The Forgotten Waltz

Crying in the Chapel

WE HAVE BEEN waiting, all week, for the snow. The cold came first. The air thrilled to it. Even indoors, the rooms felt bigger, their edges seemed more clear. The whole country was in a tizz. There were thirteen accidents on the back roads of Leitrim, there was black ice in Donegal. On Tuesday we watched the snow closing London down, covering the Cotswolds, building on the rails of the bridge into Anglesey, and melting, as if to prove its stealth, in the grey Irish Sea. It was snowing in Britain; it would snow here too.

Yesterday morning, the light was softer, the walls seemed to have moved closer in. Seán got out of bed and opened the curtains on the back garden, as though he was looking for something and I caught it, then – unbearably faint – the high, sweet smell of approaching snow.

Seán said he didn’t know you could smell snow. He gave me a ‘crazy girl’ look as he went out on to the landing and snapped the string on the bathroom light. I heard it bounce against the mirror, once, twice. Then a silence so complete he might have ceased to exist. I looked at the place where he had stood at the window, and noticed the frost flowering along the edges of the pane.

The place is freezing.

The duvet, at least, is light and thick. It is easy to slide my legs into the warmth he has left, to take his pillow and turn it over to the cool side, and add it to my own.

I lie there watching the familiar square of day, with its new edge of lace: our breath, the sweat of our bodies, gathered in a crystal fog, that grew overnight into fronds and florets of ice.

The room faces east. I know, as well as anything, the sparse dawn light, but the trees this morning are a denser green, the clouds are low and bruised with the colours of unshed snow.

I am back, through no fault of my own, in the house where I grew up. It is the fifth of February – twenty-one months, to the day, since my mother sat down on the path with her coat fanned out around her. And still there are rooms I can barely bring myself to open. Not that we are living here. We are just sorting things out. Seán, especially, is not living here, though it is nearly a year, now, since he washed up at the door. We are in between things. We are living on stolen time. We are in love.

Next door in the bathroom, Seán sighs and, after a waiting pause, starts to pee. There is another pause when he is finished, or seems finished. Then a last little rush; an afterthought. It worries me, this sense of difficulty, surely there should be nothing simpler than taking a leak? And I remember my own father leaning like a plank over the toilet bowl, his hand braced against that bathroom wall, the side of his face nuzzled into his arm. Waiting.

‘God this place is cold,’ says Seán’s voice.

He flushes the toilet and then appears back in the room to lift a dressing gown from the hook on the door. The dressing gown is a plaid design in thick grey towelling, that smells like it needs to be washed. I mean, when it is cold, it smells like this. When it is warm, it smells of Seán.

He puts it on over his pyjamas of striped jersey cotton.

Even when it is not about to snow, Seán wears pyjamas in bed. It is a habit he got into, he says, after Evie was born – not that she is around to see, except at the weekends. Even so, he walks around decent, and the world rests uncorrupted, thank goodness, by his nakedness.

The slippers are brown leather mules that slap as he walks about the room. He roots through his gym bag and shakes his dirty gear into the laundry basket. He goes back to the bathroom to get his shower gel and a fresh towel and when the bag is zipped and done, he drapes a jacket over it. I have weaned him off the suits, but there is still something too perfect about his shirts. He sends them out, now, at enormous expense, after the morning when he took one out of the wardrobe and said, in a puzzled voice, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’

So the shirts come out of the chest of drawers now, and the cardboard ends up in a heap on top of it, and the little pins end up on the floor.

‘I’ll get the man again,’ I say.

‘God it’s fucking freezing,’ he says, shuffling out of one leather slipper and then the other, as he drops the pyjama bottoms and, with a staggered hop, gets into his underpants.

‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ he says, while the radiator gives an intestinal groan and something judders, downstairs.

I don’t mind if he wears pyjamas at the weekend. I don’t mind if he wears pyjamas every night of the week. We are in love. He can wear what he likes. Even so, I wonder if there was a time when he walked this room naked; was there a day last summer, when I saw him silhouetted against the window light? Because the most foolish thing about Seán’s bare flesh is its purity. And though I have lusted after him mightily, in my time, it was always about getting him to the point where his body is as simple as it wants to be; as cruel, or as easy. There is very little about it, I would have thought, to frighten a child.

‘What am I thinking?’ he says. ‘I’m in Budapest.’

‘Today?’

‘Just tonight. Just to sort it out.’

‘I don’t mind,’ I said.

He takes his trolley bag down from the top of the wardrobe, then changes his mind and puts an extra shirt into his gym bag, which he then takes out again.

‘What am I doing? What am I doing here?’

‘Where are you staying, the Gellert?’

‘I can’t face the Gellert,’ he says.

I don’t know if this is a compliment to me or not. We had a weekend there, sometime last year, before the arse fell out of the Hungarian forint. It seems a long time ago now. You could actually see Seán’s apartment up the river, a row of three beautiful nineteenth-century windows on the far bank. He had rented the place out to a guy who claimed to be an importer of mobile phones – and maybe he was. He is, in any case, gone now, along with four months’ unpaid rent. That long-ago weekend – just last year, as I say: August 2008, when everything was still to play for – Seán finished the paperwork and slapped the phone importer’s back, and we went off to spend the afternoon down in the Gellert’s hot springs. We paddled about the beautiful old pool, then went our separate ways: him to the naked men and me to the naked, mostly old, women, every shape and size of them, who groaned as they eased themselves into the gentle waters, or slapped it towards them in small waves, gathering solace. I don’t think we made love in Budapest. We made money, of course, or Seán made money, but there was too much history downstairs, soaking in the hot pools and plunging into the cold. Too many sagging thighs and bald pubic mounds and yellow stomachs, with their stretch marks of ancient silver. In the middle of it all were two California Girls, with water up over the tips of their beautiful fake breasts, who looked about them appalled; like this is all so wrong, there must be someone they could sue.

Or we thought Seán was making money. It turns out he was actually losing money. But you know, it still felt good.

I don’t think he liked the baths, though. ‘Talk about Midnight Express,’ he said – meaning that Turkish prison movie from the seventies. We talked all evening, and we stayed too late in the hotel bar, and he fell asleep still holding the remote control.

‘There’s an Ibis out by the airport.’

He has a third bag now, hauled out from the bottom of the wardrobe, a knock-off Bally he got in Shanghai. The bed is covered with luggage.

‘No, don’t do that,’ I say. ‘Stay in town.’

And he stands there, looking at it all.

‘Jesus, it’s cold.’

He slaps over to the wardrobe and comes back to the bed empty-handed. Then he grabs his clean gear out of the gym bag and says, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just come back.’ And he starts to put the tracksuit on.

Seán’s legs are white. The hair has rubbed away from his shins and calves – not a thing I would have noticed, until I saw him one day in front of the mirror, craning around to check, like a woman with crooked seams.

‘I’ll do a quick gym.’

‘Good luck.’

‘I’ll be back in a bit.’

‘I’m gone too,’ I say. ‘Dundalk.’

‘Don’t make me jealous.’

He kisses me, quickly, as I lie there in the bed.

‘If we make it, either of us, through the snow,’ I say.

And he goes. No breakfast. The scrape of the garage door, with his bicycle being pushed through it.

An empty space in front of a window. A wilderness on the glass, of encroaching ice. The smell of snow.

I am late, myself, now. I lie there for a second, then another second, and am out from under the duvet and into the bathroom before he has joined the flow of traffic on Templeogue Road.

I twist the knob on the shower and go to brush my teeth while the water warms, turning the light on over the mirror.

Rrr-chink.

That string – the little plastic doo-dah at the end of it is chipped, and the string is knotted underneath to hold it on – it is eating itself with knots, crawling higher up the wall, and the twine itself is dense with whatever is left by twenty, thirty years of human fingers, as we approach that mirror, and pull it down. Rrr-chink! I am so intimate with the sound of it, and the silence that follows as we acknowledge the image that meets us in the glass, and allow it, a little grudgingly, to be ourselves.

Remember me?

No.

The cleanest place in the house, that mirror; the way it refuses to hold the past. I leave it to the blank contemplation of the far wall, step into the shower-stall, and drag the door closed: the same metal pipe squirting water at its base, the same shower head. New water though; nice and hot.

The towel, with a pattern of pink roses and mint-green leaves, is nearly as old as I am, and still soft. But most of the family stuff is gone, and I rarely use what is left of it. We sleep in Fiona’s old room, which seems a little odd – but less odd, somehow, than my childhood bed, which is next door to my mother’s old bed, which was once my father’s bed too. The spare room is for Evie. So we make love in this one place, the rest of the house remains inviolate. I take up only two drawers in the chest of drawers, and Seán takes the other two. We live on the sound of my mother’s old radio, our laptops, one clapped-out TV. We leave very little trace.

This is, surprisingly, easier for Seán who would rather have nothing than the wrong thing – and this is part of his snobbery too.

‘Don’t be such a snob,’ I say.

‘Why not?’ he said once and I said, ‘It’s so ageing.’

I love Seán. I am in love with Seán. I only punish him to keep him by my side. The cufflinks are gone, the Ray-Bans are forgotten in the glove compartment. He cycles into work now, his iPod playlist is a joy to behold. And in the middle of the night I help him kick off the pyjamas. I place my foot between his thighs and push them down.

The empty bedroom makes me want him again. I go to the wardrobe and pick out something he likes, even though he will not see me wearing it. I take his perfume from the bedside locker – the gift of rain – and grab the laundry basket on my way downstairs.

Halfway down, I step over some version of myself; a girl of four or six, idling or playing in the place most likely to trip people up. This is where children sit, I know this now; how they love doorways, in-between places, the busiest spot. This is where they go vague and start to dream.

Oh for God’s sake.

My mother’s shoes are some posh colour that is hard to name; sable, or taupe. Her arms are full of clean clothes.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I go about on her familiar track and I find it all comforting and sad; the jolt in the neck of the tap as the water hits; the aimless click of the ignition waiting for the gas to light.

Whomp.

The washing machine is the new one she bought, after the old one that gave her so much trouble. I know she found it hard to build up a full load. A lot of her stuff was dry clean only; it is possible, in that last year, that the machine was not much used. Or so I thought when I opened the wardrobe in her bedroom and caught the thin, sour smell of abandoned clothes.

‘Old age doesn’t smell much,’ she said once, in her arch way. And she was right. But it does smell a little.

It was some time before we opened the cupboards and the drawers. Shay said nothing could be touched for two weeks – something to do with probate, though I am sure we left it for nearly four. A month at least, to let the place fade a little, before we could begin to dismantle her life; divvy it up and throw it away. Then the surprise to find that it had not actually faded. All her things were just as she had them; bright and clean and particular. It was too hard. She liked all that Scandinavian stuff and I brought it back from my travels: a reindeer holding candles in its antlers, paper stars I bought in Stockholm, a beautiful wooden platter. The place was frayed at the edges, of course, the flooring a little clapped out, the fittings and fixtures, as the estate agents have it, in need of renewal. But she painted the rooms in those floating northern colours between blue and green: aqua, Pale Powder, Borrowed Light. She did it herself, the lines were not quite true. I wonder why she didn’t get the painters in and where the money went: school fees, college, Armani jackets. All fur coat and no knickers, that’s the Moynihans for you, though when you think about it, the home-improvements thing didn’t happen until recently. Fiona, who for weeks at a time sees more of her plumber than her husband – that’s all new.

