There are two great hours in the day. The first is the hour on the bus from Carncloon to school in Omagh when I watch the lush fields and the trees rolling past and I have the weight and warmth of Lizzie Magee slumped against me with her twin smells of greasy hair and too many sprays of Impulse. She is the dividing line between the strain of The Hill and a kind of giddy happiness that settles on me as soon as we click together. We are convent grammar girls and along with the Christian Brothers boys, the lucky ones, the 11+ passers. A good education is the sure door to the dream of living in England or America and no one ever misses a single long, hard day, despite how much we grizzle.

The other hour is the one at the end of the day when I have to wait for the workers’ bus to get back out to The Hill. This is the hour I get to spend with My Boyfriend. Lizzie says it’s enough to make her boke the way me and Joe Loughrey moon over each other. It’s not normal for sixteen-year-olds to behave like auld wans, holding hands and a ton of other soppy goings-on.

–  Hi, yous two! Get a stable!

Joe and me were used to the stable joke. Being called Mary and Joseph is far from unusual in Tyrone, but it isn’t all that funny either when you’re an item. As usual it’s big Scrumptious Connolly who’s shouting, he never knows when to quit. But he’s like everyone else that goes to school with Joe and me, they know even at sixteen that we are really something. We go together, two halves of a biscuit sandwich. It makes my head swell and my heart sing to hear them all at us. We’re the centre of attention, Doctor Loughrey’s son and me.

He had picked me. ME! Every girl on legs fancied him but it was me he asked to go steady. It was the best minute I’d ever had, couldn’t believe my luck. Joe Loughrey? And ME? He has relatives in America, more doctors who could sponsor him until he got his Green Card. He’s just the ticket, Auntie Eileen winks, and I think my God, she’s right, he can get me out of here.

What’s wrong with us, the other wans want to know? Do we dream we won’t get bored soon? Didn’t Joe Loughrey ever think of going out with somebody else, somebody who didn’t look like a white witch? Somebody whose granny didn’t see dead people?