Will I be able to secure myself just one more chance? My lungs or is it my heart plays up when I allow myself that question, flapping about like a fish on a riverbank taking in the horror with its right-side-up fish eye that it’s just air between it and the sky for evermore.

Ginger looks up at me from the sunlight dancing on the granite slab we laid down to mark Brandy dog’s grave and shows me the back of his dark little throat with an extra-wide yawn. I’m not leaving you behind, I tell him with a sob.

After John binned me in Belfast, he wrote to say he was going to lease the herd as he knew that the beasts would be too much work for me when all the boys would soon be gone. Waynes don’t last forever, Mary, you need to find something else to do with your life! True to his word, he set the wheels in motion within days and Scrumptious Connolly – who had dried out and rediscovered God all in the same afternoon – showed up to appraise the cows and walk the fields and inspect the drains and inform me it was never too late to go back to Jesus. Jesus!

The decision was made to leave me with the hill field, the river field and the back field. All I could see was a lot of space opening up around me. Johns Farm and The Hill always seemed small, like fields that could be gathered in one hand; now they were vast, green spaces rolling forever in front of me. Auntie Eileen took a leaf out of John’s book and leased her farm in the same week. Two of us can play at this retirement lark, she said.

I wept when the last of the cattle were walked past the half-door of Johns Farm on their way to greener grass on Aghabovey. At least this time I said goodbye.

When Daniel went to university in Liverpool the September after John left me, I cried so much that I thought I would drown. Until then I had had Son Number Four to focus on, him to cook for, him to love. He had to prise my arms from around his neck at Belfast airport. I had never been on a plane and the thought of him being lifted up, up and away was brutal.

I cried all the way down the M1 while Eileen roared at me to for God’s sake, get a grip, it was only fucking England not fucking Mars! We wouldn’t have to get on a rocket ship to see him, just a plane which took sixty minutes! Only sixty fucking minutes! Bernie kept passing the tissues through from the back seat ’til the box was empty. When she growled at me and gave me a good hard bang on the head with the empty box I howled some more.