty and unhinged, squeaky and cumbersome like people, necessary, swinging this way then that then staying stuck, held together with yellow lutein baling twine, needing a good lift from the lower rung to open and shut. In the end I stopped loving the ponies when they’d arrive as young foals, plucked giddy and frightened from the mother. We simply worked them and eventually we stopped calling them by their names, referring to them by gender and colour. And when a fancy horse truck would arrive in the yard with a yellow reg to collect them, I’d hide under the bed.

I never said goodbye.

This, Father said, makes us tougher. But later it made loving harder. I was always ready to

let

go.

Chapter 12

Margaret Rose held Alex’s upper arm tight between her two hands. I didn’t remember introducing them, and hoped he’d be polite. I was mad I hadn’t told him about the fish with regional accents I’d read about on Wired. Some scientist in Exeter had been studying it for years, how cod have chats. I had meant to tell him. He’d love it.

‘You’re going to have to try and count, OK, Sinéad, right, you need to try, count with me, count to a hundred, count to a hundred.’

‘One, two …’ I was making no sound.