All the air in my body was leaking out and I couldn’t breathe any back in. I could nearly hear it, hissing in my ears.

–  Mary, are you alright? Jesus, you’ve gone a terrible colour! Sure, it’s all ancient history anyway? Mary, can you hear me? Isn’t it all ancient history?

–  Ancient, yeah. Thanks, Lizzie.

She wasn’t gone five minutes before the door was darkened by my mother again. She must have set out at quite a pace when she saw Lizzie’s car. She came in gasping and throwing herself down on a kitchen chair, clutching at her arthritic hip.

–  I see that flash car of Lizzie Magee’s was here again but that last was a flying visit.

–  Yes, she’s away tomorrow.

–  Hmmm, I suppose you know by now then, he’s back? Your lovely boy?

–  Who?

–  Ach, who indeed! As if you didn’t know! Pah! The lovely Joe Loughrey back from his doctoring in America to settle in that big barracks of a house that Eddie Connolly threw up and put a roof on! He’s a man in need of a lot of space for a man on his own. Maybe he’s planning on a big family?

–  Maybe.

–  Hmm…. maybe, maybe indeed. You make sure you have nothing to do with him – do you hear me, Mary Rattigan?

–  I’m Mary Johns, Mammy. Why can’t you remember that?

I must stand up now, stand up and start moving. I must make a start on the special dinner for tomorrow when the boys arrive. I imagined that one day when we’d been alone for too long, John would come home and decide at last that he was tired of being hitched to me. He would get a bulldozer and charge the house, smashing the half-door and the ancient lintels. Tumbling the chimneys and breaking the glass at the windows and the first brick to hit my head would stun me just enough so that I would know I was being buried alive.

I found myself listening for machines and checking the walls for cracks before I shook it off and snorted at my own madness! The very thought! That John Johns would waste money or time hiring a bulldozer and driving it all the way down the lane, when we both knew all he had to do was walk into the house, take me by the hand and silence me with a well-chosen word or two, something loaded like ‘Come’.

–  What news did Sadie have?

–  Jesus, John! How do you do that?

–  Well? What news?

–  Nothing! Nothing at all!