The Forgotten Waltz

Knocking on Heaven’s Door

WHEN EVIE WAS four years old, she fell off the swing and Aileen slapped the au pair, and Seán, when he arrived home, put his little finger into his daughter’s mouth to find where she had bitten the inside of her cheek. He checked her pupils.

‘Look at me, Evie. Now look up at the light.’

‘I lost my shoe,’ she said.

So he went out into the dusk and found the little glittering ballet flat beside the swing. The back of it was smeared with clay, and there was a little divot of turf still attached to the heel.

There was a time, after Fiona’s ruthless little anecdote in her kitchen, that I questioned everything that had happened between myself and Seán, down to our choice of bed. I had missed key details, I thought: I had misread the signs. If love is a story we tell ourselves then I had the story wrong. Or maybe passion is just, and always, a wrong-headed thing.

Now, I feel if I can figure out what happened to Evie, I can tell the story properly. If I can think about it and understand it, then I will be able to understand Seán, and ease his pain.

The evening she fell off the swing, they sat with the drained and smiling child in the GP’s waiting room, and she turned to her father and said, ‘Did I die?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. ‘Look at you, you’re all alive!’

The doctor, who had a marked English accent, introduced himself as ‘Malachy O’Boyle’ – a name so makey-uppey and Irish that, Aileen said later, ‘it was definitely fake’. He sat Evie up on his examining couch and laid her down. He felt the back of her head, checked her pupils and all her signs, while listening to, and ignoring, Aileen’s clear and agitated description of events that afternoon.

‘Did she have a temperature?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure?’ At which Aileen fell silent, because of course, she had not been there.

‘So Evie,’ he said – now he had dealt with her mother. ‘Tell me what happened.’

‘I fell off the swing,’ she said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Nope.’

‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Did anything happen before you fell? What were you looking at?’

She gave him a keen and suspicious glance and said, ‘The clouds.’

‘Were they nice clouds?’

Evie did not answer. But she did not take her eyes off him, either then or subsequently, and when, at the end of the consultation, he offered her a lollipop she said, ‘No thank you,’ which, from her, was a very great insult indeed.

Malachy O’Boyle sat back in his swivel chair and, in his easy, adenoidal way, told them Evie had bumped her head, and that she would be fine. It was also possible, he thought, that she had suffered an event, a convulsion or seizure, what people used to call a fit. He was by no means sure of this, and even if she had, most children who do never have a second one. But just so they were aware of it. Just so they could keep an eye.

They left his room and they paid the receptionist fifty-five euros. Then they went out to the car. Aileen said, ‘We are going to casualty.’ She was white and trembling in the passenger seat beside him. Seán said, ‘It’s Friday evening.’

But they went to casualty, and they sat in casualty for four-and-a-half hours, in order to be seen by a tired girl in a white coat who repeated pretty much what the fake-Irish GP had said. The girl, who looked about sixteen, resisted all talk of seizures and MRI scans, allowed that she could keep Evie in for observation but it would have to be on a trolley. And so they sat, or paced, or stood beside the trolley where Evie slept the delicious, heartbreaking sleep of a child, while, all around them, Friday-night Dublin wept, bled and cursed (and that was just the porters, as Aileen tartly said). They had one plastic chair between them. From time to time, Seán bent over the end of his daughter’s mattress, and set his head on his folded arms, where he lurched asleep for thirty seconds at a time.

They stayed, itching with tiredness, until, at ten o’clock in the morning, a more important-looking doctor swept past, checked the metal clipboard, pulled Evie’s eyelids open, one at a time, and with a breezy bit of banter, gave them all permission to go home. They had no idea who he was – as Aileen pointed out later, he might have been a cleaner in drag – but they were, by this stage, pliable, grateful, almost animal. All their normal human competency was gone. The rules had changed.

Aileen swung, in the next while, from efficiency to uselessness. She bullied or she froze; there was nothing in-between. She became convinced, after many late nights on various websites, that there was something seriously wrong. Evie had been crying out in her sleep for months – perhaps a year – before she fell off the swing, and sometimes they found her confused and on her bedroom floor. Aileen dragged the child around three different GPs (‘The medical equivalent of a stage mother,’ as Seán described her), until she got a referral for a paediatric neurologist with a two-month waiting list, and that night she got, for the first time since he had known her, rat-arsed on champagne.

Meanwhile, the au pair did not so much leave as flounce out, and although they needed another, and urgently, Aileen stalled at the idea of ringing the agency again. She took half days off work, and sometimes made Seán take the other half, she rang neighbours and got babysitters in. The childcare, which had been until then a smooth enough affair – at least as far as he was concerned – became insoluble. It was as though she did not want it to work, he realised, one day when the handover went astray, and she ended up screaming down the phone at him: You said two o’clock but you meant three o’clock. How many lies is that? How many lies are there, in a whole fucking hour?

The guilt and the worry had overwhelmed her, she said later. She just wanted to stay with Evie, all the time.

And Seán said, ‘She’s fine.’

It happened at breakfast time. Evie was always a joy in the morning – ‘You put them to bed screaming,’ Seán said, ‘and they wake up all new.’ Evie sat up in bed at first light and read a book – or just talked to the pictures – then got up at the sound of the alarm clock to slip between her waking parents. She talked non-stop, she wandered and chatted and got distracted. Her mornings were spent in a state of loveliness and forgetting: looking in her wardrobe and not remembering to dress, helping to make the porridge then letting it go cold, trying to walk out the door before she had located her shoes.

On this morning, she was neglecting her porridge for a black-and-white stuffed hen, which she danced across the table with squawks and cluckings, in the middle of which she rolled her eyes back and slid on to the floor. Seán watched her for many seconds before he even tried to make sense of what was happening. Under the table, Evie shook and rattled. Her eyes were open and fixed. She didn’t look at him, but at the wall behind her head, and what disturbed Seán, in retrospect, was the gentle, thoughtful look he saw in her eyes, like someone examining the idea of pain. Her hands were clenched, her right foot throbbed or kicked, and it seemed to him that her body was outraged by her brain’s betrayal, and was fighting to regain control. This was an illusion, he knew, but nothing could quite convince Seán that Evie was not suffering. She made small mewling sounds, as tiny and uncomprehending as when she was newborn, and her mouth drooled and snapped.

Aileen had pulled the chair back, to give her space. She stood over her daughter. Then she ducked down quickly to cushion her head from the hard tiles.

‘Don’t,’ said Seán, who had some idea that Evie should not be touched, at all.

‘Don’t what?’

Aileen’s calm was almost unnatural. She held her daughter by the shoulders, then slipped easily on to the floor and set Evie’s head on her lap, reaching up to hold on to the tabletop with her free hand.

Seán remembered this image with great clarity: the unflattering fold of fat between her knee and thigh, and Aileen, usually so fastidious, with drool smearing her skirt.

Meanwhile, Evie’s clenched hands pumped more slowly, and her lips seemed almost blue.

She was not breathing, he thought.