We went in together, to clear her things away. We met at the corner and walked down, as we used to do from school. Fiona is, in fact, the same weight she was in sixth year, though motherhood has settled in her gait and her hair colour has brightened over the years from mouse-brown to a more glamorous afghan-hound.

I don’t know what I looked like. If you asked me my age, in the weeks after Joan died, I would not have been able to say. I seemed to shift from hour to hour around some heavy, unchanging thing. I felt ancient. I felt like a child.

We looked to each other, at the front door. Fiona deferred and I put my version of the key in the lock, and we walked in to the smell of our childhoods, and the bright, neat hall.

We didn’t, in fact, sort Joan’s things. We went, as though by agreement, to our old bedrooms at the back of the house, and we sorted our own. I had a roll of bin bags and I filled two of them with fluffy toys, books, belts, beads and shoes. Only a mother could love this tat, I thought, wondering what Joan saw when she looked at this faded plastic – some happiness of her own, some childhood, that was not quite my childhood. I had lost this too.

I knotted my bags and left them on the landing, ready for the skip. Fiona took hers with her out to the car.

‘You’re not going to hang on to all that?’ I said. And she said, No, she would take them home and throw them out there.

‘Right,’ I said.

It was hard, after that first occasion, to find a suitable time. Between Megan’s maths homework and Jack’s eczema, Fiona just could not get away. I was busy at work, catching up. So the house sat on, unburgled, while the smell in Joan’s wardrobe turned sour.

There was no one to look after us. We needed someone to help us go through her things: her navy Jean Muir and the Agnès B cardigans; the Biba and early Jaeger; all the stuff she bought that famous year she spent in London before my father met her and courted her and brought her back home.

Isn’t that what men are for? To tell you it’s only a skirt, for God’s sake, it’s only an old blouse. But the men left us to it, and even if they hadn’t, the fact was that neither Shay nor Conor were up to the job. They didn’t matter enough. They could not keep us safe from each other, as we took out her Sybil Connolly evening stole, or the little ostrich-feather shrug, and said, ‘No you have it,’ ‘No you.’

It was more than a question of timing, is what I am saying, though timing is what we think about now.

Outside in the garden, tethered to the gate with some vicious, strong wire, the For Sale sign stands; bright and square and always new. It was hammered in there seventeen months ago, give or take. There is no point arguing about it. Anyone can do the dates. Anyone can do the sums. It is what it is – that’s what I say. It is what it is. Our mother died in May 2007. She was dead all day. She would be dead for the rest of that week. And the week after that, she would be dead too. It was no longer, for Joan, a question of timing.

And anyway, we thought – we were in the habit of thinking – that the longer you left it, the better. Just that February, Mrs Cullen’s down the road went Sale Agreed at ‘nearly two’. That is how you spoke about these things that spring, during the last furious buying before all the buying stopped, when the word ‘million’ was too real and dirty to say out loud. Way back in the good old days, when my mother was alive, and everyone drank in the streets and, if you wanted your kitchen tiled (and we wanted little else), you had to fly the workman in from England, and put him up in a hotel.

Shay brought us to the solicitor’s, sometime in early June. We sat in his office in town and let this stranger with his fine, clean hands go through a file marked ‘Miles Moynihan’ and opine, in the casual after-chat, that once probate was cleared we would probably ask for ‘two and a bit’.

Then we paid him. A big whack of money. We paid the estate agent too. Nearly two years on, I don’t like any of these people.

But at the time, I was almost grateful. If you’re going to spin your grief into cash – what the hell – maybe it helps if the cash is crazy. We left his office and walked in silence down the granite steps. Fiona said, ‘Nice hands.’

‘He was wearing Alexander McQueen shoes,’ I said. ‘Did you see? Tiny little skulls in the leather.’

‘What does that mean?’ she said. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means he’s a filthy rich, post-punk solicitor.’

‘Well that’s all right then. That makes me feel a lot better.’

When I think about it now, I suspect he knew something we did not. I suspect they all did, that they just couldn’t say it, not even to themselves. We spoke to an estate agent in July and there was some talk of probate, but the timing was good, he said, for the autumn market, so we put the house up for sale in the first week in September, whether we owned it or not. It went on the websites on Wednesday, it was in the property supplement on Thursday. We sat back and felt that we had managed something hugely difficult and significant. We did not want to let the place go.

We do now.

I catch my mother’s trail around the kitchen, this morning of snow, and I am grateful for it. Some days, it doesn’t feel like the house I grew up in, anymore. I don’t remember that I own it, or even half of it. That is what I should have said to my sister when we were still shouting at each other. I will only live in half. Although I am not living there, as we know. I am only keeping the place in a condition to view.

Most of the small stuff is sorted now, gone to the dump or the charity shop, to Fiona’s house or over to Clonskeagh. We divided it with great tenderness. No you take it, No you. These foolish, small pieces of cloth, that no one will ever wear again, a useful triple steamer, a few abstract oils that scream ‘1973’.

Every once in a while, I come across something we missed. After Seán moved in (though he never actually ‘moved in’) I found a photograph fallen down the back of a chest of drawers; a large glossy black-and-white picture of our parents standing in front of the control tower in Dublin airport. Going where – Nice? Cannes? Going to Lourdes, probably, with rosary beads in her patent handbag – though they managed, with her crocheted hat and his flapping trench, to make this look like a dashing thing to do.

Another time – just a couple of months ago – I spotted a brown cloth bag on top of her wardrobe. I got on a chair and took it down. There were bottles inside: I could tell by the way the glass clacked and squeaked against itself under the cotton.

When I prised open the drawstring I found an empty bottle of Tweed, a perfume I gave her myself when I was in primary school. There was also an empty bottle of Givenchy III – the original blend – and a maverick, half-full bottle of Je Reviens. I opened the Tweed and put the cold glass under my nose, trying to conjure her out of there. Joan was old-fashioned about these things; it was the last thing she put on, after her jewellery and before her coat, so the scent of perfume will always be the smell of my mother leaving; the mystery of her bending to kiss me, or straightening back up. These were the nights when Daddy was still alive, and he would squeeze himself into a tux for some ‘do’ in the Burlo or the Mansion House. They would go for drinks in the Shelbourne first, and dance after dinner, in the wooden centre of the carpeted floor, to Elvis covers and ‘The Tennessee Waltz’.

Then they’d come home in the middle of the night, completely lashed.

My father’s dress shoes were very shiny and black. Even now, I think of them as ‘drinking shoes’. I saw someone on the street, once, who was so like him. Very far gone, but immaculate with it. The kind of drinker who stays upright – also decent, and frank. The kind that likes to say ‘knacker’ and ‘culchie’, who looks like he might have more, and more cogent things to say, even when he is so steaming, the power of speech has deserted him.

I had too much wine, myself, the night after she died. After the undertaker, the phone calls and arrangements, I cracked open a Loire white, and drank it at speed, and I felt two things. The first thing I felt was nothing at all. The other thing I felt was an emotion so fake and slick I wanted rid of it. It was such a lie. There he was – my father. Not in a stranger, but in me, as I sat on my own in a straight-backed chair at the kitchen table, pausing to apologise to the wine when it slopped out of the glass.

I threw the perfume bottles away; these woody, elegant scents my mother chose to complement the smell of her cigarette smoke and her occasional night on the vodka. You might think I would want to hold on to these last moving molecules, but I did not. I wanted to open the windows, bash the upholstery, and chase the smell of her death away; the butts I found in the garden ashtray floating in rainwater, the yellow tinge on the ceilings, the cloying old glamour of Je Reviens.

Seán came to the funeral. I didn’t mind. It should have been a tactless thing to do, but it wasn’t. It seemed to come from some hidden rhythm in our lives; a better place. He came up in the church porch and gave me a hug. Seán looks like someone too busy to care, but then something happens and he does it all perfectly. The country manners coming out in him, maybe, or the bank manager father, who knew the line between doing something sincerely and doing it well. Seán did it well. The only public gesture between us. The only ritual act of touching: hand on my shoulder, hand to the centre of my back, a one-armed hug, his face in my hair, ‘Poor you,’ he said. ‘Poor Gina.’ And did not pause to look into my wrecked eyes, or to feed on the sorrow in my face, but went over to hug Fiona, and then walked away. The whole sequence perfectly timed and true to what we had become; old comrades in the war of love.

My eyes were fine, as it happened. My sister’s also. We are, neither of us, the crying type. We are the sunglasses type. We are the kind of woman who walks out of a funeral service talking about their foundation.

‘Is there a line?’ I said to Fiona, indicating the underside of my chin. Said it, and meant it. And Fiona, who understood completely, said, ‘Tiny bit. Just there. You’re fine.’

So my make-up was, at least, properly blended, as they loaded my mother’s coffin into the hearse and Seán paid his respects in the May sunshine. I looked after him as he walked away – you might even say he trotted – a busy little shortarse in a pale summer suit, his arm up for a taxi as soon as he hit the side of the road.

Then I hugged the next person.

I can’t talk about Conor at the funeral. He was great. Conor is great, anyone could tell you that. He did everything right. Except, I suppose, for the way he checked his damn phone every five minutes.

‘Don’t tell me that thing is online,’ I said.

‘Duh!’ he said. Then he looked up at me and stalled, realising where he was.

He was wearing his black suit – too tight on him, now – his only suit, the one he had been married in. Same church, same porch, a little later in the year; the fallen cherry blossom now drifted against the steps and turning brown.

How Can I be Sure

SEÁN RANG, SOME weeks later, to ‘check that I was OK’, I said I was really not OK, and I laughed. He said he knew a good guy if we wanted help selling the house.

‘If you are selling the house.’

‘Well, you know,’ I said. I did not tell him that I was sleeping in the place, or sleeping there some days, during the afternoon. As I said, you would think the rooms might have faded, but all her things were just as she liked them. And when I came back, one day – another day, that Fiona could not manage – I put my feet up on the sofa for a moment, and woke just as dark was starting to fall.

‘What’s up with you?’ I said.

‘Nothing’s up.’

‘Are you in the dogbox?’ I said, because that’s how he used to talk about his marriage, he always used to say, ‘I’m in the dogbox at home.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ he said. But it was something.

In the old days – the good old days, when we seldom saw each other dressed – Seán did not discuss his daughter. She might crop up towards the end of the afternoon, just as he was getting ready to go. One day he said, ‘Evie wants a ferret. Can you believe it?’ Another time, going through his pockets for keys, he said, ‘A lump of Evie’s hair fell out, have you ever seen that? About the size of an old two-pence, about this wide.’

