The banshee was waiting for me at the bottom of the escalator in Tottenham Court Road tube station. If I'd known what she was, I'd have run a mile. But I didn't.

The tube station was packed with commuters, heads down and charging for the platforms, shoving aside anyone who got in their way. Still damp from the November night and blinking in the station's light they funnelled towards the escalators nudging and shuffling forward. Pressed together, there was something comforting in our shared heat and wisps of steam rose to the vaulted ceiling.

Amongst the commuters were squeezed crowds of babbling Italian children, each one carrying a backpack bearing the logo of a language school. Small groups of tourists, neat Japanese and badly dressed Americans, stopped in all the wrong places and looked hopefully upwards, perhaps hoping for the hand of god to direct them to The British Museum or Leicester Square.

I was one of the commuters. I tutted at the tourists and glared at the Italian kids, and I played the eye contact game as I rode down the escalator. I shifted my gaze along the lines of those riding up the other escalator, looking for a pretty girl, any girl, and trying to catch her eye. I liked making contact, maybe getting a smile. I'd never try and follow it up, I just loved the little thrill it brought.

No one looked up tonight. There was no thrill.

The escalator at Tottenham Court road ends in a hall in which the crowd divides. Some dive down further into the hell of the Northern Line. The rest go straight on to the Central Line. There is a tight press here, crowds grunting and struggling from the open space of the hall into the tight tunnels that lead to the trains. Eyes narrow. Teeth are bared. People become cruel in this space.

I was almost through the hall and into the tunnel leading to the Central Line before I noticed the old woman staring at me. She was leaning against the dirty cream tiles of the tube station's walls between a poster for Les Miserables and one for female sanitary products.

I assumed, at first, that she was one of those Romanian beggars who seem to have taken over all the best spots on the Underground. Her black shawl, rough skirt and age-lined face made her seem like a refugee from something.

"This one is for you," her voice was a thick Dublin brogue. Her eyes were fixed on mine. She pressed the play button on a portable stereo and started to sing.

The song was Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? It was the song Nuala and I danced to at our wedding. We chose it because it was next to our song, Brown Eyed Girl, on a Van Morrison album I owned and was slow enough so that we could shuffle together around a dancefloor to it.

The banshee didn't sound like Van Morrison. She crooned in the style of a Vegas cabaret act but her voice was high-pitched and warbling, like Whitney Houston on helium. I stopped and, like a tourist, stood and stared. I ignored the tuts and glares and shoves from my fellow commuters.

She didn't sing the whole song, just the first verse and the chorus twice. Then the song just kind of petered out, as though she'd forgotten the words but the taped music seemed to splutter and fade as her voice died.

We stared at each other, ignoring the rush of people between us. Then she grimaced, displaying rows of broken, black teeth.

"Fuck off!" she shouted and dived into the crowd towards the escalator.

I stood for a moment, bewildered, then made to follow her. I was suddenly certain that she knew something. Something I needed to know. But she was gone. She wasn't on the escalator. I couldn't see her anywhere. Confused, I shrugged and rejoined the flow of commuters to the train and the slow crawl back to Ealing Broadway.

*

That night, sitting in our little flat in Webster Gardens, I told Nuala about the weird woman and the singing.

"You are an eedjit, Dermot, so you are," she said. Her Cavan accent had never softened even after years in England.

Then she laughed. She laughed really hard. And the laughter turned into a coughing fit. And the coughing fit brought up blood.

Six weeks later, Nuala died.

In a way I was glad.

It was cancer. It probably started in her lungs. I could never get her to give up smoking. It was already in her intestines and in her marrow by the time it spread to her throat and became obvious.

Nuala went downhill so quickly that within weeks she had stopped being the woman I had first loved. She no longer resembled the pretty girl who looked at me from the wedding picture on our wall. She no longer laughed or smiled. She hardly ever spoke. All she could do was suffer.

They blamed cancer but the radiation and the drugs killed my Nuala long before her body stopped working.

When they couldn't pump morphine into her quickly enough to dull the pain, they gave her just enough to make sure the pain stopped forever.

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