Evie bucked and bucked and then stopped. She looked as though she had forgotten something. Then, after a moment of great emptiness, her body pulled in a rasping breath. After this came another breath. Aileen rubbed and patted her, making soothing, whimpering sounds and it took a long time to bring the child back to herself – or perhaps none of it took a long time, perhaps the whole thing happened in a very short time; it just felt endless and messy. Evie was confused, Aileen was confused, calling her name, rubbing her back and arms. And then, something shifted and caught.

Evie sat up. She roared. She struggled out of her mother’s restraining arms; outraged, calling the world to account.

He was so proud of her.

There are times when Seán seems to blame me for the failure of his marriage, but he never blames me for what happened to Evie. I coaxed it all out of him on the car journeys we took down to the west; the beautiful small roads along the Shannon beyond Limerick: Pallaskenry, Ballyvogue, Oola, Foynes. We drove with the wide river showing through sun-dappled trees; Seán concentrating on the driving, me safely dressed, neither of us looking at the other, sitting side by side.

Talking about her makes him simple. Seán, a man, as he would himself admit, addicted to winning and to losing – when Evie got ill, all that fell away, and the world opened up to them in a way that amazes him yet.

The morning Evie had the seizure, Aileen rang the neurologist’s office where they had an appointment in a fortnight’s time. They were on their way into casualty. Aileen was in the back of the car, holding Evie around her seat belt, and managing the phone. The doctor’s secretary said, ‘Hang on a minute,’ and she put her hand over the mouthpiece. Then she came back on to say, ‘Dr Prentice will send down the team.’

‘Sorry?’

‘When you come to casualty. Dr Prentice will see you after you talk to her team.’

And she did.

It was, for those first few hours, a kind of bliss. A doctor, two doctors, a bed in the day ward. The consultant arrived; a small, profoundly powerful woman, trussed up in a navy crêpe suit. The consultant was kind. She allowed for an MRI scan and an EEG. She used the word ‘benign’, which made them think about brain tumours. She wrote a prescription. She said a lot of nice and reassuring things, many of which were hard to remember.

They walked the hospital corridors looking for an exit, with Evie still exhausted in her father’s arms, and they felt – at least Seán felt – the heaviness and beauty of her head, as it rolled on his shoulder, the mystery of bringing her into the world, and the way she escaped the mystery by being so absolutely and pragmatically herself. They looked around them, memorising their future in this place: the signed football jerseys in their frames, the wire games on wooden tables, and yellowing murals of cartoon characters long gone out of fashion. A cleaner asked were they lost, which they were. A passing nurse said, ‘Do you know your way out?’ There were only two kinds of people in this place – people who were nice, and people who were lost. They held hands. They had never been closer; heading for the swing doors of the children’s hospital and the daylight beyond.

For the next several months they bought and wrangled their way up the waiting lists and the house was run according to Evie’s medical schedule. They rose in darkness, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her to the car. Seán drove as the dawn slipped down the hillsides, filling the bowl of Dublin Bay with a pale mist, and the sun rose out of the sea in front of them, washed and white. In the hospital, Evie was hot and damp and delicious to the touch, as they carried her down one corridor or another to the right waiting room, or the wrong one, where nice people (they were all nice, all of them) took their paperwork or redirected them, and they walked on, looking through the glass panel on each door in case they should stumble into a ward where the bald children were, or the children with scars too big for their small bodies: all the hopeful little freaks. Very quickly, they stopped seeing the children’s diseases and saw them as real children, and this frightened them too: the idea that this reversal of nature could be an ordinary thing. They did not look at their own reflections. Not ever. Each sick, or even dying, child – beautiful as a flower – seemed to be attached to some unwashed parent, who slept on the floor, and forgot to get her roots done, and looked like a refugee.

After the first few appointments, Aileen said there was no point in the pair of them spending their lives down there, she could manage on her own. Then, when the tests were clear, she threw it back at him, saying, ‘You couldn’t even come to the hospital, you weren’t even there.’

It was the relief that made her shout. The diagnosis, when it came, was very terrible, or very hopeful – it was hard to say which. Dr Prentice said that Evie would, in all probability, grow out of the seizures. She did not have a tumour, she would probably not die – unless in her sleep, suddenly, for no reason at all: unless in the bath, or under a car, or in their living room, if she had a seizure while standing beside the fire. There was nothing wrong with her, she seemed to say, except for this thing that was wrong with her. The medication was presented as a choice: seizures or no seizures, you decide.

‘Most people,’ said Dr Prentice, in her kind, crisp way, ‘opt for the latter.’

The pills made Evie confused – at least Aileen thought so. A contented, almost biddable child, she got frustrated and threw tantrums, even in the morning – when all that lovely forgetting was now turned into something more sinister. Aileen thought she might be having hallucinations.

‘You think?’ said Seán.

It was hard to tell. The child was four years old: she spent her day in a state of constant imagining. But Aileen said she stopped dead in the street, or startled at nothing. Every so often, she lifted a hand as though brushing cobwebs from in front of her eyes. She said strange things. Aileen did not know if this was some kind of shadow of the seizures that had now stopped, or a side effect of the pills she took to stop them. Seán privately thought it was a symptom of Aileen’s anxiety, but they both listened to Evie’s prattle with a more attentive ear.

After months of this fretfulness and concern, and many hundreds of hours on the internet, Aileen decided to take Evie off her medication.

‘I want my little girl back,’ she said.

Aileen’s worry had become impossible. She had worried so hard and for so long, it had transcended itself and turned into a rapture of care.

‘It’s not her anymore,’ she said. ‘It’s not Evie.’

Seán argued that the child was only four: ‘She’s changing every minute,’ he said. ‘She’s never the same.’

To which Aileen answered, ‘How can you not know?’

So Evie was weaned off her tablets and the seizure, when it happened, was almost a relief, after so many days of waiting for it to come. Days and weeks of being present and mindful, waiting for the crackle in her brain, fearful of the shadows, as the sun was cut to flitters by the roadside trees. Do you smell something, Evie? Do you see something? What are you thinking, Evie?

It happened in the crèche where Evie now spent her days. The woman in charge didn’t seem to bat an eyelid. It was an event. She had managed it.

‘I just held her in my arms,’ she said. ‘Poor little mite.’

Not that they liked her for it.

‘What a cow,’ said Aileen, because reality had shifted for them, one more time. They were now looking at a world in which an absent, juddering child was a normal thing. Their child. Their beautiful, ever-present Evie.

There is no doubt that Aileen, who was above all things rational, was not behaving rationally when she decided to put an end to this nonsense, once and for all. She put Evie on a diet. It was a medical diet. The hospital they attended did not supervise it, but some hospitals did, she said, though it was usually for children much worse off than Evie. It was a ketogenic regime – like Atkins but weirder and stricter – it seemed to involve endless but very exact amounts of whipped cream. No carbohydrates were allowed. None whatsoever. Not an apple, not the stain of sauce on a baked bean. One crisp and the child would be foaming at the mouth and falling under the nearest bus, no question.

Seán should have argued it out, he said. Or he should have talked to her more – Aileen that is – made her feel less lonely in it. But it was all unstoppably itself, he thought. And there was nothing so terribly wrong with whipped cream. So he just let her at it.

