‘And every time I looked, the Being was still there,’ Ciara Lavin was saying. ‘If I looked away from it, I felt a sense of enormous trepidation. But whenever I looked straight back at it, the fear went away.’

Ciara Lavin was sitting at Lorna’s kitchen table along with Emma Doherty and Lorna’s mother, Anne. Some years ago, Ciara had travelled to South America and participated in an ayahuasca ritual. This is what she was talking about now. A guide took you into the forest and you drank a foul black liquid and hallucinated for hours, sometimes days. After she took the ayahuasca, Ciara had encountered an entity, what she called the Being, amid the trees ringing their encampment. Ciara struggled to describe the Being. It was not human but it had humanoid aspects. At times it had seemed extraterrestrial, reptilian, even ­machine-­like. It had seemed, in some inexpressible way, feminine. It had intelligence. Ciara’s sense was that the Being had a message it wanted to communicate to her, a message that Ciara intuitively understood was of the utmost importance, not just to her but to all of humanity, but she had not been equipped, or ready, to receive the message.

‘You know how they say you shouldn’t bore people by telling them about your dreams,’ Emma Doherty said.

‘Is that your way of telling me to shut up?’ Ciara asked.

‘It so happens I think telling people about your dreams is fine,’ Emma said, ‘so long as the account is brief.’

‘Well it wasn’t a dream,’ Ciara said. ‘It’s silly to talk about now, but at the time it felt like the realest thing that’s ever happened to me.’

‘I think it sounds very fascinating,’ Anne said diplomatically.

‘Ayahuasca,’ Emma said. ‘I’m an Uisce Beatha woman myself.’

Together with Luke, the four women had just got back from the service and burial for Lydia Healy, a woman from the estate who had died suddenly a few days ago. Lydia had been in her early fifties, a good decade older than Lorna and her friends and a decade younger than Anne. None of the women had known her particularly well, but her youngest son attended the boys’ secondary school with Luke, and that had been reason enough for Lorna to pay her respects. Once she had said she was going, Ciara, Emma and Anne said they would too.