Mammy creaked into the front seat in her Sunday-best underpinnings and we got in the back and off we set over the back roads through Pettigo, crossed the border at Belleek and on through Ballyshannon to the coast. The guilt and gloom lifted a little as the blue of the ocean came into view.

It was fine and warm, the light soft over the water. The beach was packed and the sweet smell of ice cream, toffee apples and candyfloss was burnt into the air. Mick and me ran off to the wee-smelling huts on the front to get on our cossies, leaving Mammy and Da to walk around the noise and promise of the penny arcades before we could get at the sandwiches. In the heat, the butter would have melted into the cottage-loaf bread and they would be the most delicious things we’d ever tasted after an hour in the freezing Atlantic.

When we were blue with cold we ran up the beach; we ran straight past them once and when we doubled back neither of us knew where to put ourselves or our eyes. My mother was in a bright yellow swimsuit which she had ‘improved’ by inserting a large red modesty panel to cover the line between her breasts. She started handing out the sandwiches as if nothing was amiss. Sadie could never be described as fat because she was solid; her flesh, even uncontained, did not wobble but she was substantial, tall for a woman, broad at the hip and shoulder, buxom, bunioned, absolutely not built for bright yellow.

Some young girls laughed and pointed and we all heard the words ‘scary canary’. Slowly she covered her feet, then the terrible legs and finally her torso with a towel, which she tucked into the scarlet modesty panel to still it in the breeze. My father managed the word ‘dodgems’ and he and Mick showered us in sand as they legged it to the amusements. I sat burning beside her, letting my salty hair swing forward to cover my face so I could take her in.

Until that day her skin had been her arms from her elbows down and a small white V at the base of her throat. When I got to her face she was staring back just as hard. She held my eyes for an excruciating minute or two before they dropped to my chest and travelled on slowly, so, so slowly, to the chipped nail polish I had on my toes, a forgotten bit of fun at Lizzie Magee’s. We were new to each other.

I waited for the insults to fly, the cry of how I would have to look about myself, the warning that Lizzie Magee was a menace, but no, all was silence bar the seagulls. Why wasn’t she shouting?