Which necessity will also bring me to a task long avoided, which is to establish what circumstances brought in some of the patients, and whether indeed, as was tragically true in some cases, they were sectioned for social rather than medical reasons. Because I am not so great a fool as to think that all the 'lunatics' in here are mad, or ever were, or were before they came here and learned a sort of viral madness. These people are perceived by the all-knowing public at large, or let us say public opinion as it is mirrored in the newspapers, as deserving of 'freedom' and 'release'. Which may be very true, but creatures so long kennelled and confined find freedom and release very problematic attainments, like those eastern European countries after communism. And similarly there is a weird reluctance in me to see anyone go. Why is that? The anxiety of the zoo keeper? Can my polar bears do as well at the pole? I suppose this is a reductive thought. Well, we will see.

In particular I will have to approach my old friend Mrs McNulty, who is not only the oldest person in this place, but in Roscommon itself, perhaps even Ireland. She was old when I got here thirty years ago, although at that time with the energy of, I don't know what, a force of nature. She is a formidable person and though long periods have gone by when I have not seen her, or only tangentially, I am always aware of her, and try to ask after her. I am afraid she is rather a touchstone for me. She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life. 'The star to every wandering bark,' as Shakespeare has it. My marriage troubles with poor Bet, my spirits lowering, plummeting, betimes, my feeling of not getting on, my this, my that – my companionable stupidity, I suppose. While things have ineluctably changed, she has remained the same, if grown of course weaker and slighter as the years go on. Is she a hundred now? She used to play the piano down in the recreation room, really very expert songs, jazz tunes of the twenties and thirties.

I don't know how she knew them. But she used to sit there, with her long silver hair flowing freely down her back, in one of those awful hospital gowns, but looking like a queen, and though she was seventy then, very striking in the face. Really quite beautiful still, and God knows what she must have looked like when she was young. Extraordinary, a sort of manifestation of something unusual and maybe alien in this provincial world. When a mild rheumatism – she wouldn't allow the word, she called it 'a reluctance' in her fingers – set in in later years, she stopped playing the piano. She might have played almost as well, but almost as well didn't suit her. So we lost the sound of Mrs McNulty playing jazz.

As a matter of record, that piano, assailed by woodworm, was later thrown out on a skip with an enormous unmusical clang.

So now I will have to go in and tackle her about this and that. I am unaccountably nervous about it. Why should I be nervous? I think it is because she is so senior to me, and if given to great silences, an extremely agreeable presence, like the company of an older colleague that one reveres. I think that is it. Maybe it is because I have a suspicion she likes me, just as much as I like her. Though why she does I don't know. I have harboured a curiosity about her, but I have never delved into her life, though perhaps as a professional psychiatrist that should be a black mark against me. Nevertheless, there it is, she likes me. Yet I would not trouble that liking, the condition of it I mean, for the world. So I must tread carefully.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.

When I was ten or so my father in a fit of educating enthusiasm brought me to the top of the long thin tower in the graveyard. It was one of those beautiful, lofty slim buildings made by monks in a time of danger and destruction. It stood in a nettled corner of the graveyard and was not much remarked on. When you had grown up in Sligo it was just there. But no doubt it was a treasure beyond compare, put up with only a murmur of mortar between the stones, each one remembering the curve of the tower, each one set in with perfect success by ancient masons. Of course it was a Catholic yard. My father had not got that job because of his religion, but because he was deeply liked in the town by all and sundry, and the Catholics did not mind their graves being dug by a Presbyterian, if it was a likeable one. Because in those days there was often much greater ease between the churches than we give credit for, and it is often forgotten that under the old penal laws in vanished days the dissenting churches were just as harried, as he often liked to point out. At any rate, there is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship. And it was only later that this distinction in him made any difference. At any rate I know he was exceedingly liked by the parish priest, a little perky darting man called Father Gaunt who loomed so large later in my own story, if a small man can be said to loom large.

Those were the days just after the first war, and maybe in those ditches of history as it were, minds turn to strangenesses, quirks of education such as he was bent on that day with me. Otherwise I cannot explain why a grown man would take his child to the top of an old tower with a bag of hammers and feathers.

All of Sligo, river, churches, houses, radiated out from the foot of the tower, or so it seemed from the little window at the top. A passing bird might have seen two excited faces trying to peer out at the same time, myself heaping my weight onto my toes and bumping the underside of his chin.

'Roseanne, dearest, I shaved already this morning, and you won't shave me anyhow with the top of your golden head.'

For it was true I had soft hair like gold – like the gold of those selfsame monks. Yellow as the gleams in old books.

'Pappa,' I said, 'for the love of all things, drop the hammers and feathers and let's see what's what.'

'Oh,' he said, 'I am weary from the climb, let's just scope our eyes over Sligo before we attempt our experiment.'

He had waited and chosen a windless day for his work. He wished to prove to me the ancient premise that all things fall at the same rate, in the realm of theory.

'All things fall at the same rate,' he had said, 'in the realm of theory. And I will prove it to you. I will prove it to myself.'

We had been sitting by the spitting anthracite of our fire.

'All may fall at the same rate, as you say,' my mother piped up from her corner. 'But it's the rare thing rises.'

I do not think this was a cut at him, but just an observation. At any rate he looked over at her with the perfect neutrality she herself was mistress of and had taught him.

It is strange to me writing this here in this darkened room, scratching it all out in blue biro ink, somehow to see them in my mind's eye, or somewhere behind my eyes, in the darkened bowl of my head, still there, alive and talking, truly, as if their time was real time and mine was an illusion. And it touches my heart for the thousandth time how beautiful she is, how neat, agreeable and shining, with her Southampton accent like the pebbles on the beach there disturbed by the waves, rushing, shushing, a soft sound that sounds in my dreams. It is also true that when I was bold, when she worried that my path was veering from the path she wanted for me, even in small matters, she was wont to whip me. But in those times children were routinely hit.