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force tears down her cheeks despite her enormous effort to keep them back. She did not give in to whatever it was. She kept thinking, attempting to work out what was causing this new feeling that was like despondency, that was like how she felt when her father died and she watched them closing the coffin, the feeling that he would never see the world again and she would never be able to talk to him again.

She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.

In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them linger so that she would not have to open her eyes and see the room. One of the dreams was about the courthouse at the top of Friary Hill in Enniscorthy. She remembered now how much the neighbours had dreaded the day when the court sat, not because of the cases that were reported in the papers of petty theft, or drunkenness, or disorderly behaviour, but because sometimes the court ordered children to be taken into care, put into orphanages or industrial schools or foster homes because they mitched from school or caused trouble or because of problems with their parents. Sometimes, inconsolable mothers could be found screaming, howling outside the courthouse as their children were taken away. But her dream had no screaming women, just a group of silent children, Eilis among them, standing in a line, knowing that they would soon be led away on the orders of the judge.

What was strange for her now as she lay awake was that she had seemed to be looking forward to being led away, she had felt no fear of it. Her fear, instead, was of seeing her mother in front of the courthouse. In her dream she found a way of avoiding her mother. She was taken out of the line, and through a side door and then on a car journey that appeared to last as long as she could stay asleep.

She got up and used the bathroom very quietly; she thought that she would have breakfast in one of the diners on Fulton Street, as she had seen people do on her way to work. Once she was dressed and ready, she tiptoed out of the house. She did not want to meet any of the others. It was only half past seven. She would, she thought, sit somewhere for an hour, having a coffee and a sandwich, and then go to work early.

As she walked, she began to dread the day. Later, as she sat at the counter of a diner looking at a menu, snatches of another dream that she had only half remembered when she woke came to her. She was flying, as though in a balloon, over the calm sea on a calm day. Below, she could see the cliffs at Cush Gap and the soft sand at Ballyconnigar. The wind was propelling her towards Blackwater, then the Ballagh, then Monageer, then Vinegar Hill and Enniscorthy. She was lost so much in the memory of this dream that the waiter behind the counter asked her if she was all right.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You look sad,” he replied.

She shook her hair and tried to smile and ordered a coffee and a sandwich.

“Cheer up,” he said in a louder voice. “Come on, cheer up. It’ll never