The diet never worked. At least, Evie never stuck to it – Seán suspected, besides, that the crèche woman was feeding her Hula Hoops, out of sympathy. They started fresh every Monday, by Thursday Evie would be discovered with sugar on her breath. Aileen would go into the next room in order to compose herself, then she would come back to discuss things with Evie.

‘Remember, Mrs Mooch, how we talked about your brain?’

One evening, after finding a nest of peach stones stuffed down the back of the sofa, Aileen stood and wept. They were turning their daughter into a failure, she said; their fabulous daughter, who was now a constant disappointment to them; also, when it came to food, an accomplished thief and liar. And though Aileen saw all this happening, she did not know how to fix it, and there was nothing Seán could do except stand outside the circle and tell her that everything was going to be all right when it was not all right. It was all impossible. And it was all her fault.

It was during this phase of their lives, the ketogenic phase, that I saw Seán for the first time, standing at the bottom of my sister’s garden in Enniskerry. I do not know what he was thinking about. He might have been thinking about Evie, or about work, or about a woman at work. He might have been admiring the view, or wondering how much the houses were worth, between here and the sea. Perhaps he was pining for my sister Fiona, who is so pretty and sad. Or he might have been thinking about nothing. The way men often claim to do.

‘What are you thinking about?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing much.’

It is fairly clear, however, that he was not thinking about Evie in any practical way, because, when she came up behind him there was a stolen smear of something sticky and very purple on her little face.

He said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, Evie,’ and he sighed. He watched Aileen scrub at the gunk with a paper napkin, then he looked over to me.

Of course, I know Evie’s story mostly from Seán’s point of view, and I know that Seán does not always tell the truth. Or he does not remember the truth. The way he tells it, he met Fiona’s sister (as he used to think of me) for the first time, walking in Knocksink woods, with the kids up to their knees in muck. He has no recollection of me at the party, standing by the fence.

But whatever way he remembers it, there is something in Evie’s story that Seán is constantly trying to understand. Something about himself, perhaps.

And then there is Aileen.

Evie marched into Terenure – quite early on – and handed me a battered-looking envelope, then she rolled her eyes, and clumped off to switch on Joan’s crap little TV. Inside was an information sheet, headed ‘What to Do When Someone has an Epileptic Seizure’. This was clipped to a pathetic note from Aileen – typed, unsigned – that began, ‘When Evie was four years old, she was diagnosed as suffering from benign rolandic epilepsy of childhood (BREC). Recently that diagnosis has been under review.’ I read it all. I didn’t understand a word of it. I said to Seán, ‘So what exactly is wrong with her?’

‘Actually nothing,’ he said. ‘She’s fine.’

Evie, still off the medication, went to school the autumn after the party in Enniskerry, and Aileen had a whole new reality check. The very nice and very young teacher listened to her tale and blinked twice. She said, ‘Could you run that by me again?’ Seán and Aileen then spoke to the headmistress who was completely reassuring. She also reminded them, on their way out the door, that there were twenty-nine other children in Evie’s class.

In October, Evie had a seizure in the line before the bell went, and everyone made a great fuss of her. But there was one little girl who was mean and really, as Evie said to her mother, with all the wisdom a five-year-old can muster, ‘It’s just not me, you know?’

They laughed when she said it, but they were ashamed too. Evie was saying that this might happen inside her, but she was outside it. It was not for her a question of poetry, or personality. It was just a bad thing that happened to her and she wanted it to stop.

They had to admire the person she was, at five years old, and hope she never lost it. Aileen relented. They put her on a different drug which slowly made her fat and, perhaps – again it was hard to tell – a bit incontinent. The seizures stopped. All her loopiness faded away. If anything, she seemed a little dull, though that might have been an illusion of her new girth – and besides, she was growing up. Also out. By the time I saw her in Brittas she was a different person. This time it was Seán who had put the child on a diet – for looking, I suspect, less than middle class. He saw it as a simple balance to her medication, but it is possible that Evie irritated him more, the larger she grew. Because the forbidden ice-pop that day in Brittas had a kind of despair built into it – the way they clung together – both of them hanging on to Evie’s disappearing childhood, there on Fiona’s deck.

That autumn, at Dr Prentice’s suggestion, they tapered the dose, and then, finally, gave it up. Nothing happened.

Evie was absolutely herself – body and mind. She was a little private, perhaps; watchful and solitary. There was, when I met her upstairs on New Year’s Day, a stilled and expectant look, like a child who has known danger, or one who is slightly deaf. She continued free of seizures: her childhood illness was now finished. In a way, it had never been very terrible. She had suffered, the summer of the whipped cream diet, four or five major seizures. Her last was the one in the yard, the year she started school. She did not have another problem until she was ten years old.

And that, so far as I can tell it, is what happened to Evie. But it is not the whole truth. It is just the truth in a concentrated form.

Because, let’s face it – from the day the child was born, Aileen acted as though Evie could die at any moment. What she discovered, when she looked into the baby’s muddy blue eyes, was fear in a form she had never known before. And weaning Evie off her medication was easy compared to weaning her off the breast, for example, which was a major production only slightly less fraught than the three-act opera of getting her on the tit in the first instance.

But though you might think Aileen pushed him away, it is also true, if you do the dates (which I have), if you work the connections and listen to the silences, that Seán had knocked out at least one affair before Evie fell off the swing and battered her little heels on the ground. This is the real way it happens, isn’t it? I mean in the real world there is no one moment when a relationship changes, no clear cause and effect.

Or the effect might be clear, the cause is harder to trace.

The effect walks up, many years later, when you are out to dinner with your new partner and she says, ‘My goodness. Would you look who it is.’

I think his first affair was with the Global Tax woman, the one on the conference in Switzerland. Going by the dates, she was, at a guess, a series of horrible, hot little encounters when Evie was in nappies. The little window in his heart, that opened in Fiona’s kitchen, when she was just pregnant with Jack – that was when Evie was three. So if he talked to Fiona about the sadness of his wife, that day, then maybe his wife had good reason to be sad. Unless she wasn’t sad, of course, and he was just looking for something to say.

Bubblegum girl, as I like to think of her, the one with the nail varnish and the B in Honours Maths, was drinking like a twenty-two-year-old and hanging out of railings around the time I met him in Brittas Bay. I think about his body on the beach, and it seems different to me now. His strong legs and neat back standing at the edge of the sea, while his wife disentangled herself from Evie on the strand: the tufty nipples he covered up with a black T-shirt, while we sat and talked, it all seems, now, differently naked; shadowed by another girl’s touch, wrapped in her secret arms. Cocky little bastard. No wonder he leaned back on his elbows like that and lifted his face to the sky.

I don’t know why I should worry about his infidelities to Aileen especially considering that I was one of them. I should take it as proof that he never loved her, though I think he really did love her once. Did he love my sister that day in Brittas? Or all of these women, all of the time? I don’t care.

He loves me now. Or he loves me too.

Or.

I love him. And that is as much as any of us can know

The Things We Do for Love

THE FIRST THING I hear in the morning is the phone.

‘Are you going into work?’ It is Seán.

‘I think so.’

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Thanks.’

‘Where are you?’ I say, but he is gone.

