The Year I Met You

The season between autumn and spring, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere the coldest months of the year: December, January and February.

A period of inactivity or decay.

1

I was five years old when I learned that I was going to die.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would not live for ever; why would it? The topic of my death hadn’t been mentioned in passing.

My knowledge of death was not tenuous; goldfish died, I’d learned that first-hand. They died if you didn’t feed them, and then they also died if you fed them too much. Dogs died when they ran in front of moving cars, mice died when they were tempted by chocolate HobNobs in the mousetrap in our cloakroom under the stairs, rabbits died when they escaped their hutches and fell prey to evil foxes. Discovering their deaths was not cause for any personal alarm; even as a five-year-old I knew that these were all furry animals who did foolish things, things that I had no intention of doing.

So it was a great disturbance to learn that death would find me too.

According to my source, if I was ‘lucky’ my death would occur in the very same way as my grandfather’s had. Old. Smelling of pipe smoke and farts, with balls of tissue stuck to the stubble over his top lip from blowing his nose. Black lines of dirt beneath the tips of his fingernails from gardening; eyes yellowing at the corners, reminding me of the marble from my uncle’s collection that my sister used to suck on and swallow, causing Dad to come running to wrap his arms around her stomach and squeeze till the marble popped back out again. Old. With brown trousers hiked up past his waist, stopping only for his flabby boob-like chest, revealing a soft paunch and balls that had been squished to one side of the seam of his trousers. Old. No, I did not want to die how my granddad had, but dying old, my source revealed, was the best-case scenario.

I learned of my impending death from my older cousin Kevin on the day of my granddad’s funeral as we sat on the grass at the end of his long garden with plastic cups of red lemonade in our hands and as far away as possible from our mourning parents, who looked like dung beetles on what was the hottest day of the year. The grass was covered in dandelions and daisies and was much longer than usual, Granddad’s illness having prevented him from perfecting the garden in his final weeks. I remember feeling sad for him, defensive, that of all the days to showcase his beautiful back garden to neighbours and friends, it was on a day when it wasn’t the perfection he aspired to. He wouldn’t have minded not being there – he didn’t like to talk much – but he would have at least cared about the grand presentation, and then vanished to listen to the praise somewhere, away from everyone, maybe upstairs with the window open. He would pretend he didn’t care, but he would, a contented smile on his face, to go with his grass-stained knees and black fingernails. Someone, an old lady with rosary beads tied tightly around her knuckles, said she felt his presence in the garden, but I didn’t. I was sure he wasn’t there. He would be so annoyed by the look of the place, he wouldn’t be able to bear it.

Grandma would puncture silences with things like, ‘His sunflowers are thriving, God rest his soul,’ and ‘He never got to see the petunias bloom.’ To which my smart-arsed cousin Kevin muttered, ‘Yeah, his dead body is fertiliser now.’

Everyone sniggered; everyone always laughed at what Kevin said because Kevin was cool, because Kevin was the eldest, five years older than me and at the grand old age of ten said mean and cruel things that none of the rest of us would dare say. Even if we didn’t think it was funny we knew to laugh because if we didn’t, he would quickly make us the object of his cruelty, which is what he did to me on that day. On that rare occasion, I didn’t think it was funny that Granddad’s dead body beneath the earth was helping his petunias grow, nor did I think it was cruel. I saw a kind of beauty in it. A lovely fullness and fairness to it. That is exactly what my granddad would have loved, now that his big thick sausage fingers could no longer contribute to the bloom in his long beautiful garden that was the centre of his universe.

It was my granddad’s love of gardening that led me to be named Jasmine. It was what he had brought my mother when he had visited her in hospital on my birth: a clutch of flowers he’d plucked from the wooden frame he’d nailed together and painted red that climbed the shaded back wall, wrapped in newspaper and brown string, the ink on the half-finished Irish Times cryptic crossword running from the rainwater left on the stems. It wasn’t the summer jasmine that we all know from expensive scented candles and fancy room vaporisers; I was a winter baby, and so winter jasmine with its small yellow star-like blooms was in abundance in his garden to help brighten up the dull grey winter. I don’t think Granddad had thought about the significance of it, and I don’t know if he’d been particularly honoured by the tribute my mother made by naming me after the flower he brought. I think he felt it was an odd name for a child, a name meant only for the natural things in his garden and never for a person. With a name like Adalbert, after a saint who was a missionary in Ireland, and with a middle name Mary, he wasn’t used to names that didn’t come from the Bible. The previous winter, he’d brought purple heather to my mother when my winter sister was born and Heather she had become. A simple gift when my sister was born, but it makes me wonder about his intentions on my naming. When I looked into it, I discovered the winter jasmine is a direct relative of winter-flowering heather, another provider of colour to winter gardens. I don’t know if it’s because of him and the way he was, but I’ve always hoped generally that silent people hold a magic and a knowledge that less contained people lack; that their not saying something means that more important thoughts are going on inside their head. Perhaps their seeming simplicity belies a hidden mosaic of fanciful thoughts, among them, Granddad Adalbert wanting me to be named Jasmine.

Back in the garden, Kevin misinterpreted my lack of laughter at his death joke as disapproval and there was nothing he disliked or feared more, so he turned his wild look in my direction and said, ‘You’re going to die too, Jasmine.’

Sitting in a circle of six, me the youngest in the group, with my sister a few feet away twirling by herself and enjoying getting dizzy and falling down, a daisy chain wrapped around my ankle, a lump so enormous at the back of my throat I wasn’t sure whether I had swallowed one of the giant bumble bees swarming around the flower buffet beside us, I tried to let the fact of my future demise sink in. The others had been shocked that he’d said it, but instead of jumping to my defence and denying this awful premonition-like announcement, they had fixed me with sad gazes and nodded. Yes, it’s true, they’d concurred in that one look. You are going to die, Jasmine.

