The hum of electric monitors softens the room. A stainless steel kidney dish rests lonely on the locker. Filled with necessities to maintain a flotsam of life sinking in an array of equipment. A cool waxy hand lies still over the pressed sheet needled marked and bruised.

Doris stares at the black and white clock on the wall watches the second hand rotate again and again. Remembering a time she had willed her body to be still A high pitch alarm agitates the quietness. The green light on the monitor flat lines. It was over.

She remembered hurriedly digging for worms frustrated that the awkward spade didn't go into the ground deep enough. Uncle Ed leaned on the doorpost smiling, shoved himself of it with his back and took the spade from her. The spade sliced the damp earth and rose. Disturbed worms were plucked from dark comfort and thrown into a jam jar that cherished the smell of raspberry jam. The rotten sweet smell haunting her nostrils since. She ran into her grandmother's old farmhouse and got her daddy's fishing rod from under the stairs. That summer day she was happy.

Her daddy had been a great fisherman. She remembered lying on grassy banks while midges attacked the air, drinking vegetable soup from a flask almost cold. Her father smoking in quietness studying the ripples that stirred on a silent lake. Heather swaying in the breeze around her while dragonflies coloured the reeds and frogs croaked in hoarseness. The line dragging in water the glint of silver underneath, the splash of water as the fish choked on air. Her father guiding the play of the fish, her lifting the green nylon net in anticipation and finally the heavy weight in it. Satisfaction and pride caressing the edges of her father's face. She was allowed to carry the fish home as his rough boots crunched the ground ahead. His tall frame a comfort to nature, pointing out the honeysuckle that scented the night summer air heavy with bees. Her mother had taken the fish into the kitchen and slapped them down on a wooden board. Its smell swallowing the air around it. Doris watched while she gutted them for tea tossed the heads to the cat that purred. The smoking sizzles as they hit the pan, the extra wrapped and given to neighbours.

That was before the screech of brakes, the twisted metal covered in gluey blood. Before the sirens, the confusion saw cutting metal freeing her from a tomb of steel. The scars tore her face in half. The grief clawed her mind when aged eleven she returned home from hospital to a house without a daddy.

The smog of grief clung to their lives, greyed their days and faded their dreams.

Mother was lost in a fog of woodbine and lay adrift in a waste of despair.

Summer stumbled into autumn and Doris turned twelve in darkness. Bills crept into a hiding place behind the clock on the mantelpiece. At night heavy knocks sounded on the door, as payments were demanded and they hid under the stairs. Winter cold and cruel twisted their minds with Christmas while the young ones ran the streets wild comforted with jam butties the neighbours gave. Rory coughed with fever and mother surfaced just to smoke.

Granny Burns showed up on a rainy day as the wind sighed from a broken sky.

Mother was brought into hospital amid whispered talk. For four weeks the old lady injected their lives with order. A month later doctors said she was too ill to go home and they were separated to aunts and uncles. Granny took in the rejects herself and Angela aged two.

Uncle Tom and Ed never married lived at home and were not used to children. Granny made it clear she was to look after Angela who loved living on a farm. Doris had to carry tea in urns to the potato gathers that ate their sandwiches out of plastic bread wrappers while counting their sacks of potatoes. She hated carrying the tea through the fields of cows, felt uneasy when they followed her. Scratched her legs and tore her clothes on the cursed briars. Doris had to feed the snapping geese that chased the strangers, the hens that scraped the muck and pigs that wallowed in filth.

Once uncle Ed killed a pig for a big party her granny was planning for the end of summer. It ran in circles squealing in dread. Granny said that was because pigs were intelligent and knew when they were going to be slaughtered. Uncle Ed straddled the pig and with a kitchen knife cut its throat while it thrashed and squealed in fear trying to escape. Granny caught the blood in a big enamel bowl and mixed it with oatmeal and a little whiskey. She said she made the best black pudding around. The pig lay in its squalor, terror screaming from its dead eyes while uncle Ed chopped and joked about the party.

Lights were tossed over the beams in the barn and chairs gathered from neighbours set out. Granny baked apple tarts by the dozen, potato bread and cakes, warming the kitchen with their smells. Doris was excited and granny had brought her into town and bought her a new outfit for the occasion, the colour of emeralds that sparkled when she walked. Angela had red ribbons in her hair and a dress to match. A man delivered several barrels of beer and granny got a bottle of perfume from a drawer and scented her tired wrists and neck.

