I stopped thinking about America and I stopped thinking about what it would have been like to go there with Joe Loughrey. I thought of him now and again but always as the boy who had stood crying in the parochial house, never as the golden boy, flicking his perfect hair and knowing he was the bee’s knees.

I had no idea if John ever thought about England and Catherine the beauty. Every time he heard Sinéad O’Connor on the wireless singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, he took the trouble to walk over and turn it down until she was finished breaking every heart in Ireland including his.

I often studied him when he was squinting at the horizon but he never looked at me. Why would he? I hadn’t changed in the eleven years since he took me on; I was the same auld Mary only with fewer scales on my eyes. We kept the parts of ourselves we were willing to expose for the bedroom.

Life trundled on as inescapable as the five hills around us; we went from daffodils to roses and back to nothing beautiful blooming for months at a time, from haymaking to muck-spreading, and in that way the years marched on.

23

When the postman handed me two letters in the summer of 1993 and one of them was a blue airmail from America my heart nearly stopped. At last, at last I had my news from the long-lost Joe Loughrey! Time did a painful little fold and I was sixteen again and desperate to hear that I hadn’t been wiped from his memory. I settled down with a mug of tea and a homily to myself not to get too worked up, when I saw that it was from San Francisco and addressed to John Johns. It could only be from Father Pat O’Connell. What had made me dream I was worth remembering?

The other letter was from Omagh, from the convent. Serena had passed her 11+ and was being invited along for an interview to see if she was the right kind of material for the nuns. Sister Pious’s signature leapt off the page and punched me in the gut! Could she dream she was writing to the class of ’82’s famously failed virgin? That Serena was starting out on the road I had slipped off, coupled with such a fresh jolt from the past, made me think about how deep I had buried the life I once wanted.

The life of a teacher coming back to my nice clean, rose-scented home, the two perfect children I had always imagined would be enough, a fine upstanding doctor on my arm. I could have sworn I once thought of those things as ambitious? I left both of the letters on the table and went outside. Cows don’t feed themselves, y’know?