In my long silence, Kevin elaborated for me, twisting the knife in further. I would not only die, but before that I would get a thing called a period every month for the rest of my life that would cause excruciating pain and agony. I then learned how babies were made, in quite an in-depth description that I found so vile I could barely look my parents in the eye for a week, and then to add salt to my already open wounds, I was told there was no Santa Claus.

You try to forget such things, but such things I couldn’t.

Why do I bring up that episode in my life? Well, it’s where I began. Where me, as I know me, as everybody else knows me, was formed. My life began at five years old. Knowing that I would die instilled something in me that I carry to this day: the awareness that, despite time being infinite, my time was limited, my time was running out. I realised that my hour and someone else’s hour are not equal. We cannot spend it the same way, we cannot think of it in the same way. Do with yours what you may, but don’t drag me into it; I have none to waste. If you want to do something, you have to do it now. If you want to say something, you have to say it now. And more importantly, you have to do it yourself. It’s your life, you’re the one who dies, you’re the one who loses it. It became my practice to move, to make things happen. I worked at a rhythm that often left me so breathless I could barely catch a moment to become at one with myself. I chased myself a lot, perhaps I rarely caught up; I was fast.

I took a lot home with me from our meeting on the grass that evening, and not just the daisies that dangled from my wrists and ankles and that were weaved into my hair as we followed the dispersing sunburnt grievers back into the house. I held a lot of fear in my heart then, but not long after that, in the only way a five-year-old could process it, the fear left me. I always thought of death as Granddad Adalbert Mary beneath the ground, still growing his garden even though he wasn’t here, and I felt hope.

You reap what you sow, even in death. And so I got about sowing.

2

I was terminated from employment, I was fired, six weeks before Christmas – which in my opinion is a highly undignified time to let somebody go. They’d hired a woman to fire me for them, one of these outside agencies trained in letting unwanted employees go properly, to avoid a scene, a lawsuit or their own embarrassment. She’d taken me out for lunch, somewhere quiet, let me order a Caesar salad and then just had a black coffee herself, and sat there watching me practically choke on my crouton while she informed me of my new employment situation. I suppose Larry knew that I wouldn’t take the news from him or anyone else, that I’d try to convince him to change his mind, that I’d slap him with a lawsuit or simply slap him. He’d tried to let me die with honour, only I didn’t feel much honour when I left. Being fired is public, I would have to tell people. And if I didn’t have to tell people it’s because they already knew. I felt embarrassed. I feel embarrassed.

I began my working life as an accountant. From the ripe young age of twenty-four I worked at Trent & Bogle, a large corporation where I stayed for a year, then had a sudden shift to Start It Up, where I provided financial advice and guidance to individuals wishing to start their own businesses. I’ve learned with most that there are always two stories to one event: the public story and the truth. The story I tell is that after eighteen months I left to start up my own business after becoming so inspired by those passing through my office I was overcome with the desire to turn my own ideas into a reality. The truth is that I became irritated by seeing people not doing it properly, my quest for efficiency always my driver, and so started my own business. It became so successful someone offered to buy it. So I sold it. Then I set up another business and again, I sold it. I quickly developed the next idea. The third time I didn’t even have long enough to develop the idea because somebody loved the concept, or hated that it would be a strong rival to theirs, and bought it straight away. This led me to a working relationship with Larry, the most recent start-up and the only job that I have ever been fired from. The business concept was not my initial idea but Larry’s, we developed the idea together, I was a co-founder and nurtured that baby like it had come from my own womb. I helped it grow. I watched it mature, develop beyond our wildest dreams, and then prepared for the moment when we would sell it. That didn’t happen. I got fired.

The business was called the Idea Factory; we helped organisations with their own big ideas. We were not a consultancy firm. We’d either take their ideas and make them better or create our own, develop them, implement them, see them through completely. The big idea might go from being Daily Fix, a newspaper for a local coffee shop with local stories, a publication that would support local businesses, writers, artists; or it might be a sex shop’s decision to sell ice cream – which, as my idea, was an enormous success, both personally and professionally. We didn’t struggle during the recession, we soared. Because if there was one thing that companies needed in order to keep going in the current climate, it was imagination. We sold our imagination, and I loved it.

As I analyse it now in my idle days I can see that my relationship with Larry had begun to break down some time ago. I was heading, perhaps blindly, towards the ‘sell the company’ route, as I had done three times already, while he was still planning on keeping it. A big problem, with hindsight. I think I pushed it too much, finding interested parties when I knew deep down that he wasn’t interested, and that put him under too much pressure. He believed ‘seeing it through’ meant continuing to grow it, whereas I believed seeing something through meant selling it and starting again with something else. I nurtured with a view to eventually saying goodbye, he nurtured to hold on. If you see the way he is with his teenage daughter and his wife, you’d know it’s his philosophy for pretty much everything. Hold on, don’t let go, it’s mine. Control must not be relinquished. Anyway.

I’m thirty-three years old and worked there for four years. I never had a sick day, a complaint, an accusation, never received a warning, never an inappropriate affair – at least none that resulted in a negative outcome for the company. I gave my job everything, notably all for my own benefit because I wanted to, but I expected the machine I was working for to give something back, to honour my honour. My previous belief that being fired wasn’t personal was based on never having been fired but having had to let go others. Now I understand that it is personal, because my job was my life. Friends and colleagues have been incredibly supportive in a way, which makes me think that if I ever get cancer, I want to treat it alone without anyone knowing. They make me feel like a victim. They look at me as if I’ll be the next person to hop on the plane to Australia to become the next overqualified person to work on a watermelon farm. Barely two months have passed, and already I’m questioning my validity. I have no purpose, nothing to contribute on a day-to-day basis. I feel as though I am just taking from the world. I know that this is short-term, that I can fulfil that role again, but this is currently how I feel. Mostly, it has been almost two months and I am bored. I’m a doer and I haven’t been doing much.

