All of the thoughts bombarding my head had hard edges which jarred and hurt. I tried to blink them away but it was like dragging my eyelids over sand. I wanted to pull myself together, to get a bit done up, to get up the lane and to the bus. I wanted to do it but it was like wanting to know if there was a monster under the bed. I’d have to risk having my head torn off to find out. No matter how much I wished myself in Belfast I just couldn’t go there.

On day five Kathleen breezed in with flowers and vegetables as if we might be short of those things on a farm. She gets a kind of fixed little smile when she’s nervous and she only gets nervous when I’m behaving oddly. She wants to know what’s going on with John and me and I wish with all of my heart that I could tell her. Instead I say nothing’s going on, will you take tea? She lays the back of her hand on my head. You’re on fire, Mary, she says.

I changed tack and called the hospital direct every day but John was ‘not in his bed’ when the nurses went looking. Getting the phone out of the cradle and punching in the number was like running a marathon; I had to sit down afterwards to steady my legs. How could a man who couldn’t walk get so far away that he couldn’t speak to his wife? The panic set in. It had only taken him five days of freedom to let him see he wanted more. He’d got away.

I was kept up to date with his progress by Eugene and Marius who were still there. They were embarrassed, stumbling over their excuses for his absence now that he’d let them see he wasn’t keen on contact. After a whole week had flown by, they called me, clearing their throats and trying to make light of a heavy body-blow. John Johns had put in a request that I was not to try phoning him again ’til I was contacted. He would let me know when I was wanted. I was not to get on a bus, I was not to come anywhere near him, until he had fully recovered his strength.