Neither is he, as I discover when I let the phone fall back on the duvet, in the bed beside me. It is half past eight. There is something too blank about the light outside. I get up into the murk of the room, and pull the curtains of grey linen, and find the world flattened by monochrome.

I do the winter sprint around the freezing room, shower and dress, pick the phone up to find a text:

‘Can you pick Ev up from Foxrock?’

To which I reply, ‘Hve meeting. Walking into town.’

I can’t imagine how Evie is supposed to get out of Enniskerry, which must be snowed in. The schools are closed. I don’t see any cars on the road, and the television, when I turn it on, has pictures of frozen confusion, quiet chaos. Nothing is moving, except makeshift toboggans and snowballs.

You would think that on this day of all days, she would just stay at home. But I know nothing about these things – the reason Evie stays, or the reasons she goes – there are deep forces at work, great imperatives. We must inch forward massively, like rock along a fault line, for fear of the quake.

At ten thirty, another, somewhat redundant, text from Seán, ‘Hang on…’

‘Bated breath,’ I write – and then delete.

Since his daughter came into my house, life is one long wrangle about arrangements: times, places, pick-ups, drop-offs, handovers. And everything has to be done in person. For some reason, you can’t just ask someone – friend’s mother, drama teacher or whoever – to put the child in a taxi. I mean, how much is my time worth? How much is Seán’s time worth? Surely more than the tenner for the fare. But you can’t put daughters in taxis. Putting a daughter in a taxi is like asking a foreigner to molest her, on the meter.

‘Meet Ev 3.30ish Dawson St??’

‘ok. When home?’

‘145 bus stop.’

‘whn home?’

‘trying!!!!’

‘How Buda?’

He does not reply.

I have saved this man’s life, but there are things I am not allowed to – that I do not need to – know. The money thing, for example. I don’t know whether he can break even in Budapest, or what is happening to his house by the beach, which is now up for sale too. I think, to be fair, he doesn’t know either. I mean, it’s fine. Everything is fine, just so long as no one blinks, no one moves. Meanwhile, it is there on the web for everyone to click over and ignore – the shells on the windowsills in Ballymoney, and whether Clonskeagh has gone Sale Agreed. Myself and Seán have loved a whole litter of For Sale signs into being. And no one is about to buy anything. Not in this snow.

At eleven my meeting calls to cancel, as I knew she would. I hold my phone and look at it, wondering who to text about what. Then I just put it away.

The craziest thing, I think, is the way I can’t speak to them in person, to Aileen or to Evie. I am a grown woman with a job and a salary, and I am not allowed talk to the people who, at a whim, make or ruin my Saturdays. I can not even lift the phone.

As I say to Fiachra, it’s like I get all the stupid stuff and none of the cuddles. Not that I want the cuddles: Evie (am I the only one who notices this?) is no longer a child.

She is nearly twelve. Evie had a growth spurt last autumn and, though she measured herself against her father – chin! earlobe! forehead! – to her preening delight and his seeming pride, it has not yet translated into actual cubic centimetres: this of girl and this of air. She has not yet learned the extent of herself.

So she sits on her father’s knee, or rather plonks herself on to his lap, just as she always used to, ‘Oh God. Evie,’ while he pulls back to guard the family jewels and ducks to the side to keep her skull from breaking his nose. You can’t actually see him behind her large and white and radiant flesh. She is dressed like a girl you see throwing up into a litter bin on a Saturday night, in black ripped tights under denim shorts (Aileen looks in the cheap shops to see what she will wear and tries to match it in something a little more expensive), and she really is sitting on him as opposed to perching on his knee, and the two of them are entirely happy and natural with this, until they aren’t.

‘Off now, Evie.’

‘Aw-ww.’

‘Off!’

Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes, he lets her stay. Her face in front of his is rounder, the lips softer, and her eyes, though the same shape and colour, are spookily not the same: there is an entirely different human being in there. She swings a leg and looks airily about, claiming her father against all comers, while I sit and smile.

The first time she stayed over I kept away, walking the streets of Galway in the rain, only driving home when I was sure she would be gone. It was September. The house had been on the market exactly a year. If you listened to the car radio, all the money in the country had just evaporated, you could almost see it, rising off the rooftops like steam. And there she was, this cuckoo, sitting in my kitchen; the price I had to pay for love.

The absurdity of it was lost on Seán, who was – who continues to be – completely helpless when it comes to Evie. He can see nothing but her.

So I did not ask his permission the next weekend, but walked in at two o’clock to find the two of them sitting down to lunch.

‘Hi!’ I said, brightly.

Evie ignored me, but it is possible she ignores everyone for the first while.

Her father said, ‘Evie,’ and she looked up with hurt eyes. ‘You remember Gina.’

‘Hm,’ she said.

And I moved quietly about as she picked through the home-made burger; removing lettuce and cucumber, complaining there was no ketchup, piling on the mayonnaise.

Since then, she comes quite often. We meet in passing. I dodge her rage. I am always brief. I am always nice. I sleep with her father, while she sleeps across the landing. All the doors are open in case she dies in her sleep, even though she is not going to die in her sleep. But I do not think we would make love if they were closed, not even silently.

I come out in the morning, to find her already occupying the bathroom, or she barges past, in some tatty flannelette of infant pink. Every time I see her, she has grown – but massively. It is like a different stranger to bump into every week.

At night, I hear them moving about the spare room, the curtains pulled, the quiet chat as she arranges fluffy toys and night lights and who knows what, until her father – Evie is nearly twelve, remember – lies down beside her and murmurs her to sleep. As often as not he falls asleep too, and I can not tap on the door, or put my head round it to rouse him: I can not risk it. So they lie, cocooned and hopeless and completely contented, while I sit and watch crap TV.

She started coming in September and they ran out of trips and excursions by the middle of October, so they linger in the house and fail to make decisions; Evie whining, I just want to hang out with my frie-ends.

For a man who is crazy about his daughter, Seán spends a lot of time telling her to go away. Maybe all parents do this.

‘Go and do something,’ he says, as she peers over his shoulder at his laptop screen, eating an apple beside his ear.

‘What are you standing there for?’ He sends her down to the shops for sweets, and then tells her she can’t have sweets. He sends her down to the shops for a smoothie, instead. He says, ‘Go and play,’ when there is no one for her to play with. He tells her to go and read a book, though he never reads books, himself; I have never seen him with a book in his hand. So she plays Nintendo, and then he tells her not to play so much Nintendo.

‘Stop touching things, Evie.’

There is no stilling her hands, always on the mooch.

I noticed this the first time we went outside the house together, and walked down to Bushy Park with Evie’s new dog (the dog is another story: let me not begin to discuss the dog). She followed each wall with the tips of her fingers, smooth or rough; let them drift through hedges and drag the leaves off bushes.

It was as though she was testing the edges of her world; finding the point where objects began and space stopped.

‘There is no need to touch the wall, Evie.’

Seán seemed worried she would shred the pads on her fingers – and there was something else there too, some idea of contamination; whether she would dirty things or be made dirty by them – Seán is, as we know, a clean sort and Evie plays with his disgust in the smallest ways. She doesn’t do anything truly taboo, she wouldn’t get away with it; she is, besides, at a modest age. Delicate to a fault about her galloping physicality, she never discusses sex and thinks adults are completely gross when they try.

