I supped up my milky tea and watched Decker swirl the cup in his big hand. I knew what I wanted to hear – that my bony shoulder blades would break through my skin, covered in feathers – long white feathers sweeping the floor like all the best angels from St Bede’s. I would take off as soon as I’d shook them dry. I’d leave the muck of The Hill behind. I’d be away in a matter of minutes, over our hill, over the next hill and the next, across the border, along the steely grey stripe of the Cloon River, the green grass shivering below me as I swooped through the valleys. I’d be out of Mammy’s reach for good.

I chewed my fingernails down to the nub in pure excitement. Decker spun my cup dry and looked into the brown leaves, his bushy eyebrows drawing together in a frown. Auntie Eileen pulled me closer, I could feel the rosary beads in her apron pocket and the smell of the Coty talc Bernie was always doused in. We both leaned in for the big news.

–  There’s naught but rough seas for this wan, said the sorrowful showman.

–  You could say that for any woman young or auld, Decker McHugh, you buck eejit, snorted Mrs Johns who lived down the back lane.

–  What else would you expect in the Six Counties? roared somebody else.

It took Eileen a long while to settle me that night. I thought of the white waves rolling over the sand at Bundoran on our one-Sunday-a-summer seaside outing. How cold the water was off the coast of Donegal, how easy it was to get a lungful of salt and burny eyes, how the waves dragged you back even when you were running as fast as you could to get to the beach, the watery fists wrapped tight around your ankles, your mammy not caring, your daddy too far away to notice. Was that the rough seas he meant?

–  You’ll travel, said Auntie Eileen to placate me. That’s all it is!

–  Do you really think so?

–  Sure, you have to take to the sea rough or not if you want to get as far away as America one day?

Auntie Eileen was a big fan of America. She was a big fan of anywhere that wasn’t Carncloon. She’d already been to New York – that’s where she’d got married and where Bernie had been born. I feasted on her tales of true love, of adventure. I was right by her side as she walked down Fifth Avenue describing the dresses she saw in the windows, imagined the coffee places where she tasted her first proper cup (‘it’s not even a bastard cousin of that Camp shite, don’t ever forget that, Mary’), watched her learn to eat spaghetti by twirling it on a spoon.