So I told Claire about my condition and she was staggered. In other circumstances it might have been funny, but at the time nobody was finding anything amusing. Claire actually cried and, peculiarly, I ended up comforting her. ‘It’s very sad,’ she wept unconsolably. ‘You’re so young.’

Through her welfare officer, Claire was able to get information for me and Shay, and with unexpected ease the arrangements were made. A load lifted off me –I wouldn’t have to have the baby and face the consequences – and then a whole host of new, horrific worries bobbed to the surface. I’d been brought up as a Catholic, but somehow I’d managed to avoid a lot of the accompanying fear and guilt. I’d always thought God must be a decent kind of bloke and I’d only suffered mild agonies of guilt about having sex with Shay because I figured He wouldn’t have given us an appetite if He didn’t want us to use it. It had been a long time since I’d believed in Hell, but all of a sudden I started to wonder, and reactions that I didn’t recognize as mine began to play out.

‘Am I doing something terrible?’ I asked Claire, dreading the answer. ‘Am I… a murderer?’

‘No,’ she reassured me. ‘It’s not a baby yet. It’s only a bunch of cells.’

I clung uneasily to that thought as Shay and I got the money together. It wasn’t hard for me because I was a saver, and it wasn’t hard for him because he was a charmer. And on a Friday evening in April – my parents under the impression that I was on a study weekend with Emily – Shay and I left for London.

Plane fares were out of our price range, so we went by ferry. It was a long journey – four hours on the boat, then six on the bus – and I sat bolt upright for most of the way, convinced I’d never sleep again. Somewhere outside Birmingham I nodded off on Shay’s shoulder and I remember waking up as the bus was driving past red-bricked mansion blocks in a London suburb. It was spring and the trees were startlingly green and the tulips were out. Even to this day, I shy away from London. Whenever I have to go there, I relive those feelings, my first glimpse of the place. Those red-bricked mansion blocks are ubiquitous and I always wonder, Were these the ones I saw?

I rose back into consciousness, like swimming to the surface, and I heard myself crying. A noise that I’d never before made was tearing itself from my gut. Stunned and still part-anaesthetized, I lay and listened to myself. I’d stop soon.

And pain. Was there pain? I checked, and yes, there was, a low-down, pulling cramp. When I’d finished letting these yelps come out of me, I’d do something about the pain. Or maybe someone would come. In this hospital that wasn’t a hospital, surely a nurse who wasn’t a nurse would hear me and come.

But no one came. And almost dreamily, as if someone else was making those sounds, I lay and listened. I must have fallen back to sleep, and the next time I woke I was silent. Bizarrely, I felt almost OK.

*

On Saturday evening, when Shay collected me and brought me to the B&B where we were spending the night, he was immensely tender. I was relieved, yet I cried – only when it was all over and safe could I afford to let myself get sentimental about the baby. For some reason I’d decided that the baby had been a boy, and as I wondered out loud if he would have looked like me or him, Shay was clearly uncomfortable.

We left for Ireland on Sunday morning, arriving back that evening. Unbelievably, less than two days since I’d left, I was back in my bedroom, where everything looked deceptively –almost bafflingly – normal. My little desk was piled high with textbooks requiring my urgent attention. This was my future, it had never gone away, all I had to do now was re-embrace it. Immediately, in fact that very night, I knuckled down and threw myself into my work, it was only six weeks to my exams. But over the following days, weird stuff began to happen. I could hear babies crying everywhere – when I was in the shower, when the bus was moving – but when the water stopped running or the bus came to a halt, the faint wailing stopped too.

I tried to tell Shay, but he didn’t want to know. ‘Forget it,’ he urged. ‘You feel guilty but don’t let it beat you. Think about the exams instead. Just a few weeks to go.’

So I swallowed my need to talk about it, to convince myself I’d done the right thing, and instead forced myself to list how many hours of study I’d managed. When the urge to talk about our baby got very bad, I’d ask Shay something about Hamlet or the early poetry of Yeats and he’d earnestly explain, mostly regurgitating study guides.

I got through the suspended animation of exam time and then it was all over. I’d left school, I was an adult, my life was about to begin. While we waited for our results, Shay and I were almost never apart. We watched a lot of telly together –even on the warm, sunny days when the celebratory sunshine made the corduroy couch and brown carpet look ridiculous, we stayed inside and watched the box.

We never had sex again.

Mid-summer, we got the results of our Leaving Cert – Shay did brilliantly and I did badly. Not disastrously, but I’d worked so hard that everyone’s hopes for me had been high. My parents were confused and immediately set about reducing my failure into something unimportant. How were they to know that I’d spent the last six weeks before the exams sitting in my room straining to hear imaginary babies crying behind the ring of a burglar alarm?

The aftermath lingered for a very long time. Almost from the moment I was no longer pregnant, guilt and regret arrived and I began to think that having the baby wouldn’t have been so bad. (Although I was just about together enough to understand that if I was still pregnant, I’d be yearning not to be.)

Contradictions pulled me this way and that. I felt I’d had the right to have an abortion – but I was still bothered by horrible uneasiness. No matter how cleanly I lived the rest of my life, till the day I died this would always be with me. I couldn’t exactly find the right description: ‘sin’ was the wrong word, because that was about breaking someone else’s laws. But a part of me would always be broken and I would always be a person who’d had an abortion.

I felt so trapped by this irreversibility that I thought about killing myself. Only for a few seconds, but for that short time I sincerely wanted to. It was like being shackled to something shameful and painful for ever. Not like having points on your licence or a criminal record that lapses after five years or ten. It could never be fixed. It would never be fixable.