All of the things I dreamed of doing during my busy stressful days have been done. I completed most of them in the first month. I booked a holiday in the sun shortly before Christmas and now I am tanned and cold. I met with my friends, who are all new mothers on maternity leave and extended maternity leave and I-don’t-know-if-I-ever-want-to-go-back leave, for coffee at a time of day that I have never had coffee before out in public. It felt like bunking off school for the day, it was wonderful – the first few times. Then it became not so wonderful, and I focused my attention on those serving the coffee, cleaning the tables, stocking the paninis. Workers. All working. I have bonded with all my friends’ cute babies, though most of them lie on their colourful mats that squeak and rustle if you step on them by mistake, while the babies don’t do anything but lift their lardy legs up, grab their toes and roll over on to their sides and struggle to get back over again. It’s funny to watch the first ten times.

I have been asked to be godmother twice in seven weeks, as if that will help occupy the mind of the friend who’s not busy. Both requests were thoughtful and kind, and I was touched, but if I had been working I would not have been asked because I wouldn’t have visited them as much, or met their children, and everything eventually relates back to the fact that I have no work. I’m now the girl that friends call when they are at their wits’ end, with their hair like an oil slick on their head, reeking of body odour and baby vomit, when they say down the phone in a low hushed voice that gives me goosebumps that they are afraid of what they will do, so that I run to hold the baby while they have their ten-minute shower. I’ve learned that a ten-minute shower and the gift of going to the toilet without a ticking clock restores much more in new parents than personal hygiene.

I spontaneously call my sister, which I was never able to do before. This has confused her immensely and when I’m with her she constantly asks what time it is, as if I’ve upset her body clock. I Christmas-shopped with time to spare. I bought actual Christmas cards and posted them on time – all two hundred of them. I even took over my dad’s shopping list. I am ultra-efficient, always have been. Of course I can be idle – I love a two-week holiday, I love to lie on the beach and do nothing – but only when I say so, on my terms, when I know I have something waiting for me afterwards. When the holiday is over, I need a goal. I need an objective. I need a challenge. I need a purpose. I need to contribute. I need to do something.

I loved my job, but to make myself feel better about not being able to work there any more, I try to focus on what I won’t miss.

I worked mainly with men. Most of the men were cocks, some were amusing, a few were pleasant. I did not like to spend any hours outside of work with any of them, which might mean my next sentence doesn’t make sense, but it does. Of the team of ten, I slept with three. Of the three, I regret sleeping with two; the one I don’t regret sleeping with strongly regrets sleeping with me. This is unfortunate.

I will not miss people at work. People are what bother me most in life. It bothers me that so many lack common sense, that their opinions can be so biased and backward, so utterly frustrating, misguided, misinformed and dangerous that I can’t stand to listen to them. I’m not pointlessly prickly. I like non-PC jokes in controlled environments where it is appropriate and when it is obvious that the joke is at the expense of the ignorant who say such things. When a non-PC punchline is delivered by someone who genuinely believes it to be true, it is not funny, it is offensive. I don’t enjoy a good debate about what’s supposedly right and wrong; I would rather everyone just knew it, from the moment they’re born. A heel-prick test and a jab of cop-on.

Not having my job has made me face what I dislike most about the world, and about myself. In my job I could hide, I could be distracted. Without a job, I have to face things, think about things, question things, find a way to actually deal with things that I have been avoiding for a long time. This includes the neighbourhood that I moved into four years ago and had nothing to do with until now.

It also includes what happens at night: I’m not sure whether I somehow managed to ignore it before, whether it has escalated, or whether my idleness has led to me become fascinated, almost obsessed by it. But it is ten p.m. and it is a few hours away from my nightly distraction.

It is New Year’s Eve. For the first time ever, I am alone. I have chosen to do this for a few reasons: firstly, the weather is so awful I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it after almost being decapitated by the door when I’d opened it to collect my Thai takeaway from the brave man who had battled the elements to deliver my food. The prawn crackers had practically dissolved and he’d spilled my dumpling sauce in the bottom of the bag, but I didn’t have it in my heart to complain. His long forlorn look past my front door and into the safety and warmth of my house stopped me from mentioning the state of the delivery.

The wind outside howls with such force I wonder if it will lift the roof off. My next-door neighbour’s garden gate is banging constantly and I debate whether to go out and close it, but that would mean I’ll get blown around like the wheelie bins that are battering each other in the side passage. It is the stormiest weather this country – Ireland – has seen since whenever. It’s the same for the UK, and the US is being pounded too. It’s minus forty in Kansas, Niagara Falls has frozen, New York has been attacked by a frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex, there are mobile homes landing on clifftops in Kerry, previously sure-footed sheep on steep cliff faces are being challenged and defeated, lying beside washed-up seals on the shoreline. There are flood warnings, residents in coastal areas have been advised to stay indoors by miserable saturated news reporters with blue lips reporting live from beside the sea. The road that takes me most places that I need to go has been flooded for two days. At a time when I’ve wanted, needed to keep busy, Mother Nature is slowing me to a standstill. I know what she’s doing: she’s trying to make me think, and she’s winning. Hence all thoughts about myself now begin with Perhaps… because I’m having to think about myself in ways I never did before and I’m not sure if I’m right in my thinking about those things.

