‘So sorry,’ Molly said. ‘Not the best for you, ladies.’ I began to shake, pluck my eyelashes, and noticing, she sat by me. ‘He died, darl. But he wanted to die. You didn’t. That’s it. It’s OK. Live a nurse-life long enough and you know those who want to go just go. We have choices, we all have fight, but we all know when we’ve fought enough, darl.’ As she turned to leave after the porters and the body, she turned back. ‘It’s personal, death. Has to be. For everyone. He was comfortable, darl … Try not to worry.’

I was cold.

Michal arrived shortly after, a pained face of something approaching mourning, lips and nose pinched, and he was kind, persuasive with his coffee and warm porridge but my throat was on fire. I had slept the night through, heavily sedated. Sedated the night through. Thank fuck. ‘Poor man … and so so tough on you all here and …’ he whispered, nodding at the bed, ‘poor Shane.’

‘Good morning, sailors.’ Jane was up and out of bed and pirouetting, she’d rise up slowly and suddenly fall over, rising and falling, over and over.

Shane was dead.

I couldn’t stop thinking it. Then suddenly forgetting it. I had heard about death rattles. I heard nothing with my sedation. My heart was palpitating. I wanted to see my mother, but all I could focus on was breath. The puckered creased sheet underneath me was stopping any relaxation, that and the sight of his toes, five. Five toes. I needed to text the boys. Joshua would send a paragraph of emojis. Heart beating. Someone had dressed me in a theatre gown. It was huge and gaped and my arse cheeks were uncovered as it pooled either side of me.

I tried to speak. I gurgled.

The windows banged perhaps to protest loss. The curtains around Shane’s bed were wide open and every trace of him gone, apart from a tiny water stain air-drying on the blue mattress where it had been cleaned.

I had a direct view out to Galway’s gloaming dawn. I tried to focus. I imagined the courthouse hustling, the sprawling buses full of believers arriving for mass at the cathedral, the cynical courthouse and the lofty cathedral oh so close to each other. Fitting. The green dome of the cathedral faded since I was young, from a day here and there of sunshine or from the constant dirty deluge of rain, and the clunky strength in the brick style seemed amateur. But everything seems brighter, more alive when you’re young. Bigger. It was once a prison, rebuilt (Browne again, he didn’t rest), and now a large cold church under the grey Galway fretful sky, ghosts of inmates could be imagined beating their chests for redemption or love inside its walls.

The Corrib River sneaks herself like long fingers through the city, labyrinthine, slyly moving around the cathedral, forking out at Nun’s Island and in past the Salmon trap to enter under the Salmon Weir Bridge. Around the city’s shop walls, greys and reds, and late at night down by the canals, cola-brown Buckfast bottles lie decapitated here and there. The people are an odd mixture of bog and bohemia, students and shoppers, city and country, of chatter and shopping bags and a village nature, and the city itself is often considered A Graveyard of Ambition, exciting tourists and frustrating locals.