I mustn’t worry. They can work miracles these days. Miracles? Does she know she’s talking to a woman who’s just had Holy Water lobbed at her by a hyper-religious lunatic who wouldn’t be familiar with kindness or love or hope if it punched her in the face? I say thank you and I hang up, spinning around suddenly in the silence as if someone is standing between my shoulder blades. I cannot form a single thought except that on this day, of all days, I do not want to see Granny Moo.

I shove off my good clothes and pull on my ancient track bottoms and an old sweatshirt and wellies and run all the way back up the hill. The blisters on my heels don’t even slow me down. I want my lungs to burn. I want to feel the blood pump around my body, my body that could still move.

Perhaps I should have waited outside because bursting into a house completely out of puff and red in the face is not what people waiting for bad news necessarily want to see.

–  What is it, Mary? Oh Good Holy God and His Blessed Mother, he’s dead! He’s dead! Isn’t he, Mary? Don’t lie to us! HE’S DEAD!

–  He’s not dead, Mammy! Get a grip! He’s fine, comfortable, sedated, we can go and see him tomorrow. Daddy, can you get me a drink of water?

–  Why were you runnin’?

–  I don’t know, Daddy, I just took a fit of running!

–  Oh.

–  I’ll put the dinner out, says Mother Hen. That’s what we all need: a good home-cooked dinner to heat our gizzards!

Mammy’s loving the fact that she has a full house, that she can grumble about how unused she is to having to get a dinner up for seven people but how it’s all no trouble, really, no trouble. She wouldn’t have chosen to do anything else in the circumstances, though her hands are aching a bit from peeling all those spuds, but it was no trouble at all. The boys push the food into their mouths as silent as their grandfather while I bat answers back to my mother’s mundane questions.

–  So, was Omagh busy?

–  Average.

–  Did you walk down to the Memorial Garden?

–  Yes.

–  Did you say a prayer?

–  Why would I?