The bark of the dog across the road is barely audible above the wind, I think Dr Jameson has forgotten to take him in again. He’s getting a bit scatty, or else he’s had a falling out with the dog. I don’t know its name but it’s a Jack Russell. I find it running around my garden, sometimes it shits, it has on a few occasions run into my house and I’ve had to chase it around and deliver it back across the road to the right honourable gentleman. I call him the right honourable gentleman because he is a rather grand man in his seventies, retired GP, and for kicks and giggles was the president of every club going: chess, bridge, golf, cricket, and now our neighbourhood management company, which handles leaf-blowing, street-lamp bulb replacement, neighbourhood watch and the like. He is always well turned out, perfectly ironed trousers and shirts with little V-neck sweaters, polished shoes and tidy hair. He talks at me as if he’s directing his sentences over my head, lifted chin and head-on nostrils, like an amateur theatre actor, yet is never blatantly rude so gives me no reason to be rude back, but just distant. Distance is all I can give someone I can’t truly fathom. I didn’t know until one month ago that Dr Jameson even had a dog, but these days I seem to know too much about my neighbours. The more the dog barks over the wind, the more I worry if Dr Jameson has fallen over, or been blown away into somebody’s back garden like the trampolines that have been garden-hopping during the storms. I heard about a little girl waking up to find a swing set and slide in her back garden; she thought Santa had come again, but it turned out it had come from five houses down the road.

I can’t hear the party down the street, though I can see it. Mr and Mrs Murphy are having their usual family New Year shindig. It always begins and ends with traditional Irish songs and Mr Murphy plays the bodhrán and Mrs Murphy sings with such sadness it’s as though she’s sitting right in a field of dead rotten black potatoes. The rest of their guests join in as though they’re all rocking from side to side on a famine ship on stormy seas to the Americas. I’m not sad that the wind is lifting their sounds away in another direction, I can however hear a party that I can’t see, probably from a few streets away; a few words from those crazy enough to smoke outside are blown down my chimney, along with a distant rhythm of party music before it gets swiped away again; sounds and leaves circling in a violent frenzy on my doorstep.

I was invited to three parties, but couldn’t think of anything worse than party-hopping from one to the other, finding taxis on New Year’s Eve in this weather, feeling like this. Also the TV shows are supposed to be great on New Year’s Eve and, for the first time ever, I want to watch them. I wrap the cashmere blanket tighter around my body, take a sip of my red wine, feeling content with my decision to be alone, thinking that anybody out there, in that, is crazy. The wind roars again and I reach for the remote control to turn the volume up, but as soon as I do, every light in my house, including the television, goes off. I’m plunged into darkness and the house alarm beeps angrily.

A quick look outside my window shows me the entire street has lost electricity too. Unlike the others, I don’t bother with candles. It is further reason for me to feel my way to the stairs and climb into bed at barely ten o’clock. The irony that I am powerless is not lost on me. I watch the New Year’s Eve show on my iPad until the battery dies, then I listen to my iPod, which displays a threateningly low red battery that diminishes so quickly I can barely enjoy the songs. I turn then to my laptop, and when that dies I feel like crying.

I hear a car on the road and I know it’s action time.

I climb out of bed and pull open the curtains. The lights are out on the entire street, I see the flicker of candles from a few houses but mostly it is black, most of my neighbours are over seventy and are in bed. I’m confident that I can’t be seen because my house, too, is black; I can stand at the window with the curtains open and freely watch the spectacle that I know is about to take place.

I look outside. And I see you.

3

I am not a stalker but you make it difficult for me not to watch you. You are a circus act all of your own and I cannot help but be your audience. We live directly across the road from one another on this suburban cul de sac in Sutton, North Dublin, which was built in the seventies and was modelled on an American suburb. We have large front gardens, no hedging or shrubs to separate the pathway from our gardens, no gates, nothing to stop a person from walking straight up to our front windows. Our front gardens are larger than our back gardens and so the entire street has taken pride in maintaining the front, each one pruned, groomed, fed and watered within an inch of its natural life. Everybody on our street, bar the occupants of your house and mine, is retired. They spend endless hours in their gardens and, because they are outside, in the front, everybody knows about who comes and goes and at what time. Not me though. Or you. We are not gardeners and we are not retired. You are probably ten years older than me but we have lowered the age of the street by thirty years. You have three children, I’m not sure what ages they are but I guess one is a teenager and the other two are under ten.

You are not a good father; I never see you with them.

You have always lived opposite me, ever since I moved in, and you have always bothered me beyond belief, but going to work every day and all that came with that for me – distraction and knowing that there are more important things in the world – took me away from caring, from complaining and marching over there and punching your lights out.

I feel now like I’m living in a goldfish bowl and all I can see and hear from every window in my home is you. You, you, you. So at two thirty in the morning, which is a rather respectable time for you to return home, I find myself, elbows on the windowsill, chin resting on my hand, awaiting your next screw-up. I know this will be a good one because it’s New Year’s Eve and you are Matt Marshall, DJ on Ireland’s biggest radio station and, despite not wanting to, I heard your show tonight on my phone before that too died. It was as intrusive, disgusting, repulsive, unpalatable, foul, nasty and vomitous as the others have been. Your talk show Matt Marshall’s Mouthpiece which airs from eleven p.m. to one a.m. receives the highest number of listeners of any show on Irish radio. You have been at the helm of late-night talk shows for ten years. I didn’t know you lived on this street when I moved in, but when I heard your voice travel to me across the road one day, I knew instantly it was you. Everybody does when they hear you, and mostly they get excited but I was repulsed.

You are everything I do not like about people. Your views, your opinions, your discussions that do nothing to fix the problem you pretend you want to fix and instead stir up angry frenzies and mob-like behaviour. You provide a hub for hatred and racism and anger to be vented, but you present it as free speech. For those reasons I dislike you; for personal reasons, I despise you. I’ll go into them later.