He said this sometime in the spring. I know when it was because I remember thinking, quite casually, ‘We did that.’ It was our kiss on New Year’s Eve that did this thing to Evie’s hair.

The calls he made after Joan died were different. He rang as a friend, and he talked about his daughter, the way you do.

Evie was fighting with her mother. Evie threw a pair of shoes under the wheels of a lorry because she wanted to wear high heels. Evie was so spacey, she was always late. Her schoolwork was going to pot, she couldn’t concentrate for two minutes at a time. I tried to figure out if my niece, Megan, had started her periods yet. I said, ‘Is she eating?’

‘Eating?’ he said.

‘Like, food.’

‘She eats,’ he said, though he seemed to disapprove of the question.

‘What age is she again?’

‘Ten.’

‘That’s a bit early all right.’

I told him we thought Fiona had anorexia when she was sixteen and this interested him a lot.

‘We brought her to a doctor. Have you brought Evie to a doctor?’

‘For what, though?’ he said. ‘I mean, what would you say?’

It was a thing we started to do, whenever I was over in Terenure – twice, maybe three times in the next couple of months – I sent him a text, and he would call. I slept on the sofa another time, and we talked when I woke. The third time (it was a bit like going back on the cigarettes, actually) I rang as soon as I got in the door, and we had these dreamy, walking chats, where he led me, through this and that, to his troublesome daughter, and I moved through my mother’s rooms, and touched the objects she had left behind. And I don’t know if Evie was the reason or the excuse, the day he said – maybe that day, the day of the third call:

‘Where are you? Are you there now? I’m just down the road.’

Which is how we ended up making love, not in my old room, but in the bedroom beside it. I opened the front door and he was there, all clear grey eyes in front of a troubled grey sky. I showed him into the house.

‘Funny,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I thought it would be bigger.’

‘It is quite big,’ I said.

We went upstairs.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I mean this is a very desirable sort of house.’

He glanced inside the bedrooms, checked out the en-suite, the spare room, the upstairs bathroom.

‘Two and a bit?’ he said.

And then he hugged me, because I was trembling. I fended him off at the door to my parents’ room and at the one that led to my own childhood bed. We went to the place of least resistance. At least I think so. I think we fell through the door that felt right.

And were, of course, found out.

Seán had come into the house with some papers in his hand and he left them on the shelf in the hall where the post gets left, and a few days later Fiona discovered, among the letters there, several addressed to him, their envelopes ripped open, including one that contained – she could not help but notice – a cheque for four-hundred-and-fifty euro. She put them in her car and drove them home on the front seat beside her, and she was about to pull into his driveway and hand them in at his door when she realised that she could not do this. She thought about pushing them through the letterbox and decided against this also. She dialled my number and said, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I can’t believe you did this. How am I supposed to look at them now? How am I supposed to look at his wife?’

All of this from her parked car, in the lane outside his house; the boxed fury of my sister.

‘How am I supposed to look at her?’

‘Look at who?’ I said.

And we carried on like this for a while – like married people, shouting and lying.

‘I can’t believe you did this to me.’

‘I didn’t do it to you,’ I said. ‘It is nothing to do with you.’

But it turned out I had done it to everybody. The whole world was disgusted with me and worn out by my behaviour. The entire population of Dublin felt compromised, and they felt it keenly.

Fiachra, for example, ‘always knew’. He knew it before I did. ‘I am in love with him,’ I said, sitting in the back room of Ron Blacks after too many gin and tonics. And Fiachra waited a tiny, unforgivable moment, before he said:

‘I am sure you are.’

But it was the first time I had said the words out loud, and it might have been true all along but it became properly true then. True like something you have discovered. I loved him. Through all the shouting that followed, the silences, the gossip (an unbelievable amount of gossip) there was one thing I held on to, the idea, the fact, that I loved Seán Vallely and I held my head high, even as I glowed with shame. Glowed with it.

I love him.

It was something to say in the long gaps between things – because even though it felt like everything was happening, for long stretches, nothing happened. Except for being in love, which happened intensely and all the time.

I love him: dull, like a pain, when no one rang: thrilling and clarion in the arguments I had with my sister, I love him! And then like a punch to the stomach, the day his wife rang to say, ‘Can we talk?’ and I drove up there and saw her standing behind the old glass of the house in Enniskerry, before I put the car back into gear and drove away.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Seán. ‘I know what she’s doing, here. Don’t mind her. You don’t know what she is like.’

But I just felt sorry for her – this woman who refused the truth. I had to remind myself this was something between me and Seán, not between me and Aileen. I might have liked her or hated her in another life. It was only incidental that she was not my type.

But this was much later – months later. For a week after that first phone call, ‘I can’t believe you did this to me,’ Fiona did nothing. I continued as usual, and Seán continued as usual, and no one spoke to anyone else as we waited for the axe to fall.

Walking around thinking, This will end, and This will end as I stacked the dishes in Clonskeagh, or turned out the bedside light. Kissing Conor, as he slept, and feeling stupid even as I leaned over him, his stone-still, dreamless head. It was all too melodramatic and silly. Maybe the axe would not fall: maybe we would continue just as before. Though I didn’t like Conor so much by then; I did not like the smell of his sleeping breath.

On Saturday morning, Seán got a call from Shay, asking him to drop round to the house. He rang me afterwards, walking back down the lane.

‘What did he say?’

‘Not much.’

My brother-in-law had been his rueful, back-slapping self. He brought Seán into the kitchen and pushed the letters across the table saying, ‘You’ll be wanting that cheque.’

‘Was Fiona there?’

‘No.’

Fiona had taken the kids off somewhere, apparently. Seán sounded a bit shook as he said this and I could imagine the delicate way Shay phrased it: Fiona bundling the kids into the car, as though the sight of the adulterer might scar them for life.

Another fabulous silence descended. For a week, maybe more, I waited for Seán to ring, for Aileen to turn up on my doorstep, for Conor to put his head in his hands at the desk and weep. None of these things happened. One evening after work, I went to the house in Terenure and fell asleep on the sofa. In the middle of the night I got up and went upstairs, to the bed where we last made love, and I have slept there ever since.

I woke to a sky full of rain, and I borrowed an umbrella from my dead mother to get the bus into town – the same bus I used to get as a teenager – there wasn’t a cab in sight. I went upstairs to windows thick with condensation, and the smell of wet commuters: stale lives, morning soap, last night’s fun. I hadn’t been on a bus in years. And I liked it. I liked looking down from this childhood height, seeing the gardens all redone, with their flagstones and big planters; the window boxes along Rathgar Road and cars guarding the gravel. The passengers were changed, too; they had funky haircuts and better clothes and they were all plugged into something, texting or listening to their headphones. We were across the canal before I realised that none of them were speaking English, and I liked that too. I had the feeling that this was the magic bus, and there was no telling our final destination.

Conor rang, sporadically, all day. I did not answer. I sat with my feet up on the desk, checking out the jobs pages of the newspapers. Undervalued, overlooked: I was completely fed up with Rathlin Communications. At four in the afternoon, the calls stopped.

He had rung Fiona.

The next few days were full of shouting. Much cliché. It seemed that everything was said. I mean everything, by everybody. The whole thing felt like a single sentence; one you could imagine bellowed, hissed, scrawled in lipstick on the bathroom mirror; you could carve it into your own flesh, you could chisel it on a fucking gravestone. And not one word of it mattered. Not one stupid word.

You never.

I always.

The thing about you is.

I think they all really enjoyed it. Fiona more than anyone. My goodness, the accusations flew.

‘I am glad she is dead. I am glad our mother is dead, so she doesn’t have to witness this.’

And, ‘Do you think he loves you? Do you think he cares about you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think he does, actually.’

That was all I said. I didn’t tell her she could fuck off back to her muppet of a husband, who rolls on to her after his bottle of Friday-night wine, and then rolls off again. If she calls that love. Wondering has he come yet, and how much it would cost to have a horse in livery like the woman down the road. I didn’t say any of this to my sister. How I saw her being broken into mediocrity and motherhood; her body broken and then her mind – or did her mind go first, it’s sort of hard to disentangle – and then for her to turn round and say Broken is Best, I didn’t say how that made me furious beyond measure.

We were in the living room of the house in Terenure. It was easy to shout there. It was like being twelve again.

I said, ‘You’re a prig. You’re a fucking prig and you always have been. This is something for me, Fiona. Do you understand? This has nothing to do with you.’

Our mother stayed dead through all of this. Amazingly. She was dead during every tantrum and silence. And she was still dead, when we woke the next day and remembered what had been said.

Because of course you are not twelve. And you regret everything. Every word you uttered. The fact that human beings learned the art of speech – you regret that too.

Stop! In the Name of Love

CONOR AND I spent a long evening in Clonskeagh not shouting, at least for the first while. He came in while I was getting some clothes out of the Sliderobe. I always hated that thing. You could specify the finish when you signed for the house. You handed over three hundred grand and, with a special smile, they handed you a little card with squares of polished wood on it. We chose ‘Birch’. Hideous. Anyway, I was taking a few things out of the Sliderobe, when I heard Conor coming up the stairs, and a few moments later he appeared in the doorway. We didn’t speak. He sat on the bed and watched as I took an armful of clothes and laid them in a suitcase, with the hangers still attached. Then he got up and left the room.

When I zipped up the case and came out, I found him on the sofa, going through my Pauric Sweeney shoulderbag.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Are you back on the pill?’ he said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I just want to know.’

I turned and went back into the bedroom. It was all too sad to shout about. But, after a small silence, we managed to shout about it anyway.

‘I’m your fucking husband, that’s who I am!’

Conor rarely loses his temper. He does it like a cartoon, with bulging muscles and popping veins. I was almost afraid of him. And I remembered something about him that I had somehow managed to forget: how exact he was in bed; how he could, in his ruthless, friendly way, destroy me between the sheets.

‘Oh right. Oh that’s right.’

Because the unsayable thing is, that just before I started sleeping with Seán – when I was just thinking about it, when I was on the brink – myself and Conor had a lot of sex. Not the slow abandon of our early days, but rooting, rummaging, sudden sex that was not supposed to be enjoyable, strictly speaking; that was not about me. If Conor could have made me pregnant then, he would have done it without thinking (there was no thinking involved in any of this), which is why, incidentally, I think he did know about Seán, somewhere deep down.

The one thing he never said to me was that he was surprised.

Poor, terrifying Conor. Stood there in the halogen glare with his hands clenched and his head thrust forward. I tried to move past him to get to the stairs, but he would not give way so I stood back and thumped him in the face, quite hard. I thought I would feel pain when I hit him but a kind of numbness spread from the impact, it was like hitting rubber – not just his cheek, but my hand, the whole room seemed numb. So I swung at him again, to see if that would bring the feeling back.

