‘Segnat said we had many ones on us,’ Neasa says. ‘Segnat said she could not help us, but that the child would; and now she is gone. I forgot all this, because my throat is so dry and I am so dizzy. The child, Segnat said, would help us make the right choice.’

‘I remember, too,’ Ruth says. ‘We have done a bad thing.’

Neasa coughs, and looks at the drawings on the wall. ‘They are depictions of work,’ she says. ‘Of peasants in the fields, cutting down the yield of the earth, but each blade of grain is individually rendered. Fields ripe with wheat, here; a summer’s morning; peasants stooped over ditches, drinking water from cupped dock leaves. Their hands are brown with dirt. Women and children hold hands; it goes on forever.’

‘I can feel the sickness in my bones,’ Concessa says, shivering. ‘It has grasping fingers.’

‘I greet death every morning,’ Neasa says. ‘And it has never greeted me back. Why should we die? Why should anyone?’

‘It is an ageless story,’ Ruth says, ‘but it is over, and it is a sickness, not a massacre. There is a difference.’

‘Cartilage has a popping sound,’ Concessa says. ‘There are many little holes in the child’s flesh around the cheek, close together and bunched up like honeycomb, yellow ones, eating themselves with infection. Gaps in the flesh, pus pours like fountains, the life leaking out of you. Your life leaks out of me. It has always been a massacre. Someone is knocking hard at that door.’

‘There is no knocking,’ Ruth says, listening to the silence.

‘Swelling begins behind the eyes and around the anus and then the pits of your arms burst open,’ Neasa says, ‘and I have never made love, I have only been made love to.’

‘I’m thirsty,’ Concessa says. ‘Is the room growing dim?’

‘I was loved once or twice,’ Ruth says, looking at Neasa, ‘but to what purpose?’

‘It feels as though the thirst is only in the left side of my throat,’ Concessa says, ‘where I cannot swallow it away.’

They fall silent again, and look towards one another with guarded suspicion. A clacking sound comes from outside, a small tapping noise; the child is drawing on the house. Ruth taps at the piglet with her foot, pushing it deeper under the straw. It dies suddenly; the heat leaks out its body.

‘Don’t interrupt me,’ Concessa shouts, though the room is silent.

‘How much time has passed?’ Neasa asks.

They look at one another again.

‘I feel nothing,’ Ruth says.

‘Nothing?’

‘Yes,’ Ruth says. ‘You know it is there, not inside you. It is what is not inside you.’

‘Things disperse,’ Concessa says. ‘There is no magic, only God.’

‘I remember these things,’ Neasa continues, eyeing Concessa with hatred. There is great meaning and threat in her voice. ‘I remember everything.’