‘Oh pull-ease.’

But she scratches her scalp into the fold of a book. She leaves sticky smears on the keyboards and remotes and phones. She twirls her hair, or sucks her hair, she is hugely uncomfortable in her bra – for which she has my sympathy, it’s a life sentence – and her underwear is constantly prised out and readjusted. She also – and this gets to me too – hoiks the phlegm up her nose instead of using a hanky.

It is all, in its way, fantastic for being so effective. Although she seems to be helpless to it, and maybe she is, it is also the best and quickest way to drive her father around the bend.

‘Evie, please!’

‘What?’

She also knows, as though by the fruit of long contemplation, the exact and simplest way to his heart. Not just by looking at him with her grey eyes, which should be enough for anyone, which is almost enough for me. Not just by doing well in school and being ostentatiously averse to boys. No, Evie has made friends with the richest girl in the class. Which in Evie’s class, out in County Wicklow, is pretty damn rich. In fact, the father of Evie’s best friend (blonde, like her mother, with beautiful slim knees) owns houses and hotels, owns whole apartment blocks, from Tralee to Riga.

Her name – and you have to admire her parents for this – is Paddy.

They are doing a project together on lice in horses. Paddy is supplying the horses. I did not ask if Evie was supplying the lice.

And sometimes, too, they are perfect: sitting on the sofa watching ‘Father Ted’, or out in the open air, or the way they talk in the car, because talking is what Seán is good at, and with his daughter there is no charm and no blame, there is just Seán. I listen to the ease of his tone with her and I think, He does not speak that way to me.

He does not hold me by the hand. He does not tickle me, quickly, to get me out of his way. He does not tango me down the hall, and arch me over, backwards. He does not wake in the night, thinking of me.

I have saved his life.

From what?

‘You have saved my life,’ he said.

But if you ask me, it’s not one woman or another that is the saving of Seán. It is the woman he loves but can never desire. It is Evie.

‘Take those earphones off, Evie.’

Evie absent or dreaming in front of a screen or a book. Evie failing to focus up, to move along, to snap to.

Evie stalled in front of the mirror for hours at a time, sprouting hair and neuroses, moody as all get out. And it seems so unfair, to be jumping with hormones when you’re still in Hello Kitty pyjamas; it is like no one is telling the truth, or no one knows what truth to tell.

I walked in on her one evening. Evie always leaves the door open when she is in the bath – You still alive in there, Evie: you haven’t gone down the plughole? Usually, she chats away – just the feel of the warm water seems to set her rattling on – and her father leaves her to it; listening, or pretending to listen, stretched out on our bed across the landing.

But this one evening, she had fallen silent and, between one sentence and the next, I walked in the door.

Evie pulled the sponge up to cover her little budding chest and looked at me with huge grey eyes.

‘Don’t mind me!’ I said, as I dodged across the room to get the thing I needed, whatever it was, from out of the bathroom cabinet.

In the autumn, Evie seemed to get rounder and rounder, fatter and fatter, after which came the amazing stretch and boi-oi-oinngg of this extra flesh into a waist and hips and breasts – though, as I recall, breasts don’t feel like fat, at that age, they feel like tenderised gristle. But they look, from what I saw in the bath, heartbreaking and simple.

There is nothing worse than being nearly twelve.

Evie is at that moment. Her body is at that moment when it is wrong to look at her, wrong to think about her nakedness, when it would be criminal to take a photograph. Her body is becoming her own. Her body is becoming lonely. Her father, who used to bathe and dry her, now stretched out staring at the ceiling, across the hall.

‘Have you rinsed, Evie? Rinse till you hear it squeak.’

He was off the bed and standing in the doorway when I came out of the bathroom. I lifted my hands in a mock shrug – because all this was normal too – and he nodded and turned away.

And I am suddenly passionate about Evie. I want to take him by the shoulders and explain that my jealousy is a kind of loving, too. Because, when I was her age, my father was sitting up in his hospice bed enjoying the fact that all women were equally nameless to him now.

‘Hello my darlings, to what do I owe the pleasure?’

I want to tell him that Evie is lucky to have him, that he, Seán, is where all her luck resides. Because after Miles died nothing went right, unless we made it right; all blessings and bounty, all unexpected joys, came from his love – pathetic as it sometimes was and sometimes huge. After Miles died, everything was hard work – marrying Conor, marrying Shay – and nothing came to either of his daughters gratis and undeserved.

I cried that night. I don’t know if Evie heard me; the strange woman weeping beside her father in this strange house. I smothered most of it in the pillow; Seán’s hand stroking my back. Me saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.’

There she was at breakfast, an overgrown child again; her white arse hanging out of her pink pyjamas. She picked the nuts out of her muesli, and left them on the table in a little heap beside the bowl.

Seán said, ‘Eat your breakfast, Evie.’

I said, ‘Would you like some eggs?’

And Evie said, ‘I hate eggs.’

And yet, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be here. That’s what I think.

I kissed her father, upstairs in his own house, and Evie lifted her flapping hands from her sides and she ran over to us saying, ‘Happy New Year, Daddy!’ and he bent to kiss her too.

As far as Seán was concerned, nothing happened that day. Keep it simple and you will win, or if you don’t win – as he liked to say – at least it will be simple. But, sometime after that kiss, between one hotel afternoon and the next hotel afternoon, Evie started to disappear.

How such a constantly tended child could do such a thing, is hard to say. For the first long while, they did not even notice; it crept up on them. Evie was just not where she was supposed to be. She seemed to get lost on her way up the stairs. She didn’t show up for meals, only to be found in her bedroom, or the au pair’s room, or out in the garden with no coat. One day, around the time my mother died, she failed to arrive back from Megan’s house. This was a journey of some three hundred yards down a country road that even Evie was allowed to take by herself.

‘When did she leave?’ said Aileen to Fiona on the phone: two families streaming out of their separate houses, climbing into four different cars, reversing out of their driveways at a clip. They found her almost immediately. She was standing on the side of the road, as though at an imaginary bus stop, with no sense that her journey had been interrupted, or had taken too long.

‘What are you doing Evie?’

‘I was just looking.’

It was, up to a point, just the way she was. Stop dawdling, Evie. From the time she was three years old, Evie could never get out of a car without pausing endlessly before the jump. Thresholds made her stall. All journeys were difficult, not for her, but for the people around her, who could never quite figure out just how she managed to slow everything down.

Come along, Evie. So this was nothing more than another failure, on her part, to grow up. Then, one day, she wandered from her mother in the Dundrum Shopping Centre and when Aileen, frantic, found her outside by the fountains, she could not say where she had been.

‘I was just,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

Seán was in no position to believe that there was a problem. His life with me had taken on some importance, by then; he was a man trying to keep his balance. He was, besides, ‘Just not going to do it, this time round.’ And though he discussed Evie with me over the phone in those long drifting days after Joan died, he didn’t – he just couldn’t – listen to Aileen, when the panic machine ground into gear again.

‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s just growing. It’s fine.’