Something messy happened, then. The suitcase was wrenched away from my grasp and, as I looked down, I was caught by the flat of Conor’s hand across my chin. There was no pain, just a jarring dislocation; my brain moving faster than my skull. When I was steady again, I saw Conor had backed away from me and was standing against the wall, rubbing his hand. It was only then that my cheek started to sting. The delay worried me. My nerves were slow. Even when the hurt happened, I couldn’t be sure that it was happening to me.

And then I was sure.

It was like that moment, many hours after the plane lands, when your ears decide to open. We looked at each other as the pain spread, and we realised that we were separate human beings.

And it exhausted us.

I waited for the script to continue, for the little surge that would make me grab my case and sling him a contemptuous glance and hurry down the stairs. But it did not come. I stood there, and lifted my face, and burst into woeful tears. Conor stepped forward and pulled my head against his shoulder and I said, ‘Don’t touch me. I don’t want you to touch me,’ but I stayed there against him. My chin was starting to ache, in the bone. I wanted a cup of tea.

We talked until four in the morning. We dredged it all up. And the things Conor told me about myself that night – ‘selfish’ was just the start of it – it was like a slug crawling over your soul.

‘Everyone is selfish,’ I said. ‘They just call it something else.’

‘You think?’

‘I know.’

‘Well you know wrong,’ he said. ‘Everyone is not selfish.’

I got him to bed before morning and I lay down alongside him, fully dressed. When he was asleep, I stood up, leaving the shape of myself on the duvet, and I walked out of the room. I took my bag, and the suitcase of clothes, and I took the thing he wanted most – a little boy, maybe, as yet unmade; a sturdy little runaround fella, for sitting on his shoulders, and video games down the arcade, and football in the park.

Then I went back to Terenure and texted Seán.

‘Have clothes. All safe.’

Seán – who likes to use a johnny anyway.

Apart from anything else, how were we supposed to pay for it? The mortgage was two and a half grand a month, the childcare would be another grand on top of that. A new house – because you can’t rear children in a lopsided box – would be hundreds upon hundreds of thousands more. So it didn’t matter what Conor wanted, or what I wanted – I mean, I like children. I have the reproductive pang – but for all his talk of bliss betrayed, Conor was actually, when it came down to it, a dreamer.

He could do the sums as often as he liked, there was something about us as a couple that meant money made no sense to us: it was always a terrible surprise.

I don’t know why.

But I am being hard on my husband, who I loved, and who is now fighting with me about money, never mind broken dreams. In fact everyone is fighting with me about money: my sister, too. Who would have thought love could be so expensive? I should sit down and calculate it out at so much per kiss. The price of this house plus the price of that house, divided by two, plus the price of the house we are in. Thousands. Every time I touch him. Hundreds of thousands. Because we took it too far. We should have stuck to car parks and hotel bedrooms (no, really, we should really have stuck to car parks and hotel bedrooms). If we keep going the price will come down – per event, as it were. Twenty years of love can be consummated for tuppence. After a lifetime it is almost free.

Money (That’s What I Want)

OUTSIDE IN THE snow, the For Sale sign looks fresh as the day it was hammered home. No one knows what the house is worth now. No one will buy it, so that’s how much it is worth. Nothing. Despite which, we will owe tax based on that ‘two and a bit’. For a house that is currently worth whistling for. I can’t figure out the fake money from the real. I walk around this magic box, this trap, with its frost-flowered windows, weeping condensation as the morning proceeds. I gather my briefcase from the console table in the hall. I open the same door I have opened since I could reach the latch. And I head out to earn some money.

By the time I get to the motorway, all is quiet: a few yellow registrations, speeding back up to the border, trying to beat the weather. It’s not my favourite road in Ireland – too straight and flat – though I like the epic way the clouds always seem to lower over the Mourne Mountains, the gateway to the Black North. By the time they come into view, their dark slopes are streaked with white and my phone is jumping with warnings and dire predictions. The snow is above us. It is about to fall.

‘Book a hotel,’ says the office. ‘And stay put!’

I bailed out of Rathlin before it hit the buffers and started in the drinks industry. I wanted a new life, but it is possible I sensed what was happening, too – that autumn with my mother’s house suspended, like a dream, at ‘two and a bit’, it is possible I sensed there was nothing under our feet.

Not that I admitted it, at the time.

Selling the house was still the answer to everything. We brought the price down from ‘two and a bit’ to ‘nearly two’ and it was still short odds on winning the lottery; it was five-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand lamb chops, it was one-and-a-half-thousand years of lamb on your plate, it was so many shirts you would never have to wash another shirt, it was half of the townhouse in Clonskeagh and enough left over for a roof over our head, it was freedom and time to kiss, which is also called love.

But no one bought it.

Funny that.

Meanwhile I started in the drinks industry. I suspect my family thought the Sheilses a bit vulgar for being publicans but, you know, Conor’s father might have been low enough to sell the stuff, but my father was low enough to drink it. Maybe, in my separated, orphaned state, I realised what side I was finally on. Good times or bad, I thought, there will always be Al Co Hol.

As it turned out, the bad times were already upon us and what started out as a new and exciting web-based viral marketing campaign turned into me in a VW Golf, putting girls in bikinis into bars with trays of flavoured vodka. Which is about as far away from the future of the world wide web as you can get. It sure sells vodka though, and there is very little I don’t know, now, about fake tan. I’m like this really drawly air hostess I heard over the intercom once, then realised it was the captain speaking, and she wasn’t offering us drinks and snacks. ’Em, yeah, nothing much to report here, folks, we’re cruising now at twenty-thousand feet, bit of a tailwind…’ So I’m the really drawly one, in this bevy of bottle blondes with goosebumps on their Xen Tan Absolute. I am all white, and all real, I keep my clothes on and earn many times what they do, despite which I am pushed, sometimes actually shoved aside by local press, publicans, and many hundreds of drunken men, every second Friday night, from 5.30 to 9 p.m. Some of the men pause to sneer at me first, or they turn to sneer at me after, Yeah, look what we got. There is an amount of what you might call collateral anger to mop up. And there’s always one guy – a nice guy, a good guy – who decides, in all the excitement, that the girl to hit on is the one wearing the clothes. For this, I get paid. I’m a pimp. It’s a funny life.

But I am not going up to Dundalk to do a promotion, I am going up to Dundalk to let two of the sales staff go, after which, one of them will be taken back at a casual rate. I’m still relatively new, so I am the one who gets to fire people, the unspoken suggestion being, of course, that the last person I fire may be myself.

The office is a couple of rooms tacked on to a warehouse near the M1: grey walls, grey roof, blue carpet, red banisters, yellow cubes to set your coffee cup down. It is hard to think that people work here. No voices are ever raised. Nothing feels used.

I set up in the small meeting room and call the girls in, one at a time. I keep it neat and light, because that’s the way I like to work, but I can’t help but be caught by the look in their eyes. I am not saying I enjoy it, but you spend your time pretending you’re not actually the boss, that you’re all just friends, and they still bitch about you like crazy. Now the pretending was over. With benefits and casual hours they wouldn’t do too badly, but still you could feel it, the first snappings, strand by strand, as the rope started to go: Sinéad, with four-hundred-and-twenty points in her Leaving Certificate and a mouthful of veneers she got on the HP. Alice, who was a hippy chick at heart, just saving up for her trip to Peru. I said I would fight for the best possible package. I told them that human resources would be in touch. Then I stood up and offered my hand to shake. Then a hug, because we were all just friends really. And then they left. I did some photocopying, put my head around the distribution manager’s door – he was already heading home – then I walked out through the warehouse floor. I ducked under gallons of hooch raised in a toast on an abandoned forklift – there it all was: drink stacked high, walls of drink, drink on the move.

I drove back to the interchange and, after five miles of road, the car was swallowed by the soft and oncoming storm; a dream of red tail lights, in a dirty white mess of snow. Everything was so quiet, and the other drivers so gentle; I should have been worried, but there was something about this slow danger that was comforting and lovely. I don’t know how long it lasted. By the time I passed the airport, the air was clear. Seán was in there somewhere, in a welter of cancellations. The passengers were running from gate to gate, ‘like a herd of bullocks,’ he said. I crouched over the steering wheel and looked up, but the sky I saw through the windscreen was already dark and empty of planes.

It was half past four.

According to the radio, the entire country had bailed out of work early and was heading for home. I expected Dublin to be bedlam, but the port tunnel was so empty and pure it felt like the future, and the quays, when I surfaced in the dark of the city centre, were deserted. I imagined the traffic spreading like an aftershock, washing up in a dirty rim in the foothills of the Dublin mountains, where the pure snow began.

The schools had closed early. I wondered about Evie, if her mum would get there to pick her up, or how she would manage. I went to dial her number and then I didn’t. I have never actually rung Evie, though we are perfectly happy to talk if, by some accident, we end up on the phone.

Back in Terenure the house was dark and empty and cold. I turned on the heat and checked my emails, but I found it hard to settle. I was waiting for Seán to come home but he had not even left yet. It made me strangely angry, the thought of him sitting at the seafood bar, with a plate of smoked salmon and a glass of white. Neither here nor there. A man not unaccustomed to the departure lounge.

It took Seán seven months to leave Enniskerry. For seven months, after I left Conor, he got out of my bed and got in his car and drove home, so he could be there in the morning to make his daughter’s porridge (with cinnamon) and kiss her mother goodbye.

Just a peck, of course.

Seven months, I wasn’t allowed to ring or text or email, because it was more important than ever to be secret now; our love more urgent and sweet in these last days before he went clear.

But he did not go clear. After Christmas, he said. He could not do it before Christmas. They were buying Evie her first laptop; a little netbook. He wanted one himself, if only he could afford it, he said. And he laughed.

That Christmas – I can not even think about that Christmas. Whoever invented Christmas should be shot.

And when he finally washed up on my doorstep at two in the morning, after who knows what storm; when he finally broke free of her that spring and came to me, he did not come to live, but just to escape. He still spends the occasional night out – I assume in Enniskerry. I do not ask. In Ireland, if you leave the house and there is a divorce, then you will lose the house, he says. You have to sleep there to keep your claim. Which was all news to me, but there you go. You think it is about sex, and then you remember the money.

So here we are, some nights: me sleeping in my sister’s bed in Terenure. Seán sleeping in the au pair’s room in Enniskerry, where we kissed, or perhaps even in his old bedroom, beside the aggrieved body of his wife. Seán somewhere asleep, between the ageing flesh of his wife and the growing flesh of his child. Who knows where is he sleeping, in his dreams?

‘I never remember my dreams,’ he says.

It is not just the snow that makes me wonder these things. Though it is also, perhaps, the snow. It is Seán’s voice on the phone finally landed in Budapest, sounding just like himself and so far away.

‘Fucking Ryanair,’ he says.

‘Well, yes.’

