I had run through the rushes barefoot, my face on fire and other bits of me not much cooler, the sound of his pleasure ringing in my ears.

I had never thought of what I did once a week on a Wednesday as self-abuse. Wednesday was bingo night and John would run Bridie into the town and go for a jar while she gossiped and struggled to get a line or a full house for a fiver. With the house empty and my baba fast asleep, I would have a proper strip wash at the sink. When I was clean, I rinsed the rough facecloth out for the last time and pressed it over my face to block out the light. I would lean my weight against the locked door and wedge my feet on either side of the blocks that held the big Belfast sink up in the air, to keep from sliding on the lino.

Memories intruded: a really deep kiss I’d shared with Joe Loughrey, one from the early days when we couldn’t get enough of each other. The look on Jacques Bernier’s face when he had picked the flake of tobacco from his tongue, the thought of where that tongue had just been.

If I was extra tired, or lonely or sad, I couldn’t stop John Johns’s face floating past, his eyebrows knitted together, his lips burning red but still with nothing to say. Those nights I juddered to my feet and vowed I’d never do it again. It was a sin, anyway. But far from any of it making it better, far from it being a release, I might as well have been throwing paraffin at a fire instead of sand. The heat raged higher and hotter and harder inside me every time I strove to damp it out.

The blotches on my chest and neck would just have time to go down before they got home, she reeking of fag smoke and mint imperials, he with beer on his breath and a look in his eye I couldn’t meet.

20

The remodelling of Johns Farm was finished by the end of August, after the hottest summer any of us could remember, and we painted the whole thing white like a giant Christmas cake. The house was further linked to the barn with a glass conservatory that looked out to the orchard. John had built out the back to a huge kitchen with room for the table and chairs, and four bedrooms in all. I didn’t think about the bedrooms in case I broke out in hives.

He had made a special room for Bridie on the ground floor with her own bathroom, and the sheer excitement of it: a second bathroom under a skylight on the second floor. To go from no toilet to two toilets overnight is a rarely experienced joy. We kept the concrete floor in the kitchen: concrete never wears.