There is a strangeness in arriving at a house as Sandrine did: suddenly, with two bags, to stay. The strangeness is that the house is already lived in, already functioning. There are schedules: the times people eat, sleep, wake, retreat to the television, bathe, run errands, listen for the post, stare at themselves with no recognition in a bathroom mirror after washing their hands. And into that schedule of life Sandrine arrived with her student visa and the silent pregnancy. It was hard to remember later what exactly she had expected. To find them not as mad as they'd been described to her in interviews? To find that these people, even if mad, might somehow help her? Tell her what she could do to remain in Ireland with her child? Or to find that she would be happy there, amongst madness?