‘We were sitting on the tarmac for an hour and a half, I looked out the window and there was a man at the wing with a shovel. He was taking the ice off with an actual shovel, and there was a kind of rope with two men hanging on to it, jumping up and down. They were sawing back and forth, with this rope thrown over the wings. Which was bad enough. I mean sitting there watching it was bad enough. But then we took off.’

‘Jesus. Were there lights?’

‘What do you mean, lights?’

‘I don’t know. Snow lights. Or something.’

I need to see him safe in his plane. I need to look in through the porthole windows, with blue lights and white lights flashing in the darkness, like a fifties movie set; the snow swirling outside. And, as if he has guessed my problem, Seán says, ‘The man was not standing on the wing. Believe me, I checked.’

‘How’s Budapest? Is it snowing there?’

‘No actually,’ he says. ‘Listen, Gina.’

I know if he says my name, he wants to talk about Evie. Or not talk about Evie, he wants to tell me of some arrangement involving Evie that I will not have the power to change.

‘What?’

‘Everything’s had to be pushed forward. I don’t know if I can get back tomorrow afternoon.’

‘When can you get back?’

‘I don’t know. Definitely Saturday. If it doesn’t snow.’

‘Tell me when you know, will you?’

‘Of course.’

‘How’s Budapest?’

‘Is that where I am?’

He sounds worn out. I can hear the news on his hotel TV.

‘Have yourself a nice bath,’ I say.

‘I don’t do baths.’

‘No?’

‘Not in hotels. You don’t know who’s been there before you.’

It takes me a while to hear this, or to make sense of it. I am listening to the space he occupies, I am listening to his breath, to the timbre of his voice, that is the same to me, almost, as the texture of his skin. It has the same effect. Or better. I am closer listening to him than touching him.

‘Sure give it a wipe,’ I say.

I could live on the phone.

Evie, it turns out, has – I actually blank this bit of the conversation out. Seán says, ‘On Saturday morning, Evie has…’ and my brain goes ‘tweet tweet, oh is that the time, how pretty’ and I look out at the garden and beyond to the traffic lights, casting their beautiful light, as they switch senselessly from red to green across the serene stretch of tyre-mangled snow. So, Evie has, I don’t know; horse riding or a play date or drama or the orthodontist, which means that – tweet tweet – Seán will have to pick her up on Friday from the city centre, or Enniskerry, or outside her school if there is school, except it will not be Seán because he is not here, and I say, ‘Fine, no problem,’ realising after I have put the phone down that Seán is saying something new here. He is saying that because of circumstances that have released a whole flock of sparrows in my brain, I may have to pick up Evie tomorrow. I myself will have to do it, while Seán, presumably, flies home.

Great.

Aileen, of course, must not be disturbed on this one. Aileen must not be humiliated further. It would never be possible for Aileen to ring the bell of my home, or to meet me in the street in order to hand her child to me. Her child. To me. That would not be possible. That would be like dying. And no one wants Aileen to die in this particular way.

I will never be rid of that woman.

The first few months together in Terenure, everything reminded Seán of how much he hated Aileen. Especially me. Everything I did reminded him of his wife.

One morning, I told him he would catch a cold. This was in the early days, after the bike was bought but before he had figured the clothes, so he went out in his shirtsleeves, folding his suit jacket over the handlebars.

‘Careful you don’t catch cold,’ I said, watching from the front door, and he went still for a moment before getting up on the bike and cycling away.

That evening we fought about something stupid – our first domestic – and it turned out, once the spat was over, that I had reminded him of his wife. Because whenever Seán was going on a plane, in whatever season, autumn or spring

– he could never remember what way it went – travelling to a warmer country or a colder one, Aileen would always say, ‘You’ll get a cold, you know,’ and she was always, but always, right. And Seán hated it. It was like she owned his entire immune system. And anyway, what was he supposed to do, stay at home?

There was a wasted intensity in the way he spoke about her; nailing the lid down on some coffin with nothing inside it. Or, what was inside? A joke. Some zombie wife who still twitched at the light. I spent my days trying to guess what Aileen might say, so I could say something different

– and I learned, in jig time, not to mention illness of any kind. Or weakness even. I learned not to make him feel weak in any way.

I don’t know what she did to him, but she sure did it good.

It was a delicate business, being the Not Wife. That morning he looked at the clean shirt he took out of the wardrobe and said, ‘Is there something wrong with the iron?’ Both of us stopping right there. It was not that Aileen did Seán’s shirts. Aileen had a Polish girl in to do Seán’s shirts at twelve euro an hour. But if Seán was going to live like a younger man, he would have to change.

And he did change.

A second intimacy can be very sweet. There are so many mistakes you do not have to make. I could not believe he was beside me when I fell asleep. I could not believe he was beside me when I woke. We went to the supermarket; picking up boxes of laundry tablets like Bonnie and Clyde.

‘What about these ones? You think?’

Our shoes leaving bloody footprints, all the way down the aisle.

We did the things that boring couples do: Seán cooked dinner sometimes, and I lit the candles. We went to the pictures, and for that weekend to Budapest. We even went for walks – out into the world, side by side. Seán held my hand. He was proud of me. He took an interest in my clothes and told me what to wear. He wanted me to look good. He wanted me to look good for waiters and other strangers, because we still didn’t meet his friends. Which suited me fine, I couldn’t take the pressure.

We were out one night in Fallon & Byrne’s when a woman stopped by the table.

‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘Would you look who it is.’

I did not recognise her.

‘That’s right,’ said Seán.

‘So look at you.’

She was drunk. And middle-aged. It was the Global Tax woman, the one who was there at the conference in Montreux. She chatted for a minute and then sidled back to her own table, giving me a twee, ironic little wave before sitting in with her friends.

‘Don’t mind her,’ said Seán.

‘I don’t.’ I went back to my dinner. I said, ‘She just looks so old.’

Seán looked at me, as though from a new and lonely distance.

‘She didn’t always,’ he said.

‘When was it, anyway?’

‘It was… a long time ago.’

Later, as though to remind me that it comes to us all, he said, ‘She was the same age as you are now, actually.’

And he pulled my lip with his teeth, when he kissed me.

No wonder she shrieked and writhed, the zombie wife. I thought – just in flashes – that I was actually turning into her.

I had to trust him, he said. Our second row, this, when I expected him home and he did not arrive till late – I had to trust him because he had given up everything for me. Because Aileen had doubted every word that came out of his mouth. He could not live with that again. There were times he thought she needed to be jealous: that jealousy was part of her sexual machine.

Believe me, I thought about that one for a while.

Meanwhile, we never had any tomato chutney and the cheese I bought was just bizarre.

‘Come to bed.’

‘In a minute.’

‘Come to bed.’

‘I said, “in a minute”.’

‘You said that a minute ago.’

Seán told me that I have saved his life.

‘You saved my life,’ he said. And every small thing about me is wrong. I eat too much, I laugh the wrong way. I am not allowed to order lobster off a menu; the sight of me sucking out the meat would, he said, last him a very long time. He holds me by the hips, and squeezes, testing for fat. If it hadn’t been for me, he says, If it hadn’t been for you and he kisses me, on the side of the neck, lifting my hair.

I have saved his life.

My mother is still dead.

The snow does not accuse, or not particularly. But I am alone and I do not know for how long. There is nothing on the internet. The TV rattles on. I sacked two people today, in Dundalk. I mean, I had to let them go. I sit at my laptop with my phone in my hand and wonder how the hell I got here. And where it all went wrong. If it did go wrong. Which it did not, of course. Nothing, as I am tired of saying, went wrong.

What was the last thing he said from Budapest?

‘Goodnight, Gorgeous.’

‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, my love,’ whispering ourselves off the line.

‘Night night.’

Trailing our talk down to the fingertips.

‘Night.’

And gone.

Save the Last Dance for Me

THOSE FIRST MONTHS in Terenure, Seán did not talk about Evie, or mention her much, and I was so stupid, I did not realise he could not bring himself to say her name.

No one came to visit. It was strange, because this has always been an open kind of house – my mother used to complain about it, the way people would drop in almost unannounced. But no one dropped in on the fornicators, the love-birds and homewreckers in No. 4. The phone stayed mute: we did not even rent the line.

I said it to Fiachra: ‘We’re pariahs,’ and, as if to prove me wrong, he rocked up one Saturday morning with a bag of croissants, and a baby buggy the size of a small car.

It took all three of us to get it through the porch and parked in the hall. In the middle of this operation, Fiachra, who is a lanky object, bent over his daughter and unclipped the straps. He lifted her out and handed her to Seán, who without even a feint of surprise, set her on his hip, using his free hand to manipulate the thing closer to the wall. The child started to reach for her father just as Seán started to hand her back to him, and it was all quite deftly done. But Seán followed her with his face and, at the last moment, nuzzled into her fine, blonde hair.

Then he followed her head a little further. And inhaled.

It was unnatural. They might as well have been kissing, my lover and my friend, each of them attached to this large construction of wriggle and big blue eyes and spit.

But Seán wasn’t looking into her eyes. He was smelling her head. His own eyes were closed.

Fiachra said, ‘Watch out, she is a stranger to soap,’ and Seán gave a tiny grunt of appreciation.

‘Who’s a great girl?’ he said, pulling back to look at her. He jiggled her foot, which dangled from the crook of Fiachra’s arm. ‘Who’s a great girl?’

I am not saying it was sexual, I am saying it was a moment of great physical intimacy, and that it took place in my mother’s hall while I held a bag of warm croissants and looked on.

‘Coffee?’ I said.

‘Lovely.’

‘Yes, please.’

But no one moved.

After this first frankness, Seán appeared to ignore the child, who was, I have to say, a sweetie. She sat on her father’s lap and ate her croissant with close and reverential attention while Fiachra told stories about his new life as a stay-at-home Dad. He was queuing up in Cumberland Street dole office with the junkies, he said, his round-eyed daughter watching from her Hummer-buggy, when the guy in front of him holds up a little white plastic newsagent’s knife and waves it around saying, ‘I’ll cut myself, I’ll fuckin’ cut myself!’ The cop snapping on latex gloves as he moves, big and easy, across the floor.

‘God almighty.’

Seán leaned against the counter, and laughed. He moved to set the coffee pot further back on the stove. He went over to the bin and tucked the plastic bin-liner into place. He walked out to the hall, as though there was someone at the door, and then came back in again. After a while I realised that he wasn’t so much ignoring the child as prowling around it. He approached and avoided her, all the time. He was like something on David Attenborough, I told him later, one of those silverback gorillas maybe, who has forgotten where baby gorillas come from, then Mammy Gorilla pops one out, and he doesn’t know what to do. Cuddle it? Eat it? Pick it up and throw it in a bush?

‘Are you finished?’ he said.

‘Probably,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said. Then he walked out of the kitchen and did not come back for three days.

I had been so stupid. It wasn’t about Aileen – this anguish I had to live with, and avoid, and constantly tend. It was about Evie.

‘I failed her,’ he said.

