‘I have gone mad with hunger,’ Concessa agrees. ‘But I do not know why you would say that when she was born with the disease. Her face did look like when mud is dried out and stepped upon. A mother’s pain is eternal, but I think Segnat had prepared herself on seeing the child bleed from the face so much. You cannot completely love a child who is falling apart in front of your eyes. You cannot even touch it for fear even your touch is hurting it. To live without a mother’s embrace is a terrible thing, but to live without a mother’s love—’

‘I could embrace this child, but I am afraid of her,’ Ruth says. ‘I am becoming dizzy.’

‘I too want to carouse and make love, just one more time,’ Neasa says. ‘I always remember Segnat telling me that in cities there is more lovemaking because there are more hiding places, though I am sure there are more secluded places here near the woods, though they are uncomfortable and damp, bits of them getting inside you. I could hide anywhere.’

‘I could hide in this room and you would not find me,’ Concessa says. ‘Sometimes I feel I could make myself small as a mouse I am so ignored by others. I could hide myself in the middle of this room before all of you by making myself very still, so you would see right through me.’

‘What happened next to the sick child?’ Ruth asks Concessa.

Samthánn’s arm is aching from her drawing. She cannot go very high because she is so small, so all her figures are near the ground. A translucent piglet beside her feet snores a little. It is asleep, almost dead. Its skin is new and has never seen the sun. She steps over it and moves to the wood. The impressions her rock makes there are less clear. It is more difficult to make straight lines, but her arms don’t have to work as hard. Her fingers are cramping.

‘Well, nothing really happened the next time I went to the tree,’ Neasa answers, ‘because my eyes were open, but I had Séamus with me that time, and he said the hollow had licked him with its tongue, and he played his fingers around the edge and said the rim was covered in teeth, and he pulled out a tooth and showed it to me. It was a big tooth, twice the length of a knuckle. What scared him though was that it was a perfect circle of teeth, he said. We have but a set of teeth at the top and the bottom of our jaws, but with this tree it was as though all around its lips were teeth, in a full circle. Children draw mouths that way sometimes, in the dirt.’