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the dry mouth words we could not say to each other, the leap of trust, where was the catcher? She ran without looking and picked Rosie up off the street. She continued running until she got inside the house. I grabbed Essie by the hand. The traffic was held up, the whole street waiting until we had the door closed behind us.

      Helen stood screaming in the front room.

      I took the children into the kitchen and started making pancakes.

      Her scream continued for a long time. It went back to the time when she was a child only five years of age herself. In Birmingham. The house on the corner with the buses going by and passengers looking in the windows. Her father at work, her mother in the kitchen with earrings on peeling potatoes. Helen standing on the street, the side gate had been left open, her younger sister was getting into the back of a car. The driver was holding a bag of sweets. Her other sister, no more than three, was climbing in to join her. It was a Wolseley with leather seats, their legs were dangling. And the housekeeper from Ennis running out when she heard the scream, making up for everything she had lost in her own life, the baby she had to leave behind in Ireland. She was shouting Holy Jesus. Mary mother. Reaching into the back of the car to clutch the two girls by the arms at the last minute before the car took off around the corner with the rear door swinging. The howling of tyres creeping like a wounded animal along the wall.

      The side gate was locked again.

      Was that the reason?

      The reason for going to Canada. The reason they could never speak of and for which they made up so many other happy reasons to go and live in a quiet place with a salt mine.

      Rosie and Essie ate the pancakes with yoghurt. Essie caught me sprinkling invisible sugar with my hand. Rosie spilled yoghurt on herself, on me, it was on the carpet, a pink footprint. I brought them to bed and read the book about the boy in the bakery at night getting milk to go into the cake for the morning. We sat up in bed for a long time, all four of us. Helen was clutching them, one on each side, rocking back and forth until they were asleep.

      It never occurred to me to get the groceries fallen on the ground in the street until a neighbour came to the door and handed them in to me without a word.

      In the house overlooking the salt mine, the phone rings around the hallway, into the kitchen, into the blue room with all the furniture brought over from Birmingham. It rings out onto the porch, as far as the white picket fence. Her mother has just left the house, on her way to the courthouse square to meet her friend. She puts on her sunglasses getting into the car. The lake has no meaning for her, the sunlight is full of scorn, the glare of things she wants to forget.

      The day is hot, the cicadas are deafening. There is a child cycling along the sidewalk, in and out of brightness under the trees, making a soft tapping sound along the concrete slabs. The neighbours are gradually moving a little further along their lives each time the child comes back around – a man gardening, a woman on the porch with ice cubes ringing, blue shouts coming from a swimming pool.

      Helen’s mother has attached herself to this Canadian town like a story made up out of nothing. She has turned her back on Birmingham. The city in which her children almost disappeared. The city of fog. Fog loitering in the streets. The sound of coughing and cars starting at night. The headlights of a bus pointing through a dense grey curtain, the doorbell ringing and the fog slowly coming up the stairs.

      The world is full of things that have not happened.

      Helen gave up trying to phone her mother and came back in. We sat on the floor in the front room. The curtains were left open. Her face was gold. Her eyes were green. Her hair was copper with the light coming in off the street.

      Was it wrong to feel lucky?

      We ate some of the leftover pancakes. We drank two bottles of Guinness each. We made love. The dog next door was barking. The people upstairs were laughing. The buses stopped running. I got up to check on the children. I stood watching them for a while with the light from the hallway across their faces. The force of them asleep was greater than all their time awake.

      My mother tells me that she was in hospital once. It was in Düsseldorf, she says, during the war. She started bleeding, maybe this is difficult for her to explain. She doesn’t tell me what exactly happened, only that she could not stop bleeding and was taken to hospital.

      In the room next door to her, she says, there was a man who kept screaming at night. He was a soldier, he had been stationed in the east. He was brought back injured, but the doctors could find nothing wrong with him, no medical explanation for his pain. He experienced terrible stomach cramps which made him vomit, he could not eat a thing. He crawled along the floor, he lay curled up in the corridor, the nurses had to lift him up and carry him back to his room. They said it might have been shell shock. He was more frightened than wounded, he couldn’t sleep, his arms and legs were shaking.

      There was a soldier filming all of this with a moving camera, the man said.

      The story went around the ward in a shocked whisper. The man was given an injection to calm him down. He continued speaking a while longer, then he was quiet. He was said to be delusional. Before the night was out, he was gone, his bed was vacant. The nurse said he had been discharged. There was no more talking, no more whispering, the story disappeared. My mother brought it to Ireland with her.

      The dental practice is across the street from the former veterinary surgery. The waiting room is still in use as a dining room, a table and chairs for eight people, magazines like place mats. In the corner, there is a cabinet full of crockery, a porcelain teapot. Above the fireplace, a large picture of a turf boat with dark brown sails.

      The surgery is in the living room, to the front, facing onto the main street. The dentist speaks to me at first in the native language, then he switches back to English. He’s from the North, from Derry. He smiles and flicks his head to one side as he speaks. He whispers

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