He stood at the counter with the window at his back, the same place and silhouette as when he watched Fiachra’s child cover herself in apricot jam. It was July, and nothing was figured out yet, not even a holiday. Seán rubbed his hands up over his face, then scrubbed his scalp at the bottom of his skull. His mouth and chin distorted and his eyes shut tight. His throat produced a kind of whine, and tears popped from between his eyelids, round and clear.

He wept. And this was clearly something he had very little practice doing. Seán, the charmer, could not cry in a charming way. He cried like a mutant, all twisted and ingrown.

It did not last long. I made him a Bloody Mary and he sat at the table to drink it. He would not be hugged or touched – I did not try. How could he have done it, he said. To fail a child, it was beyond comprehending. It was not possible to fail a child. But he had done it. He had done the impossible thing.

I held him later, in the darkness, and told him the whole project is about failure. It has failure built in.

At the end of August, Seán brought me with him to Budapest to make up for the way my summer had been laid waste by loving a family man. We walked along the Danube and talked about what he was going to do, and he started to tell me about Evie.

When she was four, he said, Evie fell off a swing in the back garden in Enniskerry and they thought she had concussion. The au pair did not even see it happen, she just looked around to find the child gone, and the plastic seat of the swing still moving. Aileen arrived home to find Evie unwakeably asleep at half six in the evening. There was a trickle of dried blood coming down from the child’s mouth – not much – where she had bitten the inside of her cheek and her pants had been soiled.

‘I change her,’ said the au pair. And she shrugged, as though she was expected to live among savages.

When Seán walked in sometime later, he found his wife trembling in an armchair, Evie watching the ‘Teletubbies’ with a wan, important look on her face and the au pair upstairs, talking a mile a minute into the landline – presumably to her parents – in Spanish. Aileen had, in fact, slapped the girl but Seán was not to know this for some time: it was something he would discover later, when the arguments began. And though the room upstairs was always called the au pair’s room, this was despite the fact that there was no actual au pair after this, and from then on – from that moment on – his life was just.

‘What?’

‘Unexpected,’ he said.

And we turned from the river wall, where he had been watching the water below, and we walked on.

Apart from some speeding cyclists, the quays were quiet. We went across an iron bridge that was guarded by four beautiful iron birds. I said, ‘Bring her to Terenure.’

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Some Friday when I am away. Try it. Just bring her through the door.’

When we got back to Terenure, he looked around with an assessing eye. Then he went to the pink shop and bought her a pink duvet and a pink pillow. He also bought a matching net princess canopy for over the bed.

‘I couldn’t pass it,’ he said.

I said, ‘What age is she again?’

So he went back into town and swapped the pink bed linen for some with a chopped fruit design in acid-yellow and lime-green. He bought a lime-coloured dressing gown with purple trim, and oversized slippers with doggy faces on the toes.

He bought an iPod dock in the shape of a plastic pig and a little white chest of drawers to put it on. He bought a fish bowl and a goldfish, in a clear plastic bag. I said, ‘Who is going to feed the fish?’

‘I will,’ he said.

He gave it to me for a moment, and I held it up to the light. An orange fish, darting and stopping in its bright bubble of water.

Happiness in a bag.

Seán fed it for at least a month, every second day, faithfully, then one evening, I got a text: ‘check fish!!!!!!!!!!!’

So I feed it now, and it is still alive. A fish called Scratch. You can hear it when the house is still – actually hear it – nose down, picking up stones, sorting through the gravel. The first time she stayed over, Evie said the sound of it kept her awake all night, it was the noisiest fish on the planet.

Even Scratch is quiet, tonight. It has started to snow again and the tyre-welts on the street are softening into humps and mounds of white. The traffic lights work on. Upstairs, at the end of the landing, Evie’s room is a padded shrine of lime-green and acid-yellow, with pips, in the watermelon smiles of blood red. Her clothes, in the little white chest of drawers, tend more to black as the months pass, with rips in the right places, and skulls, and scrag-ends of tulle. Her father lets her wear what she likes. He talked about a carpet, so her sequinned hi-tops would have something to look good on, while she is away. It is like he has forgotten where he is.

‘A new carpet?’ I said.

‘Maybe a rug.’

So I hoover the rug.

I did not pay for the rug.

I nearly paid for it, mind you – that woman is bleeding him dry.

The rug has big coloured squares on it. It looks great. And I am not complaining. When it comes to housework, Seán is a clean sort. You don’t catch him at it, but after he has been through, the place is brighter, neater. His laundry tablets may glow in the dark, but they make my clothes smell like sunshine itself.

He is asleep now, wherever he is. He is dreaming figures, calculations, presentations: he is dreaming about rooms. There are women in those rooms, but do not ask him, when he wakes, which women they are.

‘I never dream about people I know. Rarely,’ he says.

I close the lid of my laptop and listen. There is a sound in the house – a sound like the fish, but it is not the fish. Something tiny.

I go through the rooms downstairs, but the noise seems to move about as I try to follow it. I pull up cushions from the sofa, and listen at the chimney breast. I go out and head up the stairs, only to pause before I reach the landing. It is somewhere between the top of the stairs and the bottom of the stairs. I go up and then down. I turn and turn about. I stand still and listen.

Finally, in a rush, I pull Seán’s gym bag out from the cupboard under the stairs. His kit is in the wash, but his trainers are still in there, also a toilet bag, and a loose tin of talc. I drag on some neon-green wires until the headset of his iPod comes into view. It is one of those jogging headsets, with a stiff band that rests on the back of your neck; the kind that looks a bit stupid even if you are actually jogging. It takes me a moment to pull the thing free. The music seems so small and frantic, locked up in there. I put one of the buds to my ear, the band twisting against my cheek, and I hear it open up, a whole cathedral of sound.

‘Listen to this,’ he said one night. ‘Listen to this!’ slotting the iPod into Evie’s plastic-pig speaker dock; some smiling diva on the display, and a voice – once you got over the swoop and posh of it – singing something no one should be asked to understand.

There she is again, dangling at the other end of the luminous wire. The ‘Four Last Songs’ with Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Surely he wasn’t pounding the treadmill to the ‘Four Last Songs’? I sit on the floor and listen for another while, before switching the thing off and throwing it back into the staleness of the gym bag. I do not linger. I do not unzip the side pockets, or check his toiletries, or lift the rectangular base of the bag to see if there is a condom under there, long forgotten, or freshly stashed. I just pause the iPod and push the lot back under the stairs.

That is how quiet Dublin is, on this night of snow.

My father listening to classical music in the dining room; his papers in piles on the polished table, the sunset making the room thick with colour. The beauty of it.

Don’t annoy your father now.

My father sitting in the chair, eyes closed, one arm hanging by his side; dead, or asleep. Passionately dead. Passionately asleep. Or maybe he was just out of it. What was the music?

Ravel’s Boléro.

Ah. The nineteen-eighties.

I get to my feet and he is behind me as I turn, talking into the phone, smoking into the old-fashioned cold of the hall. He spent his life out here, conducting cheery conversations about nothing you could put a finger on. We used to listen, myself and Fiona, to see if he would say something we could understand; a word like ‘money’ or ‘intestate’ or even ‘county council’, but he could go twenty minutes straight without nouns, or names, or anything you could stick a meaning to. ‘That’s the way of it,’ he said, or, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he,’ along with much chortling of a professional nature. All the time playing some deliberate game with the lighted cigarette that was in his hand, laying it with precision at the edge of the table, then nosing it along, to keep the burning tip ahead of the wood.

‘Indeed, you might say that. Ha ha. You might.’

And later, in the dining room, when the music could not hold him, I remember our father getting agitated at the dusk, turning to the window over and over as if to ask, What is happening to the light? Like a dog during a solar eclipse, my mother said. This was in his last illness. He had some funny bile thing that affected his liver and the toxins in his blood caused a quick kind of havoc in his brain. The world refused to make sense to him, even as it turned. It took us a while to notice – dementia gave my father a bluff and paranoid air. He became more hearty, and trusted no one. It was just as he had always suspected.

One afternoon I came back from the swimming pool in Terenure College with my hair wet. There must have been boys there; something about me that looked like guilt.

‘Why is that one wet?’ he said, and he looked to Fiona, like I was the greatest eejit.

‘She went for a swim, Daddy.’

‘A swim?’

It was hard to know what part of the sentence he did not understand; whether he had forgotten about swimming, or forgotten about water, or forgotten, indeed, about wetness. But he did not forget, not to the very end, how to pitch one human being against the other. That he could do when all else was lost to him.

‘A woman should be very beautiful or very interesting,’ he used to say, when he was well. ‘And you, my dear, are madly interesting.’

Pronounced ‘medley’, in that lush, Irish camp he liked to affect when he delivered his bon mots. Fiona, of course, was medley beautiful.

Neither did he forget how to drink. Fiona would dispute this, but I have the clearest memory of us both walking down to the hospice on Harold’s Cross Road with a naggin of gin that we had bought for him in the off-licence before the park. We had saved our pocket money for it.

He was sitting up in the bed when we found his room, but he did not know who we were. He said to Fiona, ‘Who are you? Why are you kissing me?’ But he still remembered the difference between vodka and gin – it was supposed to look like water, we knew that much, but it seems we got the wrong one – he spat it back into the tooth mug, and said, ‘What do you call this?’

Then he drank it anyway.

It was as though he was made of glass, his insides had gone so slack and loud. You could hear the liquid travelling into his stomach, spilling down his oesophagus, gurgling into his belly. There was a wrung-out kind of creak as it rose back up and the expression on his face as he willed it down again was comically fierce. He closed his eyes and rested. Then he opened them again and, for two minutes, maybe five, he was completely himself. He was the man we knew; clever, busy, large.

‘If you stopped biting your lips, my dear, then you wouldn’t have such a raggedy mouth.’

My father used to complain about my mouth, the way it gave me an insolent look. ‘What’s the puss about?’ he said, or once, memorably, to one of his cronies, ‘She didn’t get that, sucking oranges through a tennis racket.’

But he said plenty of nice things, too. My father never treated us as children. If you hurt him, he would hurt you right back. If you made him laugh, he would bring the house down with delight. I don’t remember people ‘doing’ children, the way Fiona ‘does’ hers in that tidy your toys and we’ll have a nice hug sort of way. There was drama all day when my father was around, and it was all as big as it needed to be. He fought with my mother, he loved my mother. He went missing. He came home and was shaggy and large with us. I loved that about him, the wonderful air of danger and surprise.

I just hated, as I got older, the look of him when he had drink taken: the way he swivelled his face around to find you, and the chosen, careful nonsense that came out of his mouth when he did. I hated the way he sat there, benignly absent, or horribly possessed by some slow creature, who rolled, across the distance between you, whatever sentence he could shape in his head; lovely, mean, grandiose, small. Or fond: that was the worst, I think. Fond.

‘Look at you. Aren’t you lovely?’

