Whenever he was sad or ill his thoughts would return to Nellie and what had happened to her; in the hospital he would tell and retell Nellie’s story. He was eleven years old when he’d found the mare caught up in barbed wire at the top of the bog. He’d unloosed her and walked her home and he and his father hoisted her then in a sling to the joists of a barn, where, all summer long they lovingly nursed her back to health. Clare noticed how her father would always build the story up so as to make clear the message of a good deed returned: ‘When she was well she bolted only once, with us out after her. And the second we left, lightning struck the barn and it burst into flames. Had Nellie not done that, me and my father would have died inside that barn.’ Now her father was asking for the stories he had written. He said they were in a red box brought over from London when the family had returned to Ireland. When he first mentioned the box Clare had thought him delirious for it had never arrived; he’d left it behind him years ago in their council flat in north London, the keys of which he had illegally sold to a friend of his for a thousand pounds.