Then, one Saturday after the summer holidays, Evie did not come out of her drama class. Seán who was doing the pick-up waited, and checked his watch. He went inside where the teacher was packing up and discovered that Evie, though dropped at the door, had not showed up in class that day. They started to ransack the building, the two of them – then Seán decided to try outside. He ran into the street and up the hill, past buildings and doors and girls smoking at the bus stop, into the shopping centre, where he went down the first escalator he came to and stood in the middle of the atrium, and he looked up at a changed world, one full of angles, doors and possibilities that he had never seen before.

He wanted to shout her name and then did not shout. He found a security guard, who muttered into his walkie-talkie, then wrote out a phone number and advised him to ring the local police. Which Seán did, standing on the street, watching buses and cars, and old ladies with stand-up trolleys, going about their usual business. The man who answered asked him to hold the line. Then a woman’s voice. I must sound bad, he thought, if they are handing me to a girl.

‘Can you describe your daughter?’

Just the word ‘daughter’, the way she said it, made him feel like a liar. He felt like someone who was about to be found out.

‘She has big eyes,’ he said.

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

‘Take your time, sir. Can you tell me the colour of her eyes?’ At which point he did that thing; he turned himself into a person who can describe his daughter in words you might hear on the evening news: age, height, hair colour.

‘What was she wearing?’

‘I’ll have to ring her mother,’ he said. And as soon as he cut the connection, Aileen was on the line.

For a few moments, he failed to understand, not just the words she was saying, but her voice itself – she might have been talking Danish – then he somehow figured out that Evie had rung Aileen, or Aileen had rung Evie, and she was in the theatre, where she was supposed to have been all along.

‘You spent the class in the toilet?’ To which Evie replied, ‘No!’ And then, ‘I must have done.’

There was nothing for it, but to go back to the doctors – the same round of referrals and endless waiting lists, the same watchfulness and morning anxiety, Aileen on the internet every night, googling ‘absences’, ‘lesions’, ‘puberty’; inviting it all in.

When they finally found themselves back with Dr Prentice – it was with difficulty, Aileen said, that she did not ‘fall on the woman’s neck’ – Evie had very little to say.

She answered all the questions and gave no clues.

‘And what do you think is going on, Evie?’ the doctor finally said, to which Evie offered the idea that her brain might be funny.

‘In what way funny?’

Evie, who by this time knew more than most children about the human brain, said, ‘The two halves – the hemispheres, you know? – it is like they don’t join up properly.’

Dr Prentice pursed her mouth and looked into her lap, then she lifted her head and with great clarity and tactfulness, discussed the anomalies of Evie’s case, and suggested – strongly suggested – that alongside her medical tests and enquiries, they should bring Evie for ‘psychiatric assessment’.

This was what was going on, the Christmas I wandered the deserted city streets. They gave her a computer, and told her not to spend so much time on the computer, and they pulled crackers, and hugged her, taking careful turns.

It is my suspicion that, after this, Aileen finally confronted Seán with all the things she had known – but not let herself know – for years. I suspect that she kicked him out. Because she realised the lies they told each other were wrecking Evie’s head.

Or perhaps he kicked himself out, for much the same reason.

It is hard to pin down. Seán tells the story differently every time, and he believes it differently each time. But the fact seems to be that, at a time when it seemed most important, for Evie’s sake, that they should stay together, it was also vital, for Evie’s sake, that they should part.

In the last days of March, they sat in a room full of ghastly china figurines and discussed their daughter with a lemur of a woman – all eyes, and quick little hands – who had been seeing Evie, at great expense, for the previous two months. She looked at them and twitched her head sideways.

‘Now. Let’s talk about you guys, OK?’ Not OK.

And sometime in the next week, Seán Vallely walked out of his house with nothing, not even a jacket, and he drove, in the middle of the night, to my door.

It was a weeknight: some normal night without him. It might have been two in the morning. I woke to the sound of the bell and the rattle of the letter box. Seán was crouched down, saying my name, trying not to wake the neighbours.

I was not quite awake, myself. I thought someone had died. Then I remembered that Joan was already dead: I had no one left, now, except Fiona. So it was my sister, then – though it seemed so unlikely; Fiona was not, somehow, the dying type. I pulled the door open and he was standing outside in the weather. And the first thing I said was, ‘Is she dead?’

‘Let me in, will you?’

‘Oh, sorry.’

He came inside the door – not very far – he crossed the threshold and then he leaned back against the wall. Every bit of his face was wet, and when I kissed him, he tasted of rain.

I said it to Seán once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as though I had just blasphemed.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

As far as he is concerned, there is no cause: he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.

In which case, Evie’s room is like something after the tide went out: dirty feathers, scraps of paper, endless bits of cheap, non-specific plastic, and some that are quite expensive:

‘Do you know how much those fucking things cost?’ says Seán, going through the compacted filth of the Hoover bag, looking for a game from her Nintendo.

My stuff, on the other hand, does not matter. A Chanel compact, skittering across the floor, my phone pushed off the arm of the sofa, the battery forever after temperamental.

‘Gawd,’ says Evie.

She does not say ‘sorry’, that would be too personal.

Evie was always a bit of a barreller, a lurcher; her elbows are very close to her unconscious. At one stage they were going to have her checked for dyspraxia, by which they just meant ‘clumsiness’, but I guarantee you I have seen her move with great finesse. In this house, she is only clumsy around things that belong to me.

She eats nothing she is asked to eat, and everything that is forbidden. But she eats. Which I consider a minor miracle. She filches, she sneaks and crams. She waits – a bit like myself, indeed – until her father is not there. The place we meet most often is at the fridge door.

Two months ago, when Seán was at the gym and Evie was complaining I had finished all the mayonnaise, I tossed my bag on the kitchen table and said, ‘Why don’t you go and buy your own fucking food?’

Not pretty, but true.

Evie looked at me, as though noticing me for the first time. Later that day, she said something to me – something that wasn’t just a whine, like, ‘Why don’t you have Sky TV?’

She said, ‘I can’t believe you have so many shoes.’

And I had to leave the room to stuff my knuckles in my mouth, and pretend to bite into them, behind the door.

I look for my hiking boots and find them eventually on a shelf, wrapped up in a paper bag that came all the way from Sydney. I have not worn them since: my life, it seems, took the kind of turn that can only be effected in high heels. I take them out of the bag and the red dust of Australia shakes out on to our kitchen floor. My dreaming boots. I put them on and walk outside.

The afternoon snow has a shining crust that gives underfoot as I cross the garden and open the gate and join all the other tracks on the path into town. The slush has frozen back to ice in the shade and the difficulty pulls my eyes constantly downwards. I take one treacherous step after the next, and for the first while, I can not shake the rant.

It’s hard, taking second place to a child – it was bad enough taking second place to her mother – and I remember what Seán said about me in his report to Rathlin Communications (now deceased – the ironies in that), when I took a sneaky look, and read where he had written – there was much praise there too, of course – that I was ‘most ideally suited to a secondary role’.

That stung.

They underestimate me, I think. They underestimate my tenacity.

On Rathmines Road there is grit under my feet and the paths are walked clear. There aren’t many cars, but the buses are running, and they leave moraines of dirty slush on either side of the road.