By the time we were teenagers, he wasn’t around all that much. He always kept Sunday at home, but even on a Sunday he was in bed till eleven, and went out around five so, let’s face it, six hours a week, a bit of roast lamb with mint sauce on the side – you could take it either way. You could be mad about him, as Fiona was, you could be pretty and perfect, you could have plaits that were sweet, and hairbands that stayed put, you could work on your Irish dancing and your songs from Oklahoma! or you could slob about and glower, like me. I was clever. I mean, Fiona was clever in a let’s-all-get-a-B-plus sort of way, but I was clever because if I was clever then I would not have to care.

Now she has a perfect life, my sister has taken to inventing a perfect past to match it. She doesn’t think our father was a drunk – which makes two of them, I suppose – and she would certainly deny the memory I have of us hanging on to each other laughing, coming back up the Harold’s Cross Road.

‘Who are you? Why are you kissing me?’ he had said to her. ‘And why, my pet, have you stopped kissing me, when we were getting so nicely acquainted?’

Demented is different to drunk. I think people get demented the same way they get annoying. The thing you don’t like about them just gets worse, until one day you find that’s all there is left of them – the fuss and the show of it – the actual person has snuck out the back and gone home.

I can’t remember how long his illness took. Too long. Not long enough. When the school holidays came, we were sent across to our Granny O’Dea’s house in Sutton where the sea lapped the garden steps or exposed a rocky shore and sometime, between one tide and the next, he died.

At the funeral, then, we got him back: this wonderful person, our father. The church was packed, the house overflowed with men in suits, who sat and leaned their hands on long thighs, to tell tales of his wit, his acumen, his canny charm. He was the last of the great romantics. My mother said that. Someone had sent a case of Moët, and she asked for it to be served. She stood up and raised her glass. She said, ‘Here’s to Miles, my handsome husband. He was the last of the great romantics.’

Why not?

Then they left and we were alone.

We had a way, all that autumn, of hanging out and moping – that’s the only way to describe it: the three of us talking about clothes and hair and weight, pecking at things, idling them through our fingers, going on the same diets, swapping clothes; stealing from each other too.

‘Did you take my halterneck top?’

‘What top?’

And nothing in these conversations was ever satisfactory, or wanted to be, there was only one direction, and that was downhill.

When Fiona hit seven stone my mother brought her to a shrink, who said my sister had stopped eating in order to stop the clock: if she stayed a child, then her father would not have to die. Which was too sad to be useful really. Joan went back to wearing her dressing gown all day and Fiona went back to her cottage cheese and there was no food in the fridge anyway – at least not after I had been through it – and then, when the spring came, we discovered boys.

Or I discovered boys. Fiona, if you ask me, only pretended to.

People might think it hard, growing up with a pretty sister but Fiona was lovely the way girls are lovely for their Daddy, and after he died, she did not know what to do with it, really. Her beauty was a sort of puzzle to her. And she always ended up with the wrong sort of guy: the kind who want a girlfriend to match their car; prestige types, bottom feeders, liars. At least that’s what I think; that boring old Shay was probably the best of them. That she ran into motherhood in the hopes that she would be safe there, and they would all leave her alone.

But in the spring of 1989, six months after Miles died, my sister was pretty and I was lots of fun. Joan screwed a fag into her white plastic filter, and got out the powder and blush. We were the Moynihans of Terenure. It was our duty to have a queue of young men knocking at the door.

Across the road – which is now a busy road – is the bus stop where I used to say goodnight to those early boyfriends: sitting on the wall for hours, or strolling around the corner on some excuse (‘Let’s see what’s around the corner!’), for a bout of kissing. Rory or Davey or Colin or Fergus: it was supposed to be about their eyes or their fringe or their taste in music, but despite the way I persuaded myself, with doodles in the backs of copy books and shrieks among friends, that I loved them, each in turn, it was all just about this: the smell of petrol from the buses, and the evenings getting longer, and kissing outdoors until the tips of our noses went cold. In those days, just being in the open air gave me goosebumps. Walking down the street alone, thinking my beautiful thoughts, picking the yellow blooms off the neighbour’s forsythia and shredding them on to the path: kissing was the answer to all this too.

It took me a long time to move on to anything more serious, sexually: Fiona too, I think. The Moynihan girls were old-fashioned. It was something to do with our mother being a widow; an instinct we had about power.

It was Fiona I missed, that first Christmas back in Terenure. Seán was in Enniskerry doing Santa Claus for a child who no longer believed in Santa Claus. Aileen was serving a light fino before lunch. I was alone. And the person I missed was my sister, the woman who was glad – as she said, glad – our mother was dead, so she wouldn’t have to witness the way I was carrying on.

She was wrong about that, by the way. My mother would have understood. My mother with her handsome, infuriating husband; she would have kissed the top of my sad head.

I slip between the curtains in the front room and press my forehead to the glass, with the nets falling down my back, the orange light of the streetlights outside turning the shadows violet, and I remember, or think I remember, some childhood snow, Miles bringing us to the big hill in Bushy Park, half the neighbourhood going down it on tea trays and body boards and plastic bags, Hold on tight! The outraged ducks slipping across the obstinate pond, our screams bouncing off a low, blank sky.

Miles in the room behind me, with the rug rolled up, old twinkle toes.

Once round the dresser!

Teaching me Irish dancing, singing out the patter: one two three, one two three, down-kick and tip and heel-fall, bang, kick up, heel-step tip-drum.

And just for a moment, I do not care what kind of a man he was. Perhaps it is the way the snow opens up a space, but for a moment, all my memories of my father are chocolate-box, and smell of winter: icing sugar thrown on the fire, in a shower of yellow flame, a crate of satsumas cold from the garage, my mother in a Nordic knit, Miles with a daughter under each arm standing on the doorstep, listening to Mr Thomson down the road, playing ‘Silent Night’ on his military bugle. Of course Christmas in this house was always a bit of a torment – there was always, before the day was out, some crisis with handsome, pissed old Miles – but it started well. Bursting through the door to find our presents in heaps at either end of the sofa – Fiona’s one end, mine the other – a big comfortable sofa, the fabric a dark embossed red; picked out, along the seams, with a beige fringe.

There I am, on my father’s knee, a little pietà. I am waiting to be tickled, playing dead.

My father lifts one hand and holds it high.

‘Is that the way?’

‘I’m dead!’

I start to wriggle to the floor and, as I slip across his knees, he pounces, finding the spaces between my ribs and digging in. By the time I have hit the carpet I am beside myself. I am out of my skin, stuck to the spinning floor. I am tied to my body where his fingers hold me together, as I fly apart.

‘No! No!’

My father tickling me from the sofa, as I squirm on the ground, my shoulders churning into the carpet.

‘Oh no!’

His cigarette is clamped between his in-rolled lips: he gathers my ankles in one big hand, then he turns to leave the cigarette in the ashtray.

‘Oh the mouse,’ he says. ‘Oh the mouse,’ and his fingers dance and scrabble across the soft underside of my foot.

Being dead was like being tickled, except that when you flew out of your body you never came back.

When I was twelve or so, I used to practise astral flying – it must have been a fashion then. I lay on my back in bed, and when I was fully heavy, too heavy to move, I got up, in my mind, and left the house. I went down the stairs and out the front door. I walked or I drifted along the street. If I wanted to, I flew. And I imagined, or I saw, every single detail of the passing world; every fact about the hall or the stairs and the street beyond. The next day I would go out to look for things I had noticed, for the first time, the night before. And I found them, too. Or I thought I had.

The pubs have shut: there are shouts in the distance and the screams of girls. I lean my forehead against the cold glass, as the traffic lights change and change again. It is time for bed. But I don’t want to go to bed. I want to keep them company another little while: my father and mother, dispersed as they are along the sweet, bright arc of the dead.

Paper Roses

A COUPLE OF months ago, I saw Conor on Grafton Street. He was pushing a buggy, which gave me pause, but then I recognised his sister beside him, home from Bondi. He did not seem surprised to see me. He looked up and nodded, as though we had arranged to meet.

His lips were chapped, I noticed. The light was too strong on his face – the way the sun sets straight down Grafton Street – and when we circled around, the better to see each other, I was bizarrely worried that my skin had aged.

‘All right. You?’

‘Yeah.’

His sister was watching us, with a look so tragic I felt like asking her did the budgie die.

‘Oh my goodness!’ I said, instead, and I bent down to look under the hood of the buggy. There was her baby, a little shock of humanity, looking me bang in the eye.

‘Gorgeous!’ I said, and asked how long she was staying, and what the news from Sydney was while Conor seemed more and more tired, just standing there.

After I walked on I got the blip of a text in my pocket.

‘Are we married?’

I kept going. I put one foot in front of the other. A second text arrived.

‘Need to talk about stuff.’ I glanced around then but Conor was thumbs deep in his mobile. Fatter too, in the harsh light. Or, not so much fat as more solid. He glanced up, and I had, as I turned away, an impression of his weight along the length of me, top to toe.

‘I’m just saying,’ says Fiachra. ‘He’s small, good-looking, witty.’

‘So?’

‘He’s your type.’

‘I don’t have a type.’

‘I’m just saying.’

So all right, they are both on the smallish side. They are both good company; both hard to know well. But underneath the charm Conor is an absent-minded sort. And Seán? When the party stops, when the door closes, when the guests go home…

They are completely different people. People love Conor, but they do not love Seán. They are attracted to Seán, which is not the same thing. Because Seán has a permanent joke in his eye, and it is usually you – the joke I mean – he is such a tease. And he likes to boast a little. And he likes to do you down.

My grey-haired boy.

He always compliments the thing you don’t expect. It is never the thing you made an effort with: the dress, or the jewellery, or the hair. He compliments the thing that is wrong, so it gets more wrong all night.

‘What do you think?’

Coming down the stairs, ready to go out: there is something about my expectant look that annoys him.

‘I like the lipstick.’

These days, it is always my mouth. I should not have told him about my father in the hospice. I know that now. I tell him less and less.

My poor, raggedy mouth.

Seán Peter Vallely, born 1957, educated to be obnoxious by the Holy Ghost Fathers, reared to be obnoxious by his mother, Margot Vallely, who loved him very much, of course, but was so disappointed he did not grow up tall.

You could be worn out by it, that’s all. By this man’s inability to lose.

I am only thirty-four. That is what I caught myself thinking. There is still time. There is something the fat on his chest does – I mean, he has very little fat on his chest, and anyway I do not care – but there is something this layer does, the effort it makes, that is dispiriting. And I do not mind until his eyes check me over, like the mirror does not see him.

Then, as though he knows what I am thinking, he says, ‘Look at you. You should be out there. You should be.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

Neither of us can say the word ‘baby’.

‘I don’t want to be out there,’ I say. Thinking, He will use this as an excuse to get rid of me.

And, This is one of his tactics too.

I came in late, one Saturday, after ending up in Reynards talking shite with Fiachra until three in the morning, just like the old days. I stumbled about the bedroom, and there was, I admit, a bit of cavorting as I discarded my clothes, then I jumped into bed and snuggled up.