You have driven home, as usual, going sixty kilometres per hour down our quiet retirement-home-like street. You bought your home from an aged couple who were downsizing, I bought mine from a widow who’d died – or at least from her children, cashing in. I did well, buying when houses were at their lowest, when people were taking what they could, before anything had risen again, and I am aiming to be mortgage free, an ambition I’ve had since I was five, wanting everything that’s mine to actually be mine and not at the mercy of others and their mistakes. Both of our homes looked like an episode of The Good Life and both of us had extensive work to do and had to fight with the management company who accused us of ruining the look of the place. We managed to compromise. Our houses look like The Good Life from the front; inside, we have extensively renovated. I, however, broke a rule with my front garden that I am still paying for. More on that later.

You drive dangerously close to your garage door as usual and you climb out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition, the radio blaring and the engine running. I’m not sure if you have forgotten or if you are not planning on staying. The car lights are on and are the only light on the street; it adds to the drama, almost as if the spotlight is on you. Despite the wind, which has died somewhat, every word of the Guns N’ Roses song is audible from the car. It’s ‘Paradise City’; 1988 must have been a good year for you. I was eight years old, you would have been eighteen, I bet you wore their T-shirts and had them on your school bag, I bet you engraved their names into school journals and went to The Grove and smoked and danced all night and shouted every word of their songs to the night sky. You must have felt free and happy then, because you play it a lot and always when you’re driving home.

I see a light go on in Dr Jameson’s bedroom; it must be a torch because it is moving around, as though the person holding it is disorientated. The dog is barking like mad now and I wonder if he’ll let him in before some little girl wakes up in the morning to find Santa has left a dizzy Jack Russell in her back garden. I watch the torch moving around the rooms upstairs. Dr Jameson likes to be at the helm of things, apparently. I learned this from my next-door neighbour Mr Malone, who called to my door to let me know that the bin truck was coming and he’d noticed I’d forgotten to put out my bins. I sense Mr Malone and Dr Jameson are at loggerheads over who should be in charge of the management company. I had forgotten to put my bins out because not being at work means I often confuse my days, but him calling to my home to tell me annoyed me. Seven weeks on, it wouldn’t bother me. I find it helpful. Everything neighbourly and anything helpful bothered me then. I had no community spirit. It wasn’t because I turned my back on it, it was because I was too busy. I didn’t know it existed and I didn’t require it.

You try the handle of the front door and appear full of shock and dismay that it isn’t unlocked for you or some masked gunman to freely enter your home. You ring the doorbell. It never begins politely, it is always rude, offensive. The amount of times you ring, the length of time you ring it for, like the burst of a machine gun. Your wife never answers straight away. Neither do the children; I wonder if they sleep through it now because they’re so used to it, or if she’s in there with them, all huddled in one room while the children sob, telling them to ignore the scary sounds at the door. Either way, nobody comes. Then you bang on the door. You like the banging, you spend most nights doing this, relieving your tension and anger. You work your way around the entire house, knocking and banging on every window you can reach. You taunt your wife in a sing-song voice, ‘I know you’re in there,’ as if she is pretending that she isn’t. I don’t think she is pretending, I think she is making it quite clear. I wonder if she is asleep or wide awake and hoping you will go away. I guess the latter.

Then you pick up your yelling. I know she hates the yelling because that above all embarrasses her, perhaps because your voice is so distinctive – though we couldn’t ever think it was any other couple on the road behaving like this. I don’t know why you haven’t figured this out by now and just cut straight to the yelling. She remains resolute for the first time I’ve witnessed. You do a new thing. You go back to your car and start blowing the horn.

I see Dr Jameson’s torch moving from upstairs to a downstairs room and I hope he isn’t going to go outside to try to calm you down. You will no doubt do something drastic. Dr Jameson’s front door opens and I hold my hands to my face, wondering if I should run out and stop him, but I don’t want to get involved. I will watch and when it turns violent I will step in, though I have no idea what I will do. Dr Jameson doesn’t appear. The dog comes running around the house at top speed, almost falls over himself on the flooded soggy grass in the race to get inside. The dog runs inside and the door is slammed. I laugh in surprise.

You must hear the door slam and think that it’s your wife, because you stop honking the horn and Guns N’ Roses is all that can be heard again. I’m thankful for that. The honking was above all the most annoying thing you’ve done. Almost as if she was waiting for you to calm down before letting you in, the front door opens and your wife steps out in her dressing gown, looking frantic. I see the dark shadow of someone behind her. At first I think she has met somebody else and I seriously worry about what will happen, but then I realise it’s your eldest son. He looks older, protective, the man of the house. She tells him to stay inside and he does. I am glad. You don’t need to make this any worse than it already is. As soon as you see her you jump out of the car and start shouting at her for locking you out of the house. You always shout this at her. She tries to calm you as she makes her way to your still-open jeep door, then she takes the keys out, which kills the music, the engine and the lights. She shakes the keys in front of you, telling you that you have the house key on your set. She told you that. You knew that.

But I know, as does she, that your practicality belongs with your sobriety, and in its place is this desperate, wild man. You always believe that you’re locked out, that you have been deliberately locked out. That it is you against the world, or more that it is you against the house, and that you must get inside using any means necessary.

You go quiet for a moment as you take in the keys dangling in front of your face and then you stagger as you reach for her, pull her close and smother her with hugs and kisses. I can’t see your face, but I see hers. It is the picture of complication, inner silent torture. You laugh and ruffle your son’s head as you pass, as if the whole thing was a joke, and I detest you even more because you can’t say sorry. You never say sorry – not that I’ve witnessed, anyway. Just as you step into the house the electricity goes back on. You twist around and you see me, at the window, my bedroom lights on full, revealing me in all my sneaky glory.

You glare at me, then you bang the door closed, and with all that you’ve done tonight, you make me feel like the weird one.

4

One of the things I liked about the Christmas break just gone was that nobody was working, it put us all on the same level. Everyone was in holiday mode, I didn’t have to compare and contrast me from them, them from me. But now everybody is back at work, so I am back to feeling how I felt before the break.

