'I'm small, I'm tiny, like the smallest things, and everything is huge and I'm floating.'

'You mean everything else is huge.'

'Yes.'

'And is that frightening?'

'Yes.'

'And he won't eat,' his grandmother interrupted. 'I can't get him to eat.'

'Oh, he's well nourished,' the doctor said. 'I wouldn't worry about that.'

Declan was still staring ahead, thinking. 'I kind of forget the dream after I've had it,' he said.

The doctor said that Declan should move his bed into the room with Helen and maybe he'd feel safer then. 'A lot of boys have nightmares for a while like that and they just go away.' He pinched Declan's cheek.

Helen watched the post. The postman came at eleven. He delivered the newspaper as well, and if there was no post he dropped the newspaper in the door, but if there was post he knocked on the door, and handed the letters to her grandmother. Her mother's letters were short and vague; she used the same words each time. Helen wondered if her father were really having tests, why the tests could not be over, why they did not produce results.

One day \a151 she could not remember what month it was – a letter came from her mother which her grandmother did not show her and which later, when Helen asked about it, her grandmother told her did not arrive. Helen was sure it had been delivered and searched with her eyes over the mantelpiece where the letters were kept, but it was not there. Her grandmother knew how to hide things. And the next day she heard her grandmother whispering to Mrs Furlong, and she felt she understood the reason for the whispering: there was something in the letter which she could not be told.

In all the months in Cush – by this time, she was sure, they had been there for three or four months – Helen and Declan had never discussed how long they would be there or what was happening to them, but as soon as Declan brought up the subject they could not stop discussing it.

'Hellie,' he began one day over lessons in the parlour. 'I want to go home.'

'Ssh,' she said. 'She'll hear you.'

'I don't think they're in Dublin at all. I think they're in England or America.'

'Don't be silly.'

'Why has she never come down here?'

'Because she's visiting him in hospital.'

'Why has she not come even once?'

'Because we're all right here.'

'We're not all right.'

Helen told him nothing about the letter. She tried to talk him out of his new idea, but it became an obsession.

'I saw a programme about it on the television,' he said. 'The father and mother left their children behind.'

'Behind where?'

'In an orphanage.'

'This is not an orphanage.'

'What will happen when she needs the rooms for summer visitors?'

'They'll be back by then.'

'They're in England.'

'Declan, they're not.'

'How do you know?'

It was around the same period she heard the word 'cancer' for the first time. Her grandmother was talking to Mrs Furlong in the hallway and did not know that Helen was listening on the other side of the door.

'When they opened him up, they found that he was riddled with cancer,' she said.

Helen knew that if she asked a question she would get no answer. One day, when her grandmother had gone into Blackwater, she searched for missing letters, but she could not find any.

By now, Declan was consumed by the possibility of escaping.

'You could get a job in Dublin,' he said. 'We'd be much better off.'

'Where?'

'In Dunnes Stores, that's where you can work if you leave school.'

'I'm not even twelve.'

'How would they know?'

In the days that followed she looked at herself carefully when she was in the bathroom. She remembered the opening of the novel Desiree, where the heroine had placed handkerchiefs inside her blouse to look like breasts. Helen was tall for her age, and she wondered, if she claimed to be fourteen, would she be believed?

Something changed in the house as the days grew longer. Their grandmother's softening attitude towards them, the length of Mrs Furlong's visits, a long visit from Father Griffin, the curate in Blackwater, all convinced Helen that it was her father who was riddled with cancer, and this must mean that he was dying, or maybe needed another operation which would take longer. Although she and Declan talked about escaping and going to Dublin and Helen finding a job and a flat and Declan going to school, Helen always treated it like a game, a fantasy. Declan, however, took it seriously. He worked out plans.

'Declan, you've hardly even been in Dublin,' she said.

'I was loads of times. I know Henry Street and Moore Street.'

'But only for a day,' she said.

One evening, he came to her in her bedroom with an old brown leather wallet which was full of twenty-pound notes.

'Where did you get it?' she asked.

'He keeps it in the kitchen press in a hole,' Declan said.

'Leave it back.'

'We can use it when we escape. Now you know where it is.'

'Leave it back.'

Their father died in Dublin on 11 June. This seemed strange to her and even now, twenty years later, as she lay in bed in this house, wide awake, her grandmother upstairs asleep and Declan in hospital in Dublin, she had no memory of that early summer in Cush, of May passing into June. Some things, however, "were still sharp in her memory: the changed atmosphere in the house, at least two other letters arriving and not being mentioned, the smell of damp and paraffin. Years afterwards, she realised that her childhood ended in those few weeks, even though she did not have her first period until six months later.

She knew something had happened on that morning: early, it must have been around eight o'clock, a man arrived, she saw him passing by the window; he spoke to her grandparents and then he left. And then, not long afterwards, Father Griffin from Blackwater arrived. She decided to stay in bed until he had gone, and told herself it was still possible that something else, or nothing much, had happened. She lay there and waited. Declan was fast asleep in the other bed.

After a while she heard her grandmother tiptoeing across the parlour. She opened the door to the bedroom quietly and told Helen in a whisper to dress as quickly as she could.

When Helen came out of the bedroom her grandmother was standing by the window.

'Helen, we've bad news now; your father died last night at eleven o'clock. He died very peacefully. We'll all have to look after your mother now. You and Declan are going to go into Enniscorthy with Father Griffin.'

'Where are we going?'

'I've got clean clothes out for you. Mrs Byrne of the Square is going to look after you and Declan.'

Helen felt a sudden surge of happiness that they were leaving here and would never have to come back, but she quickly felt guilty for thinking about herself like this when her father had just died. She tried not to think at all. She went into the kitchen, where Father Griffin was drinking tea.

'We'll all kneel down and say a prayer for his soul,' her grandmother said.

Father Griffin led a decade of the Rosary. He said the words of the prayers slowly and deliberately and when he came to the Hail Holy Queen he recited the prayer as though the words were new to him: 'To Thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.' Softly, quietly, Helen began to cry, and her grandmother came over and knelt beside her until the prayers ended.

They sat and drank more tea in silence; her grandmother made toast and aired clothes.

'Why isn't Declan up?' Helen asked.

'Oh, I let him sleep, Helen. It'll be time enough for him when we're packed to go.'