A field further on was Swanlon’s bungalow, the Munnellys’ nearest neighbour. Pell discerned a bloom of chimney smoke, faint as a watermark against the white sky. Swanlon was a pensioner with a metal hip, his only earthly companion the rowdy black bitch of a Border collie he doted upon. Pell knew she could ­sweet-­talk Swanlon into giving her a lift, though he would insist on bringing the dog, which he permitted to ride in the front passenger seat, having successfully conditioned the beast to wear a seat belt. But Pell’s impression was that driving had lately become a fretful ordeal for the old man. Besides, Gerry would go spare if Swanlon’s rusting wreck of a car, parping cloudlets of straw and dung out the exhaust, came up the school drive to collect him.

So Pell walked the quarter mile out to the main road. Town was seven miles away. She skirted the barbed spokes of the briars clustered along the road’s verge. Across the fields, a row of pylons curved away into the haze. After a while, she heard a vehicle, turned to see a county bus approaching. She stepped into the middle of the road and started waving. The bus heaved to a halt. The driver, Mack Reddin, ­tut-­tutted as Pell stamped her boots in the stairwell and thumbed her mam’s expired bus pass from her wallet.

‘You look like a cooked prawn, Pell,’ Reddin said.

There were three elderly women on board. They smelled like the inside of kettles. Pell sat away from them. The warm bus wended through the countryside and Pell drowsed in her seat, her drooping forehead scuffing the wet window and starting her back awake.

In Swinford, Pell watched a skinny dark girl in a leather jacket and wool hat bunch an infant to her chest and attempt to collapse, ­one-­handed, an uncollapsing stroller before tossing the thing, splayed and sideways, into the bus’s undercompartment.

In Foxford, three lads got on, schoolboys. Pell was ­sixteen, and they were about the same. They shambled down the aisle, jackets open and school ties wrenched loose, at this hour brazenly on the doss. Boys interested Pell. They were what she missed most about school, watching them and being among them. She liked their creaturely excitability, their insistence, in one another’s company, on shouting almost everything, almost all the time. She liked their unwieldy ­bodies – their hands like hammers and their loaflike feet, the way their Adam’s apples beat like the chests of trapped birds when they talked at her. At, not to. Pell had already deciphered the difference: most lads were too afraid to talk to her, and instead just blustered into her vicinity.