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other people expressed affection, for
instance, Kathy Kelly was glib and brittle; she perfected a self-preserving shield of hard cynicism that was never lowered. Well, not never, she thought, casting her mind back as she sat going
through the family photos that night, then abruptly shaking her head to banish the memory that appeared. That was another file, another compartment. But that memory was itself proof, surely? Lower
your guard, even with someone you trusted as much as you did yourself, and look what could happen, what did happen. She thought of Con once again, lying against the white marble heart and crying,
and how her loathing for him at moments like that almost made her feel physically sick. The times she had found him lying by the grave and had wanted to take the bottle from his hand and crash it
down over his head, the recurring fantasy of digging a hole as far away from the unfortunate Kelly females as she could drag him and quietly dropping him into it. No one would know – who
would care?

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    It had taken a few years for her to wake up after Lily’s death, and even then it took another crisis in her life. Looking back, she had probably still been in shock; even
though the crisis came along five years later, it was why it had happened. She had always been able to look out for herself, she had no other choice, so it stood to reason that if she hadn’t
been knocked off course by Lily’s death there would have been no crisis. But there was no use thinking about that; it had happened. Funnily enough, Lily’s mother, Aggie, her
grandmother, had died around the same time, 1973, though that was no more than a coincidence, but it was one less tie to bind too. She had fought with her grandmother all her life, neither one of
them having a civil, let alone pleasant word to say to or about the other. Those battles had probably kept Aggie going, though Kathy didn’t think of that till years later, and during one of
those exchanges the old woman had handed her the single most amusing and valuable piece of information she could ever have hoped for. She had just told Aggie that she was going away, and Aggie was
telling her that she was a selfish bitch for leaving Con, for leaving her, come to that, and of course, God would strike her dead. It was always that; seemed to Kathy that Aggie’s God was
forever in the throes of indecision, caught between striking her dead or forgiving her. Then Aggie would cross herself with theatrical ceremony, as if that sealed the bargain. It was in the middle
of that argument she’d let it slip, in the heat of a particularly frank exchange of views, but Kathy was in no fit state to do anything about it then, she had more pressing problems to deal
with and so she had filed it away for future use. And the next day, before Kathy could execute her planned disappearance, Aggie had beaten her to it and gone herself, and Father McCabe had rushed
to her side, as he always had done. It wasn’t entirely unexpected really; any time she was refused what she wanted, usually by Kathy it had to be said, Aggie would threaten to go. ‘That
lassie will put me in ma grave!’ she’d shriek, her hand clasped over her eyes for effect, and Kathy would shout ‘Where’s the shovel? Ah’ll dae it right noo!’ So
when Kathy finally did what her brother had done many years before, but in Peter’s case with considerably less criticism, Con was left to his own devices, this time without even Aggie to
fight for him. Now Kathy’s leaving
had
been targeted at him, but as is often the way with those supposedly helpless and dependent, Con had survived perfectly well on his own, and in
the twenty years or so since, contact had been, now what could she say? Minimal, that was it, as little as she could get away with, of the ‘call me when you’re dead’ variety. But
instead of going quickly and cleanly he’d opted to play out his final scenes as slowly as possible, by the progressive