I stayed ’til he was transferred to the ambulance and I explained to the doctor that I couldn’t go with him because I had children and must be home. Children were always more important than husbands so they understood, though I could tell they thought I was a quare wan, letting an injured man go so far, so alone. I didn’t mention the cows, though their hooves were practically sticking out of my mouth. John Johns held my eyes the whole time because I couldn’t get close enough for him to hold anything else, and I looked back because I needed to prove that I could stand on my own two feet even though my legs were wobbling like jellies. They were not strong enough to let me jump in beside him, to console him, before it was too late.

As the doors of the ambulance closed I saw one big tear roll down his face before I was shut out completely. I waited as it left the car park and turned at the roundabout with a couple of warning whoops to take him to the other side of the Six Counties and all I felt was forsaken. He was lost to me for the sake of one step in the right direction.

I didn’t want to phone Serena and listen to her howling, she cried if I told her I’d just dug a thorn out of his finger. I didn’t want to go home and face our boys, and anyway there was only one bus, same as when I was at school. Instead I wandered into Omagh town and detoured past to the garden of remembrance for the bloody Real IRA bomb. It was still, just a sweet packet fluttered at the bottom of a bush. I thought again of the woman who had died when she was pregnant with twins. Her mammy, them and her little girl all gone in a flash.

At the time the loss of her and them seemed more terrible than everyone else’s loss, but now all five of them were just part of the Northern Irish dead: lives lost, lives never lived. We have a great word here for that kind of act, indiscriminate. How could anything, anything be worth parking a car loaded with explosives in a busy market town on a fair day? Twenty-nine families of both creeds would be asking that question for the rest of their time.