I pass the Observatory Lane, a shanty row of shops, BlackBerry Lane; the rugby pitches in front of St Mary’s glutted with snow. The clouds have cleared, the sky is high and blue, the green dome of Rathmines church is still capped with white. The canal cuts a clean line under the bridge, the black water reflects the frozen water on its banks, and I am glad of the fresh air, my dreaming boots walking me into Dublin town. I remember the first Aborigine I saw, after maybe a week in Sydney, how very black he was and how very poor: you travel so far to realise that it’s all true, all of it, like my father in his last days, It is just as you always suspected.

But we weren’t wrong to hope, myself and Conor, back in our Australian days. And I am not wrong to hope, now: to hold on to Seán, and love him, and to try to love his daughter.

She is there at the bus stop, as arranged, talking on the phone. I recognise her immediately and then see, afterwards, what she is: a schoolgirl who is not allowed to walk down a city-centre street alone – not even in the snow, when the monsters that wait for schoolgirls surely have other things on their minds. I feel like taking her drinking. I feel like telling her to get out now, while the going is good. Not bother growing up.

Turn back! It’s a trap!

She spots me and puts away the phone. I see that she is wearing, on this cold day, almost nothing. A short denim skirt, opaque tights, a little black cotton jacket, a gingham scarf with added bobbles and metallic threads. Her only concessions to the freezing weather are black fingerless gloves and Ugg boots. Maybe her coat is in her backpack. I can only imagine the fight before she left the house.

‘Uggs!’ I say, coming up to her. ‘It comes to us all.’

To which she gives a long-suffering smile.

I am beginning to understand Evie’s silences, which come in many varieties. Her chat, on the other hand, is endlessly the same: hard to listen to and harder still to remember. I don’t know how Seán stays sane. It is mostly comprised of opinions, as she sifts through likes and dislikes of the kind you can choose on MTV: I don’t like this, I really like that. My friend Paddy says she really likes this, and I’m like, ‘How can you like that?’ This is mixed with scenes from movies, some small problems about the future of the planet, and some large problems about the dragon game she used to play online but doesn’t now because no one is into that anymore. She is into being into things. She is majorly into unfairness – an ardent egalitarian, anti-designer label, anti-bullying – her friend Paddy, she says, agrees with her about all of this (her friend Paddy, she says, in pretty much the same breath, always travels business class).

I feel that the world might be better if it was run by girls who are nearly twelve, the ability they have to be fully moral and fully venal at the same time. Capitalism would certainly thrive.

‘Do you want to look around the shops?’ I say, and get a response that is alert, almost animal. ‘OK.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

A look around the shops means, it turns out, for Evie, a look at shops that sell cheap soap; either ecologically aware, or freshly made.

We walk across to Grafton Street in silence.

‘You got the bus OK?’

Until we pass a baby in a little pram.

‘Ngaaawww,’ she says.

Evie’s interest in babies is so keen, it might be cause for concern, except for the fact that she is twice as interested in dogs.

She can not pass a baby without living a moment in their skin: ‘He doesn’t like the cold,’ she says, or, ‘Her hat is over her eyes,’ or just, ‘Ngawww!’ I think she is unusual in this, and I don’t know where it will all end.

‘Did you hear from your Dad?’

‘Em.’

‘Did he say when he was going to be home?’

‘I think he said he was on the plane.’

I leave her to the rows of smelly bottles; the untwiddling of caps, the sniffings and little rubbings that the shop requires. Moisturisers, toners, exfoliators: she is out of her depth, I realise, and a little disappointed by it all.

‘I think it’s time,’ I say. ‘To up your game.’ And I bring her down the street and into one of the posh shops, and a rack of perfume that she studies with quiet intent. The one she chooses finally is called Sycomore, which is so much the one my mother would have chosen, it makes me feel misplaced and odd.

‘My mother liked that,’ I say.

And she gives me a sidelong glance, as if to say that people my age should not have mothers. As, indeed, I do not.

‘My mother,’ I continue, because I am trying to push my way through something here, ‘wouldn’t buy it, of course. She would just try it – like every time she came into town – and then decide it wasn’t, you know, right.’

‘Cool,’ says Evie.

A fabulously tall sales girl rounds on us, walking past.

‘Yes? You would like to refresh yourself?’

Evie waves the bottle in vague apology, saying, ‘I’m just having a free go.’

And we move on; me pushing the small of her back, both of us trying not to laugh.

I bring her to the MAC counters, and she looks at me like this could not possibly be allowed. But I don’t care. She is tall enough now to pass for any age, if she wanted to – if, that is, she could just get the expression right, on her big, honest face.

It is Friday afternoon and, despite the weather, the place is stuffed. We are in a ruck of girls moving in slow motion towards and away from a maze of upright mirrors, turning their uncertainty into a stroke of this, a dab of that. They switch to the next brush and potion, then lean slowly in again: predatory, rapt.

‘You know what you want?’ I say.

Evie heads straight for a bank of foundation, picks one about two shades too pale, and she plies the brush, really working it in. I wonder what bedroom rituals led to all this expertise – I suspect Paddy’s dread hand – as she refuses highlighter, blusher, bronzer, to go for powder that is paler yet, and thick eyeliner.

‘Fabulous,’ I say.

All this while I try two different foundations, same shade, different texture, one on either cheek.

She selects an eyeshadow of deepest purple because, she says, it will make her eye colour ‘pop’.

I never know whether Evie will be good-looking. I squint a bit, trying to guess how she might morph over the years; the nose a bit stronger, the chin firmer. But I can’t hold it: her changing features drift away from each other and her future face falls apart.

All children are beautiful: the thing they do with their eyes that seems so dazzling when they take you all in, or seem to take you all in; it’s like being looked at by an alien, or a cat – who knows what they see? So Evie is beautiful because she is a child, but she is pretty ordinary looking too. The make-up brings it out in her – perhaps for the first time – her cheekbones will never be up to much, I think, and the nose is a bit of a blob. Though she still has those lovely, watchful eyes.

‘Is Megan into make-up?’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Megan. My niece.’

She doesn’t answer. Perhaps the relationships are too hard for her to draw. Then she says, ‘Actually Megan’s really into manga at the minute.’

‘Don’t do that,’ I say. She has unscrewed a lipstick that is so purple it is almost black.

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Because your father will kill me.

‘They might have cold sores.’

She looks me in the eye. ‘No they won’t!’

She is suddenly, immediately, spoiling for a fight. I have a glimpse of what her mother has to put up with these days – only I get the opposite. I get it flipped into:

You’re not my mother!

Such violent emotion. And I have no reply.

She is quite correct: it was a stupid thing to say, and I am not her mother. I have no rights here. I can not mirror her mood, or throw it back at her. I see the next few years of my life, just taking whatever she wants to sling at me; a mute receptacle for her hate.

I say, ‘Wow, blue mascara.’

Evie puts the lipstick down.

‘Where?’

I slip off and buy the eyeliner for her – as a bribe, I suppose (more blood money), but it works. She is delighted. Evie was always easy to please and adolescence has not changed that. She scrubs off most of the make-up – ‘It always looks better after you’ve slept in it,’ I say – and we walk back to Dawson Street talking about tattoos, ear piercing, hair dye and the number of points you need to get into veterinary these days.

