Her stories were the best boiled sweets ever invented, changing colour and getting sweeter every time I rolled one round my tongue. They tasted of freedom. My head fairly bloomed with its possibilities. If she could do it, so could I, we were the same blood. It was Mammy who first called us two rotten peas podded thirty years apart.

The hum of Macroom’s wake had carried on below us. Decker, safe in the knowledge that there would be no unnerving British Army Saracens on the street, took a fit of singing ‘The Boys of the Old Brigade’ and Eileen went back downstairs to see if she could hide the whiskey. I lay listening to Bernie choking on her wet snuffles and wondered if I could take her with me, back to her own country where she could breathe in without drowning.

The stormy seas first hit when I was a green girl of sixteen, but they did not carry me off. My life has been landlocked except for the times the Cloon burst its banks and the water let itself in like an old friend. The five children I reared looked forward to the floods like a day out, splashing through the kitchen like ducks. They are all gone now, grown up too fast, and my silly dreams of sleeping in, of being left alone for just ten straight minutes, have been realised.

When I think my voice is going to crack on the phone to them, I remember those days of wanting to be up, up and away from here, so I smile and laugh as they check again and again that I’m alright, that I’m coping, that I’m keeping busy. It’s because I’ve lost their father.

I lost him three hundred and seventy-two days ago, so many sunrises and sunsets with not much light for me in between. He isn’t hiding behind the barn or fallen down a bog hole. He’s not dead, just taking a break, and I feel a white-hot poker of regret from my womb to my throat when I recall that it’s me he’s taking a break from. He did well to last as long as he did. Not many men would have survived a mother-in-law like his, never mind a marriage like ours.

I blamed him when I failed to fly because it was him who clipped my wings. That’s the lie I told myself at sixteen and I repeated it so often that it came to be true. I fashioned a cage out of self-pity and slipped it over my head like a boned corset to hold myself together and to keep him out.