Brother Linus was very understanding. Many kindly platitudes were murmured (although I think he would’ve happily said anything – literally anything – just to get us the hell off the abbey grounds at this juncture).

I don’t drive. I never learned. I just never really felt the urge. But I am an expert at being driven (usually – I readily admit – while inhabiting the vertical plane) and the experience of being driven by Miss Drury was not a remotely relaxing or a pleasurable one. In some ways I’m just grateful that I couldn’t actually see the road (ignorance is bliss!). Another source of gratitude (while we’re on the subject of gratitude) was that I hadn’t seen Brother Prosper (or that dratted child’s dratted fur coat) on the morning of my departure, either (which, for those of you interested in such ephemera, was the morning after the night before. Same as it generally is, I suppose).

Ms Drury maintained what I can only really describe as a constant trickling effluvium of chit-chat throughout the first segment of our drive. She seemed … I don’t know … anxious. But it was difficult for me to concentrate on her feelings because I was very much preoccupied by my own feelings at this stage. My own feelings just seemed more … more important. Yes. Much more important. Than hers.

I was monosyllabic. I didn’t really feel much inclined to talk. And I knew that if I did (feel so inclined) I may well have been obliged to discuss the fact that my buttocks remained, if not stuck together (I fear the doctor may have put paid to that with a sterilized scalpel while I was still out cold), then hugely swollen. No. I had no desire whatsoever to talk about the intensive Vaselining sessions (a quietly whistling Brother Anselm in a latex glove), the salt soaps, the mortifying ‘wash downs’, the strict no-solids diet. I had no desire to talk about those.

I was monosyllabic. Like I said.

Ms Drury made up for it, though. I was given a potted version of pretty much her entire life story, for starters. Born in Cork, strict Catholic upbringing, dreamed of one day becoming a veterinarian (her marks were good enough!) but got ‘with child’ at seventeen to her girlhood sweetheart, a boy with the curiously evocative name of Gabe Highly (highly what? I wonder. Disappointed? Sexed?). Her parents sent her to a special home for pregnant girls (with the intention of getting the child adopted once it arrived), but a couple of weeks before her due date, she absconded from the home and fled to England. Well, Wales. I forget the exact details of her epic journey (I was thinking about Miss Hahn at this stage. Miss Hahn’s distinctively aristocratic nose). But blah blah … she ended up in blah … then blah … and it really blah … but she never blahed … until she … and then it was actually in her capacity as blah … that she eventually met … and Orla, Orla just knew … (This is old territory. She told me about Orla just ‘knowing’ during our formal interview. But she didn’t specify exactly what it was that Orla knew at that stage, only that Orla looked at her and she just … just ‘knew’.) Orla then told her that the Holy Virgin loved her ‘most especially’ because she too had suffered the indignity of a pregnancy out of wedlock (although – I say again – she didn’t furnish me with these precise details during our interview). Ms Drury was naturally ‘quite overwhelmed’ by this demonstration of such immense wisdom and insight from so young a girl. Terribly disabled! But never complained! Just offered it all up! And she suddenly found herself, after many, many – too many! – years of self-hatred and guilt and consuming shame, somehow just miraculously … just lifted. Restored. Healed. There and then. In one instant. And experiencing a sudden urge, an eagerness to … to love in return the Merciful God whose Beloved Only Son’s Most Holy and Sacred Heart had burned so keenly, so constantly, so relentlessly for her. Phew.