‘Your Mum,’ I say, in a palliative way, at least once. Possibly twice. Maybe three times.

‘What does your Mum say?’

‘I’d ask your Mum about that.’

‘I don’t think your Mum would like it.’

The zombie wife is back.

It is freezing cold. I bring her into a coffee shop for takeout and realise, in the queue, that she is too young for coffee.

‘Sometimes I have peppermint tea.’

I think I used to drink coffee at her age, certainly tea – I might be wrong. My mother is dead so I have no one to put me right on this.

After much peering at labels and signs, Evie settles on a hot chocolate. She takes her purse out of her backpack, and roots in it for money.

‘No, you’re all right.’

I pay at the till, remembering the day Aileen emptied out their joint bank account – what fun that was. How did she rear such a clear-hearted girl?

It is strange to me that Evie does not remember herself as a child, and I do remember her: Evie in Fiona’s garden, Evie on the beach. It is like she is always giving herself away, and keeps so little back for herself.

I hand her the hot chocolate and take her bag, and because it looks so cold outside, we tuck ourselves in at a table, and talk about dogs.

Evie says that when her Dad was growing up, he had a red setter that would steal eggs and his mouth was so soft and gentle, he could bring one home without cracking the shell.

‘Really,’ I say.

There is something so formal about talking to children: you have to be very polite. It is the only thing they understand.

‘Do you know how to train a guard dog?’ she says.

‘No, I don’t actually. Do you?’

Evie is always correcting herself. This is because everything she says comes out in the wrong order.

‘When my Dad was little and they had a dog. Somebody had a dog and they locked it in the boot of a car. And on the first day they passed the boot and the dog barked and on the second day they tapped on the boot and the dog went crazy and on maybe the fourth day-’

‘Four days?’ I say.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘On the fourth day the dog was completely silent and they opened the boot.’

Then she starts again.

‘No, the new owner of the dog. If you want the dog to change owners. Because a guard dog is trained to protect just one person and attack anyone else. So they give the new owner a piece of meat and he has to go up and open the boot.’

‘Jesus.’

‘And the dog can hardly see or anything because he’s been in the dark, and he just takes the meat, and he licks your hand, and then the dog loves you for the rest of his life.’

‘He told you this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Did your father do this to a dog?’

‘When he was growing up.’

‘Who locked the dog in the boot?’

‘I don’t know who did it,’ she says.

I look at this child and think about the days and weeks, the months of my life I have spent waiting for her father to call me. Is this something she should know?

I want to tell her that I sat outside her house in the dark one night, hanging on to the steering wheel, while she slept sixty feet away. I imagined her father behind those stone walls, I could not move for the intensity of my imagining: Seán in one place or another, doing something, or another thing, that was hard to sense or describe. I spent hours willing myself into him. And, you know, he might not even have been there.

‘So, give me some more dogs,’ I say.

‘My Dad?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’

‘His Mum had a springer spaniel and he ran out under a car and she said she was too sad ever to get another one ever again.’

‘Your Gran?’

‘My Nana.’

‘Right. Do you like your Nana?’

‘What?’

Seán would kill me, if he heard me ask her this. It is a great violation and I really quite enjoy it. I don’t know what I am stealing, but it is candy from a baby, I know that.

‘I mean what is she like, your Nana?’

‘My Nana?’

‘Is she a bit mean?’

‘What?’

And I want to lean across the little table and say, ‘Your father is not the man you think he is.’

I don’t of course, I say, ‘How’s the hot chocolate?’

‘Mmmn.’

There is no need to tell Evie about her father. She knows him better than anyone, because she loves him better than anyone. The facts about him – his kisses and his lies, his charm and his misdeeds – what are they to Evie?

What are they to me?

I say, ‘I remember you when you were just a little thing.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Long before your father and me. I mean long before anything. You were just.’

‘What was I like?’

I look at her. Seán’s pupils are ringed with a gold so pale it is nearly white. In Evie’s, the grey gives way to a burst of amber, quite intense.

‘You were very like yourself, actually.’

‘What age was I?’

‘Four or five.’

She looks out the window.

‘There’s videos,’ she says. ‘But we have the wrong charger.’

‘You were super-cute.’

‘Was I? I think the videos were for the doctor mostly.’

‘Well, everyone was very worried about you, sweetie.’

I have an urge to kiss her, just where her black hair gives way, and the skin of her ear shades into the skin of her cheek.

I ask her does she remember being sick and she says that she does, though I don’t know if this can be true – she was, after all, only four. She says, ‘I had this horrible feeling in my stomach, like I had done something wrong, and then, Bam. I used to think a giant stomped on my head. But just before, just a second before, it was really nice. It was like, “Here it comes. Here comes the foot.” ’

‘You must have got it from “fit”. Here comes the “fit”.’

She is silent.

‘We don’t say “fit”,’ she says. ‘We say “seizure”.’

‘Yes of course,’ I say (because you have to be so polite with children). ‘I’m sorry.’

‘But I didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘No of course you didn’t.’

‘I mean it made me so cross. I wet my pants and everything.’ ‘Finish up your drink, there. We’ll go.’

She holds the paper cup in two mittened hands and drinks, leaving a shallow V of chocolate flaring from her upper lip. She watches me, over the edge of the cup. She says, ‘What’s “Gina” short for?’

‘Nothing. My mother just liked it.’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Thank you.’

Evie will be all right, I think. Despite everything. Despite all our best efforts, you might say, the child has come good.

We go out on to the street and look up at a dark sky, sifting snow.

‘Will we take a cab?’ I say. ‘For the hell of it.’ But Evie says, ‘My Dad isn’t back at the house yet.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘Let’s walk for a while. You want to walk?’

I take her backpack and we head up to Stephen’s Green. We go in a side gate and start to cross the park, aiming for the bus stop on Earlsfort Terrace. We don’t talk much. Evie slides along on the soles of her boots in a way that would annoy me, if I were her mother, but it does not annoy me much.

I go through the darkening town with Seán’s beautiful mistake. Because it really was a mistake for Seán to have a child, and it was a particular mistake for him to have this child; a girl who looks out on the world with his grey eyes, from a mind that is entirely her own. Lovers can be replaced, I think – a little bitterly – but not children. Whoever she turns out to be, he is forever stuck with loving Evie.

I think I love her myself, a little.

Her phone beeps and I know it is him, landed at last. It takes her an age to set her bag down and unpack it to find the phone, and read his text. (I wait for my phone to jump but it does not.)

‘He’ll be, like, forty minutes,’ she says. The snow will melt, the houses will sell – one house, or the other – and Evie will grow or be otherwise lost to me. Not that I ever had her, really. But whether her father stays with me or goes, I will lose this girl.

I say, ‘I know it’s hard about your parents, Evie.’ She does not reply.

‘I just think, it was going to happen one way or another. I mean it could have been anyone, you know?’ She slides on; one scraping step after the other. ‘But it wasn’t,’ she says. I can’t quite see her face. ‘It was you.’