Initially I felt shocked, my whole system felt shocked, and then I believe I went through a grieving process as I mourned for a life that I’d lost. I was angry, of course I was angry; I had considered Larry, my colleague, my firer, to be my friend. We went skiing together every New Year, I stayed in his Marbella holiday home with him and his family for a week every June. I was one of the few invited to the house for his daughter’s over-the-top debs gathering. I was one of the small inner circle. I had never considered that he could take this course of action; that, despite the often heated arguments, our relationship would come to this, that he would very simply have the balls to do this to me.

After the anger, I was in denial about it being a bad thing that had happened. I didn’t want losing my job to own me, to define me. I didn’t need my job, my job needed me – and too bad, it had lost me. And then Christmas came and I got lost in social events; dinners and parties and drunken festivities that made me feel warm and fuzzy and forgetful. Now it is January and I feel as bleak as the day outside, for I am overcome by a new feeling.

I feel worthless, as though a very important part of my self-esteem has been utterly diminished. I have been robbed of my routine, my schedule which once determined my every single waking and sleeping hour. Routine of any kind has been difficult to establish; there don’t seem to be any rules for me, while everybody else marches to the beat of their own important drum. I constantly feel hungry, metaphorically and literally. I am hungry for something to do, somewhere to go, but I’m also hungry for everything in my kitchen because it’s there, right beside me, every day and I have nothing better to do than eat it. I am bored. And as much as it pains me to say it, I am lonely. I can go an entire day without any socialisation, without a conversation with anyone. I wonder sometimes if I’m invisible. I feel like the old men and women who used to bother me by engaging in unnecessary chit-chat with the cashiers while I was stuck behind them, in a hurry, wanting to get on to the next place. When you don’t have a next place to go to, time slows down enormously. I feel myself noticing other people more, catching more eyes, or seeking out eye contact. I’m now ripe and ready for a conversation about anything with anyone; it would make my day if somebody would meet my eye, or if there was someone to talk to. But everyone is too busy, and that makes me feel invisible; and invisibility, contrary to what I believed before, lacks any sense of lightness and liberty. Instead it makes me feel heavy. And so I drag myself around, trying to convince myself that I don’t feel heavy, invisible, bored and worthless, and that I am free. I do not convince myself well.

Another of the bad things about being fired is that my father calls by, uninvited.

He is in the front garden with my half-sister Zara when I arrive home. Zara is three years old, my dad is sixty-three. He retired from his printing business three years ago after selling it for a very good price that allows him to live comfortably. As soon as Zara was born he became a hands-on husband and father while his new wife, Leilah, works as a yoga instructor in her own practice. It is lovely that Dad has had a second chance at love, and also lovely that he has been able to fully embrace fatherhood, properly, for the first time in his life. He fully embraced the nappy-changing, night feeds, weaning and anything else that raising a child threw at him. He glows every day with the pride he has for her, this remarkable little girl who has managed to do such incredible things all by herself. Grow, walk, talk. He marvels at her genius, tells long stories about what she has done that day, the funny things she has said, the clever picture she drew for one so young. As I said, it is lovely. Lovely. But he views it with a first-time joy, a beginner, someone who has never seen it happen before.

In the last few weeks it has made me think, because I’ve had time to, and I wonder where was his wonderment, his absolute shock and awe, when Heather and I were growing up? If it was ever there at all, it was hidden by the mask of inconvenience and complete bafflement. Sometimes when he points out something wonderful that Zara has done I want to scream at him that other children do that too, you know, children like Heather and I, and how incredible we must have been to have gotten there first over thirty years ago. But I don’t. That would make me bitter and twisted, and I am not, and it would create an energy around something where there is nothing. I tell myself it’s the idleness that leads to these frustrating thoughts.

I often wonder, if Mum was alive, how would she feel seeing Dad as the man he is now – loyal, retired, a dedicated father and husband. Sometimes I hear her on her forgiving, wise days being all philosophical and understanding about it and other days I hear the tired voice of an exhausted single mother that I grew up with, spitting venom over him and his insensitivities. Which of her voices I hear may depend on what mood I am in myself. Mum died from breast cancer when she was forty-four. Too young to die. I was nineteen. Too young to lose a mother. It was most difficult for her, of course, having to leave this world when she didn’t want to. She had things she wanted to see, things she wanted to do, things she had been putting off until I was finished school, an adult, so that she could begin her life. She wasn’t finished yet; in many ways, she hadn’t even started. She’d had her first baby at twenty-four, then me the accident at twenty-five, and she had raised her babies and done absolutely everything for us and it should have been time for her.

After she died, I lived on campus and Heather stayed in the care home she had moved into while Mum was undergoing treatment. Sometimes I wonder why I was so selfish and didn’t decide to care for Heather myself. I don’t think I even offered. I understand that it was necessary for me to begin my own life, but I don’t believe I even thought about it for a moment. It’s not selfish not to want to, but it was selfish not to think about it. I look back and realise I could have been more helpful to my mother at the time too. I feel like I let her go through it all alone. I could have been there more, accompanied her more, instead of asking her about things afterwards. But I was a teenager, my world was about me then, and I saw my aunt being there for my mum.

Heather is my Irish twin: older by one year. She treats me as though I am the baby sister by many more years. I love her for this. I know that I was an accident, because my mum had no intention of planning another child so soon after the birth of Heather. Mum was shocked, Dad was appalled; he could barely cope with a baby in the first place, let alone one with Down syndrome, and now there was a second child on the way. Heather scared him; he didn’t know how to deal with her. When I came along, he moved further away from the family, seeking out other women who had more time on their hands to adore him and agree with him.