Seán, who had been asleep, was having none of it. Recollection is dim, but, between one grope and the next, I must have conked out. Only to wake maybe two hours later in such a state of fright, I suspect he shoved me in my sleep. He was lying in the darkness with his eyes open, as he had clearly been doing for some time. He said something – something horrible, I can’t remember what it was – and we were in the middle of breaking up; shouting, grabbing dressing gowns, slamming doors. It went from Fiachra to everything, with nothing in-between.

You always.

You never.

The thing about you is.

It was, in a spooky way, just like being married. Though there were, crucially, differences of style. Conor used to take the moral high ground, for example, and Seán doesn’t bother – the air up there doesn’t suit him, he says. No, Seán doesn’t get aggrieved, he gets mean and he gets cold, so I always end up weeping in a different room, or trying to placate him. Sitting in the silence. Lifting my hand to touch him. Putting the work in. I coax him back to me.

Then he gets aggrieved.

Anyway.

Making up is always sweet.

And though I miss the future I might have had, and each and all of Conor Sheils’ fat babies, I do not think that we are selfish to want to keep the thing unbroken and beautiful; to hold on to the knowledge that comes when we look into each other’s eyes.

I just don’t know how to explain it.

I thought it would be a different life, but sometimes it is like the same life in a dream: a different man coming in the door, a different man hanging his coat on the hook. He comes home late, he goes out to the gym, he gets stuck on the internet: we don’t spend our evenings in restaurants, or dine by candlelight anymore, we don’t even eat together, most of the time. I don’t know what I expected. That receipts would not have to be filed, or there would be no such thing as bad kitchen cabinets, or that Seán would switch on a little sidelamp instead of flicking the main switch when he enters a room. Seán exists. He arrives, he leaves. He forgets to ring me when he is delayed, and so the dinner is mistimed: the Butler’s Pantry lamb with puy lentils that I heat up in the microwave. He reads the newspaper – quite a lot, actually – and there is nothing so wrong with any of this, but sometimes the intractability of him, perhaps of all men, drives me up the wall.

It’s like they don’t know you exist unless you are standing there in front of them. I think about Seán all the time when he is gone, about who he is, and where he is, and how I can make things right for him. I hold him in my care. All the time.

And then he walks in the door.

Seán in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry, with his back to me and his face to the view, and the rowan tree at his side has a skipping rope tangled in its branches that are still just twigs.

The day has been warm and I have had a lot of Chardonnay. I am recently back from Australia. I am in love and I am working really hard at the whole Enniskerry thing with the neighbours and the kids. So the man who is standing at the bottom of the garden is just a little rip in the fabric of my life. I can stitch it all up again, if he does not turn around.

Seán stands at the window in his pyjamas, with the frost flowering across the window. Or he stands at the window in the summer light and his naked back is a puzzle of muscle and bone – he still looks like a young man, from behind – and I want to whisper, Turn around.

Or, Don’t turn around.

The weeks I spent waiting for his call, the months I spent waiting for him to leave Aileen. The loneliness of it was, in its own way, fantastic. I lived with it, and danced with it. I brought it to a kind of perfection the Christmas before last, just a few months before he went clear.

The house in Terenure had been on the market four months already, and a flood of people had been through the place, opening cupboards, pulling up the corners of carpets, sniffing the air. My living room, the sofa where I sat, my mother’s bed, were all – they still are – on the internet for anyone to click on and dismiss: the stairs we slid down on our bellies, the dark bedroom over the garage, the stain around the light switch. I found a discussion board online where they were laughing at the price – but other than that, it was hard to know what people thought. A single bidder who might have been an investor made a lot of fuss but didn’t come through. A married couple with kids offered low, and then faded. And so it was Christmas. My father was not there to ruin the day. My mother was not there to make it all better. My sister was not speaking to me. My lover was in the cold bosom of his family, wearing a paper hat.

I thought about him all day: his daughter sitting at his feet, writing her first ever email, Hello Daddy! His wife in the kitchen, her hair drooping in the steam from the brussels sprouts. His wretched mother looking about her with a glittering eye.

I had a pathetic little tree in the corner of the living room, a plastic thing you plug in, with light running to the tips of its fibre-optic needles. I made myself a sandwich for lunch and drank a cup of tea. I thought about leaving the house but I just couldn’t. There was traffic on the road outside, but they were all travelling to each other: even the taxi men had their wives beside them and their children in the back seat.

There were times, in the last years of my mother’s life, when she could not walk out the front door, and on that day, moving from room to room, I think I understood why. Inside was unbearable, and outside beyond my imagining.

I finally drove into town around two o’clock; where I abandoned the car on a set of double yellow lines. In the windows of the Shelbourne, you could see the respectable flotsam tucking into their hotel turkey, or lifting their heads to look out on deserted streets. I walked past the locked gates of Stephen’s Green, down the empty maw of Grafton Street, the mannequins in the shop windows frozen as if to say: this is it! this is the day! I thought, if I fell down in the road, there would be no one to find me until morning. By the wall of Trinity, I passed a tall couple who looked like tourists. They turned their faces as I walked by, chiming, Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas, and I felt it keenly; the pure shame of it. I did not exist. I would end up breaking windows, just to show that I was real. I would shout his name: my lover who could not risk – he could not risk it! – a text or a call.

I didn’t break any windows, of course. I made my way back to the car and drove home. When I checked my phone, I found a message from Fiona. It read, ‘Happy Christmas, xxxxxx yr sis’ and it made me cry.

In fact something did come through from Seán about seven o’clock. It said, ‘Check the shed’ where I found a bunch of roses and a slender half-bottle of Canadian ice-wine. And despite the fact that I do not really drink anymore, I ended up drinking the lot of it, following the last sweet drops with a skull-splitting dose of whiskey. None of it was right – the perfect drink does exist, but it is never, somehow, the one you have in your hand. I worked on, nonetheless, until I was steady and empty and clean. The next day I was worried I had made a noise sitting there; some keening, lowing, honk of pain, but I am pretty sure I kept silent, and that when the day was over, the season slaughtered, I managed, with some dignity, to rise and turn and walk upstairs to bed.

I woke up late on Stephen’s Day with the headache I so richly deserved and, after a breakfast of tea and Christmas pudding, I got in the car and crawled out to Fiona’s house in Enniskerry. I wept a bit as I drove, and put on the windscreen wipers by accident. I did not call beforehand. I did not know what to say.

It was three o’clock when I arrived and darkness was already in the air. I parked for a moment and saw no sign of life, but my nephew Jack was in the front room and he opened the door before I had the chance to knock. He stared me up and down, wondering how to respond to the amazing fact that I was real. Then he decided on indifference.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi Jack.’ He hung on to the side of the door, staring at me through the gap.

‘Where’s your Mum?’

‘She’s upstairs having a cuddle.’

‘Right.’

There seemed very little I could say to this, but he had already turned and run back into the front room. The door was still open, so I pushed through into the hall and closed it quietly behind me.

‘And where’s your sister?’ I said, carefully. ‘Out.’

‘And what are you doing?’

‘I’m writing a book,’ he said.

He was on his knees in the living room. I thought he might tell me more about it, but he just flopped back down on to the floor and pulled the pages of his copy book into the crook of his arm. He stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and wrote: bum in the air, cheek on the page, eyes inches away from the pen’s moving tip.

I sat and watched him for what seemed like a long time. The house was entirely silent. I was about to ask him more questions, when I heard someone come downstairs and go into the back of the house. It was Fiona, I saw her through the connecting doors. She was wearing her dressing gown and she looked, I thought, distinctly rested, you might almost say ‘refreshed’. She put the kettle on, then saw me and took fright.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘I just arrived,’ I said.

‘Jack, you should always tell me if there’s someone at the door. Always, all right?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said trying to protect him from her.

‘Do you hear me, Jack?’

‘All right.’

She looked at me and gave a crooked smile.

‘You want some tea?’

‘We need to talk about the house,’ I said later when the relief hit.

‘Yeah. The house,’ she said, and waved a depressed hand in the air. And to be fair to Fiona, she has never been greedy in that way.

‘Did I tell you, we sold the place in Brittas?’

‘No.’

‘Well we did. I’m telling you, nothing is shifting over a million. Nothing. Shay says.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Nothing being built. Not one brick, he says, on another brick, this year. Not one.’

‘Well it was too mad,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it?’

‘You think?’

And we listen to it for a moment; the rumour of money withering out of the walls and floors and out of the granite kitchen countertops, turning them back to bricks and rubble and stone.

Shay came downstairs, freshly showered and full of himself, in his polo shirt and jeans.

‘Gina!’ he said, like we were old golfing buddies too long away from the tees. Then he left, at speed, in order to pick up Megan. Fiona started putting a salad together on the kitchen island and I said it was over between myself and Seán. Just in case she wanted to know. Just in case she was interested.

‘Finished,’ I said. I did not want to see him again. He could go back to his wife.

‘What do you mean “go back”?’ said Fiona. ‘He never left.’

‘Whatever.’

‘I don’t think he even told her, you know?’

‘No?’

So I really did mean it, when I said I did not want to see him again – not ever. Seán was three hundred yards down the road, playing the family man, my sister was in her kitchen, playing the perfect wife and I was the perfect fool. There would be penalties, I knew that. Because I really felt, just then, that I had lost the game.

‘I don’t know what you saw in him,’ said Fiona.

‘Little fucker,’ I said.

‘It’s just something he does, you know. You’re not supposed to take it seriously.’

‘Well I did.’

‘He sat there,’ she said, and she was angry now – whether she was angry with me, or on my behalf, it was hard to tell.

‘He sat there,’ pointing at a leather tub chair. ‘And he told me how lonely he was. No. He told me how lonely his wife was. How worried he was about his wife.’

‘When was that?’ I said.

Fiona looked at the sheet of glass between the kitchen and the garden, where her reflection was emerging from the dusk. She checked her face, its degree of sadness, and the state of her hair.

‘Little fucker,’ she said. ‘I was fond of him.’

And she leaned over the black granite of her kitchen island, making claws of her upturned hands, the way Seán does, when he is in persuasive mode.

But you know, everyone makes a pass at Fiona, it is the burden she carries through life. Even the postman fancies my sister, she is a martyr to it, she can’t even open her own front door.

‘When was that?’ I said again.

‘Oh I don’t know,’ she said.

And then I remembered something else about my sister. It’s not that everyone fancies her, that is not her problem. Her problem is the way they love her. Men. They don’t want to shag her so much as pine for her. That is the thing that makes her sad.

‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘I was about two minutes’ pregnant with Jack. I remember, I was really stupid with it. I couldn’t figure out what he was saying to me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh I don’t know.’ She moves to the double-door fridge that seems to occupy half her kitchen wall. ‘What do they ever say?’

She opens it and the plastic seal gives way with a slight sucking sound. She says, ‘Gina. You know there’s no work for Shay. You know he hasn’t worked since October last.’