It seemed like heaven that warm August night when a full moon shone bright and people danced and sang to a local band. She danced with both her uncles but it was uncle Ed who held her tight his breath sour with beer assaulting her nostrils. He squeezed her and she grew afraid while Angela danced to the clapping hands of strangers.

The night lost its tinsel as she stood awkwardly by the tables of food. Her fingertips toying with the cracks in the wood warmed from the sun.

Absentmindedly she ate the food without tasting. Granny told her to take it easy she might be sick at least she thought that was what she said.

She remembered that night she was sick. She vomited all over the pink vinyl bedspread, the blue flowery sheets. All night she lay still in the stench fear holding her capture in the filth. Granny was furious when she found her the nest morning dragged her from the bed and pushed her into the cold bathroom with its pink carbolic soap. From the bathroom she heard her granny changing sheets and talking about eating too much. Apple tart crusted with thick sugar granules warmed. Tart and sweet, she loved. She never ate apple tart again. Doris climbed detached into the cracked white bath with inches of water to save the electric. There was a small spider walking up the beige tiles, she watched it her mind lost in a wasteland of emptiness.

On Sundays she visited her mother. Her feet were crushed into the black patent shoes she used to love. Granny tugged Angela's hair back into a blue bow and washed her face with a green flannel. The prayer books were lifted out of the drawer and she held onto Angela's hand as Uncle Ed drove them to mass. After mass people came up and said look at the poor children and wasn't granny a woman with such a good heart to take them in at her time in life.

After dinner they were taken to the hospital. An austere grey building with narrow corridors holding the scent of disinfectant. Her mother lay at the end of a long ward white faced under white sheets while starched nurses adhered to strict routines. Mother lay in bed smiling weakly asking them to be good children and not to give granny any trouble. She wanted to tell her once, the words formed in her throat and she began but mummy said hush now don't be telling tales. She began to cry and held her mother's hand seeking comfort from a few inches of flesh but mother shook her hand away and told her not to be so silly.

Leaving the hospital that day was the hardest thing she ever had to do. She dragged her feet down those cold corridors looking behind her wanting to run back to her mother knowing she would not.

Not long after mother came home from hospital and though she looked the same she was different. Granny baked all day the day before.

Her brothers and sisters were returned and Doris and Angela left the farm.

She remembered waking up in the winter freezing and struggling into her clothes for warmth while downstairs the fire would be beginning to smoke Her dark dreams of bloodied pigs and slaughtered innocence scattering with the light. That day she had stood behind her mother in the working kitchen and watched her back bent over the Belfast sink enclosed in pink vinyl apron. It reminded her of the bedspread. Her mother's hands were deep in sudsy water.

"Mummy." She whispered "

There is something."

Her mother said

" Not now dear can you not see I am busy."

She didn't go to school that day. She sat on the grass bank overlooking the river choked with rubbish freezing in her bare legs. Doris spent the day throwing pebbles into dark water that absorbed every dream she ever had.

At tea that night her mother had fried vegetable roll dripping with lard, the red plastic still clinging to the cheap meat. Her silence was hidden by the squabble of the others her mother chastised her for not eating. As she knelt for the rosary that night the lingering smell of the food made her sick. She was sick for three weeks, her mother blessed her with holy water and then the bleeding started. It had terrified her. Mother had laughed

'You're just coming of age ' .

She remembered the pain, the endless pain, she screaming with pain. Her mother refused to call the doctor for something so simple.

'It will get better' her mother had said. The sickness stopped when the bleeding came.

Several years later her granny died. Doris had said she couldn't get time of her work to go to the funeral. Mother had been angry said some things that perhaps she shouldn't have said.

The phone call came last week, it was mother could she come home there was a bit of bad news in the family and she was at the hospital. Doris caught the train the following day watched endless fields pass by and hated every one.

Doris had thought it was her mother that was ill and not an uncle dying of cancer.

A nurse rushed in checked the alarms and Doris walked outside dazed.

"Is he gone?" Her mother asked.

Doris nodded yes walked past her aunties to the air outside. She vomited into a bin and sat on a bench and sobbed for a child lost in the shadows of yesterday.

Aunty Deirdre said she was taking it hard; she was his favourite niece after all.