Meanwhile my mum dealt with reality with such strength and assurance, though she would admit later that she did it with what she called ‘Bambi legs’. I never saw that in her, never saw a shake or tremble or wrong-step, she always made it seem as if she had it all under control. She joked, and apologised, that I raised myself. I always knew that Heather was more important, that Heather needed more attention; I never felt unloved, it was just the way it was. I loved Heather too, but I know that, when Mum left this world, the one person she did not want to leave behind was Heather. Heather needed Mum, Mum had plans for Heather, and so she left the world with a broken heart for the daughter she was leaving behind. I’m okay with that, I understand. My heart broke not just for me but for the two of them too.

Heather is not happy-go-lucky, as people with Down syndrome are stereotypically thought to be. She is an individual who has good days and bad, like us all, but her personality – which has nothing to do with Down syndrome – is upbeat. Her life is tied up in routine, she appreciates it as a way of feeling in control of her life, which is why when I show up at her home or when she’s at work, she gets confused and almost agitated. Heather needs routine, which is something that makes us even more similar and not at all different.

Zara is hopping from one cobblestone to the other and trying not to step on the cracks. She insists Dad does the same. He does. I know this about him now and yet, seeing him, his Christmas belly hanging over his trousers and bouncing up and down as he hops from stone to stone, I still can’t help but not know who this man is. He looks up as I pull in.

‘I didn’t know you’d be here,’ I say, lightly. Translation: You didn’t tell me, you must always tell me.

‘We were taking a drive along the coast, watching the waves – weren’t we, Zara?’ He scoops her up in his arms. ‘Tell Jasmine about the waves.’

He always gets Zara to say things for us; I’m sure most parents do, but it infuriates me. I would rather have a conversation with Zara that isn’t dictated by Dad. Hearing her tell me things is hearing it twice.

‘They were huge waves, weren’t they? Tell Jasmine how huge they were.’

She nods. Big eyes. Holds her arms out to show what would be a disappointingly small wave, but an enormous stretch for her.

‘And weren’t they crashing up against the rocks? Tell Jasmine.’

She nods again. ‘They were crashing against the rocks.’

‘And the waves were splashing over on to the coast road in Malahide,’ he says, again in his childish voice, and I wish he would just tell me the story directly instead of relaying it like this.

‘Wow,’ I say, smiling at Zara and reaching out to her. She immediately comes to me and wraps her skinny long legs around my body and clings to me tightly. I do not have anything against Zara. Zara is lovely. No – Zara is beautiful. She is perfect in every way and I adore her. It is not Zara’s fault. It is not anybody’s fault, because nothing has happened and it is merely the annoyance of my dad making a habit of dropping by since I’ve been at home that is beginning to create something that is not there. I know this. I tell my rational self this.

‘How’s my spaghetti legs?’ I ask her, letting us into the house. ‘I haven’t seen you for an entire year!’ While I’m talking, I glance at your house. I do that a lot lately, I can’t seem to help it. It’s become a habit now, some ridiculous OCD thing where I can’t get into my car without looking across the road, or I can’t close my front door without looking, or sometimes when I pass a front window, I stop and watch. I know I need to stop. Nothing ever happens during the day time, not with you, at least; you barely surface, it’s just your wife coming and going with the kids all day. Occasionally I might see you pull a curtain open and go out to your car, but that’s it. I don’t know what I’m expecting to see.

‘Did you tell your dad that we made cupcakes together last week?’ I ask Zara.

She nods again and I realise that I’m doing exactly what Dad does. It must be frustrating for her, but I can’t seem to stop.

Dad and I talk to each other through Zara. We say things to her that we should be saying to one another, so I tell her that my electricity went off on New Year’s Eve, that I met Billy Gallagher in the supermarket and he has retired, and various other things that she doesn’t need to know. Zara pays attention for a while, but then we confuse her, and she runs off.

‘Your friend is in trouble again,’ Dad says when we’re sitting at the table with a cup of tea and biscuits left over from my enormous drawer of Christmas goodies that I’m consistently working my way through, and we watch Zara tip over the box of toys that I keep for her. The noise of Lego hitting floorboards takes away his next sentence.

‘What friend?’ I ask, worried.

Dad nods in the direction of the front window that faces your house. ‘Your man – what’s his name?’

‘Matt Marshall? He’s not a friend of mine,’ I say, disgusted. All talk always turns to you.

‘Well, your neighbour then,’ Dad says, and we both watch Zara again.

It’s only the silence dragging on for too long that causes me to ask, because I don’t know what else to say: ‘Why, what did he do?’

‘Who?’ Dad says, snapping out of his trance.

‘Matt Marshall,’ I say through gritted teeth, hating having to ask about you once, never mind twice.

‘Oh, him.’ As if it was an hour ago that he first raised it. ‘His New Year’s Eve show got complaints.’

‘He always gets complaints.’

‘Well, more than usual, I suppose. It’s all over the papers.’

We are silent again as I think about your show. I hate your show, I never listen. Or rather, I never used to listen but lately I’ve been listening to see if what you talk about has any direct link to the state you return home in, because you’re not trashed every single night of the week. About three or four nights a week. Anyway, so far there seems to be no direct correlation.

‘Well, he tried to ring in the New Year by getting a woman to-’

‘I know, I know,’ I say, interrupting him, not wanting to hear my dad say the word orgasm.

‘Well, I thought you said you hadn’t heard it,’ he says, all defensive.

‘I heard about it,’ I mumble, and I climb down on all fours to help Zara with her Lego. I pretend our tower is a dinosaur. I use it to eat her fingers, her toes, then I crash it into the second tower with a great big roar. She’s happy with that for a moment and goes back to playing by herself.

