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Because she was worried, naturally, and she found it difficult to concentrate. Apart from a few articles in the newspapers, I think she had trouble absorbing too much news. She was more interested in seeing things first-hand now, listening to people. She couldn’t write. She didn’t see the point in putting things down any more. She had no time for things that were made up, she couldn’t read a novel or watch a movie, for example, there was no time for anything invented.
    Only
Don Carlo
, because it was so personal to her.
    She offers me a Xanax in the car, as if I need it. She starts laughing and shaking her see-through plastic bag around. Like she’s offering around mints or chocolate. Here, would anybody like a Xanax? Manfred ignores her. He’s in his own world and remains focused on the driving. Anyway it’s not something that should be given to a person operating machinery. I don’t need one either, but she says it will do me no harm, why not? So I take one for a laugh, see if it does anything for me.
    I tell her that my daughter, Maeve, is getting married.
    That’s great news, Liam.
    She thinks I’m obsessed with my daughter. She doesn’t like me going on too much about Maeve all the time, I can understand that, because she has no children herself and this whole father and daughter thing gets to her a bit. I think it makes her feel excluded. She usually tells me to shut up. So I give her the details in brief, the wedding is planned for August.
    That’s very soon, she says.
    You’ll be getting an invitation, I tell her.
    Thanks, she says.
    And then I realize what I’ve just said. There’s not a hope in hell of her being able to attend the wedding. Maybe it’s the Xanax. It must be making me feel more like myself.
    I’m coming, she says.
    But it’s three months away.
    I’ll be there, Liam. Whether I’m dead or alive. Where are they having it?
    It seems like the future has abandoned her, all these things carrying on in her absence.
    The wedding, Liam? Where are they having it?
    On the farm, I tell her, his farm, Shane. It’s his mother and father, they’re very keen to have a wedding on the farm. They have these great barns and the ruins of an old church on their land. They want to have the wedding in the old ruins and then I suppose they’re intending to get a marquee, just in case of the weather. It’s a fully working farm, with live cattle and so forth. But knowing Shane, he will get that all fixed up, taking into account the wedding guests and their clothes and shoes, I would imagine. At least, that is what they’re talking about.
    A farm wedding, she says. I would love to be there.
    She once showed me a photograph of herself when she was the same age as Maeve. No more than twenty-four years old, twenty-five at the most. With lots of curls. It was taken before she went to London, before she worked as a chambermaid, when she was getting out, leaving her family and her country behind. With no fear and no idea what was coming. I wish I had met her then, the life in her. She must have been great fun in that photograph, full of danger and up for anything, all kinds of things not even thought up yet. The look in her eyes. Staring right at you. I think it was the eyebrows you noticed most. Striking, you would have to say, drawn by a child. Her eyes look like they had great questions to ask.
    She has the same eyes in Berlin. They are the eyes of a twenty-four-year-old girl, with the eyebrows left intact, even though all her hair is gone from radiation and her lungs are working very hard and she can’t get enough air to say all the things she still wants to tell me.
    She talks about a place she once went to which was great for the lungs. The salt mine she went to visit in Romania, in Transylvania. It was an active salt mine, fully operational, but all the people with bad lungs came there because the salt dried the air for them. That’s when she was travelling with Noleen. Herself and Noleen, they