–  Well, she hits the boil easy, doesn’t she?

–  Yeah, I suppose she does.

We both had to look away then. Joe couldn’t bear talk of my mother or her methods. Her moods sat between us like a rotten egg that had to be handled with care in case it cracked and poisoned the day. He could never understand why I couldn’t stand up for myself. Talk to her, he’d say. Tell her to back off. How could I explain how frightening she was, how much power she had, to a boy as mollycoddled as he was?

His parents were sickeningly sweet. His father said I should call him Dermot but I couldn’t say Dermot if he paid me a million pounds. They called each other and Joe ‘darling’ and they couldn’t get over the fact they were so chocolate-box perfect. I was all darlinged-out after an hour. Inside that house, he was someone’s baby and I needed him to grow up and run away with me, as fast as his soft-lad feet could carry him.

The whole house was choked with air freshener. Mrs Loughrey went about from room to room spraying away any of the air we could breathe. She sighed a lot. She had a woman in twice a week to clean up and do the ironing. She had a job at the post office ‘to pass the time’. Plenty of women would have liked that job ‘to pay the bills’.

To me, a home was a version of Johns Farm. Bridie’s little house is ancient, with long, low, thick walls made of granite blocks; the lintel over the half-door is granite too, a pinkish slab that was unearthed and left exposed where it gathers lichen. The walls are whitewashed and the roof is red tin. When I’m inside it, I feel I could sit out a hurricane. But I knew my life would be lived somewhere else, somewhere I won’t be able to hear the rush of the Cloon River and its spinning gravel.

I’ll miss it and Mrs Johns when I leave with Joe but I’ll send her postcards and maybe even dollars to pay her back for all her kindness. I’ll write interesting things about my marvellous set-up and if John Johns happens to see them he’ll wish he’d spoken to me when he had the chance.