They kept me locked in the caravan for days and nights I quickly lost the count of. The windows were rusted shut and could not be squeezed back and I was so weak because they brought me no food and no water. I was in a bad state very quickly. The dogs outside I believe sensed that I was weakening, that I was dying, and they called to me. We were held on the same length of chain. In the daytime the girls came and whispered through the door to me – awful, filthy stuff that I would not repeat, for hours they whispered – and I knew that Elsie hadn’t the better of the spell anymore. Evan came by night and he crawled over the roof of the caravan and he made little tapping noises. I roared and cried myself hoarse but there was no one to hear me out there and after a few days I was slipping in and out of a desperate weird sleep – full of sour, scary dreams, like bad whiskey dreams – and I felt the cold of the fields come into my bones and once in the afternoon dusk I woke from a fever to find Evan the Head outside a window of the caravan and in each of his arms he held a child to look in at me, and I knew it was the first time ever that I had seen those children calm. I have never had religion or spiritual feelings but lying there in the caravan in the farmyard outside Gort I knew for sure there was no God but there was surely a devil.

But if I gritted my teeth against the fear and kept my eyes clamped tightly shut, the sweats would seem to ease off for a while and I would see clearly my day on the beach with May-Anne, at Garrettstown, in the summer. It was a windy, blustery day, but the sea and the sand made us high, we were soaring, and we ran about like mad things on the beach. Afterwards, before the bus back to town, I bought her a 99 at a seaside shop. The shop had all sorts of beach tat for sale and she asked me about the pork-pie hats that said ‘kiss-me-quick’.

‘What’s kiss-me-quick?’

‘It’s just a seaside thing,’ I said. ‘An old saying. From England I think.’

‘Kiss-me-quick kiss-me-quick kiss-me-quick,’ she said it in a duck’s voice from a cartoon and I pecked her on the cheek, really quickly, peck peck peck, and I nuzzled the nape of her neck – she squealed.