Bridie tells me that it’s fresh air I need. There’s no shortage of fresh air at Johns Farm. When she finds me clinging to the four walls of the Lower Room, she rousts me out and pushes me through the half-door. It always seems too bright but I leave the cover of the little house and walk the ditches. I’d always loved it down here in the hollow but the thought of The Hill just two miles away has wiped out its pull. I imagine that my bed has been stripped down to a baldy mattress. Mick is gone. Daddy is up there, Matthew too, carrying on as if nothing is wrong when nothing is right or even close to it. I look at the end of the lane where it starts to climb past the orchard wall but I can’t step too close. It’d be easier to fly to the moon.

I spend a lot of my day listening to Bridie pour her heart out about dead husbands and dead children in a bid to show me that things could always be worse. The teapot never cools. I’ve not told her that it’s my job to listen to her now. I’ll never mention it because I love her so much.

She hasn’t told me outright about Father Pat O’Connell but it won’t be long. She’s already assured me she knows exactly just how it feels to be in my boat. Does she remember calling Decker McHugh a buck eejit when he forecast my rough seas? I wonder how he got it so wrong then I realise that maybe he got it absolutely right.

I was married a month when the IRA set two bombs in London: one in Hyde Park, one in Regent’s Park. Bridie and me listened to it on the wireless; both were military ceremonies guaranteed to have a lot of civilians gathered around. In the end they killed eleven soldiers, seven of them musicians, and seven horses. It seemed terrible that they were just all on a bit of a day out in the sunshine. Bridie insisted that the three of us kneel down together to say a decade of the rosary. John and me looked at each other alarmed. He had kept his promise to show no interest in me and I had kept myself hidden away as best as any person could in a three-room house. This was being too close for comfort.