John refused to come to the phone. Every day for four days I called Eugene and Marius and begged to speak to him but he waved our boys away. I could hear them hissing at him to just speak, say something, but he didn’t. All I could hear was no, no, no, like a child being spoon-fed cabbage. He was not biting. So, he was there and I was here, refusing to leave Johns Farm. Daddy, Eileen and Matthew all offered lifts to town to get the bus to Omagh and then to Belfast. I shook my head, no, no, no. There was no point. I had already confirmed to John that I was a coward. I had left him alone in his hour of need. I was too scared to hear him say it out loud. I had broken my promise to stay by his side in sickness and in health.

There were several worried faces to dodge, a gallon of tea undrunk, sin of sins, food pushed around a plate then set aside for the hens. My sons and my aunt stopped whispering when I came into the room. Daddy stayed on the stoop smoking his pipe in case he was needed again. Mammy showed up with a Lemon Madeira, though she hadn’t been invited, and the air in the kitchen was so tense that her and Auntie Eileen didn’t even bother having a fight. I found them at either end of the table looking ill at ease over this unexpected turn of events.

Serena had been speaking to John Johns and was demanding to know what was going on between us now? When would we both just grow up? Nothing’s going on, I told her, nothing! You’re as bad as each other, she roared before hanging up. It would only be a matter of time before Kathleen ‘just popped by’ doing her finest impersonation of a woman who hadn’t been phoned, who hadn’t been told to get her backside home because her baby sister was in the clabber again.

I wanted to tell them that a door had closed. It was the door of the ambulance closing over and over again to shut John Johns away from me. The metallic click played even while I slept. I hadn’t recovered because my heart had been inside the ambulance when it drove off, but that was too fanciful for County Tyrone, too far-fetched for a grown woman to say she couldn’t leave a house because she felt cut open and left raw.

I rushed at my work instead: ripping up and plaiting the onions, retying peas and beans, digging potatoes, scrubbing the hen-house roof and repainting it. And though I dropped into bed every night exhausted I had the overwhelming sensation of standing stock-still.