To recap on your New Year’s Eve show, you and your team felt it would be hilarious to ring in the New Year with the sound of a woman’s orgasm. A charming treat for your listeners, a thank you in fact, for their support. Then you had a quiz to guess the sound of a fake orgasm from a real orgasm, and then a full discussion about men who fake orgasms during sex. It wasn’t offensive, not to me, not in comparison to the filth you’ve spoken about in other shows, and I hadn’t been aware of men who faked orgasms so it was slightly informative, if not disturbing, maybe even personally enlightening – with regard to the man I didn’t regret in the office, who regretted me, possibly - though the douche-bags you had on the show to tell their side of their story did little to educate. I sound as if I’m defending you. I’m not. It just wasn’t the worst show. For once the issue is not you and your lack of charm but the right to hear the sound of a woman climax without it being considered offensive.

‘How is he in trouble?’ I ask moments later.

‘Who’s that?’ Dad asks and I count to three in my head.

‘Matt Marshall.’

‘Oh. They’ve fired him. Or suspended him. I’m not sure which. I’d say he’s out of there. Been there long enough anyway. Let somebody younger have a chance.’

‘He’s only forty-two,’ I say. It sounds like a defence of you, but I don’t mean it personally. I’m thirty-three and I need to find a new job, I’m concerned about age right now, particularly the attitude towards age in the workplace, that’s all. I think of you suspended and I immediately feel delight. I’ve always disliked you, have always wanted your show off the air, but then I feel bad and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because of your children and your nice wife, who I’ve taken to waving at in the morning.

‘Turns out it was a real woman in the studio,’ Dad says, looking a bit uncomfortable.

‘Well, it hardly sounded like a man.’

‘No, she was really… you know,’ he looks at me and I’ve no idea what he is implying.

We are quiet.

‘She was really pleasuring herself. Live in the studio,’ Dad says.

My stomach turns, both because I’ve just had that conversation with my dad and also because I can see you orchestrating that in your studio, the countdown to twelve o’clock, the team all guffawing over a woman, like idiots.

I once again loathe you.

I lift Zara into her car seat and plant a kiss on her button nose.

‘So I could talk to Ted, if you like,’ Dad says suddenly, as though continuing a conversation that I don’t remember having.

I frown. ‘Who’s Ted?’

‘Ted Clifford,’ he shrugs like it’s no big deal.

Anger rises within me so quickly I have to fight the urge to lose it right there. And I’d come so close. Dad sold his company to Ted Clifford. He could have sold it for three times the amount in the good times, he likes to tell everybody, but it is not the good times now and so he settled on a reasonably good sum of money that will ensure month-long holidays in the summer with Leilah and Zara, dinners out four times a week. I don’t know if he paid off his mortgage, and this annoys me. It would have been the first thing I’d have done. I’m not sure how me and Heather have come out of this, but I’m not bothered, though I might sound it. I’m financially okay right now, I’m more concerned about Heather. She needs security. As soon as I made enough money, I bought the apartment she was renting. She moved out of residential care five years ago, a big deal for her, a big deal for anybody. She lives with a friend, under the caring eye of her support assistant, and they are getting along perfectly well together, though it doesn’t stop me from worrying about her every second of every day. I got the apartment at a good price; most people were trying to get rid of their negative equity, that second property where it was suddenly a struggle to meet the payments. It was something I expected Dad to do when he retired, instead of buying the apartment in Spain. He thought she was fine in the care home, but I knew that it was a dream for her to have her own place so I took control. Again, I’m not angry, it’s just that things like this come to me now and I can’t help but ponder them… I need distraction.

‘No,’ I say abruptly. ‘Thanks.’ End of.

He looks at me as if he wants to say more. To stop him, I continue: ‘I don’t need you to get me a job.’

My pride. Easily damaged. I hate help. I need to do things all by myself, all of the time. His offer makes me feel weak, makes me think that he thinks I’m weak. It has too many connotations.

‘Just saying. It’d be an easy foot in the door. Ted would help you out any day.’

‘I don’t need help.’

‘You need a job.’ He chuckles. He looks at me as though he is amused, but I know that this is the precursor to his anger. That laugh is what happens when he’s annoyed; I’m not sure whether it is supposed to wind up the person he is annoyed at – which is what happens now and has always happened to me – or if it is his way of covering up his anger. Either way, I recognise the sign.

‘Okay, Jasmine, do it your way, as usual.’ He holds his hands up dramatically in the air, in defence, keys dangling from his fingers. He gets into the car and drives off.

He says it like it’s a bad thing: do it your way. Isn’t that a good thing for anyone to do? When would I ever, have I ever, wanted to do it his way? If I wanted help, he would be the last person I would go to. And then it occurs to me again that there seems to be an issue, when there really never has been an issue, and it startles me. I realise I’m standing out in the cold, glaring down the street at where the car has long since disappeared. I quickly look across the street to your house and I think I’ve seen a slight movement in an upstairs curtain, but I’ve probably imagined it.

Later, in bed, I’m unable to sleep. I feel as though my head is overheating from thinking too much, like my laptop when it’s been used for too many hours. I am angry. I am having half-finished conversations with my dad, with my job, with the man who stole my space in the car park that morning, with the watermelon that I dropped carrying from the car to the house which burst all over the ground and stained my suede boots. I am ranting to them all, I am setting everything right, I am cursing at them, I am informing them all of their shortfalls. Only it doesn’t help, it is just making me feel worse.

I sit up, frustrated and dehydrated.

Rita the Reiki woman I’d seen earlier that day told me this would happen. She’d told me to drink lots of water after our unusual session that I feel didn’t alter me at all, and instead I had a bottle of wine before bed. I’d never been to Reiki before and I probably won’t go again but my aunt had given me a voucher for Christmas. My aunt is into all kinds of alternative therapy; she and my mum used to do that kind of thing when Mum was sick. Maybe that’s why I don’t believe in it now, because it didn’t work, Mum died. But then the medicine didn’t work for her either, and I still take that. Maybe I will go back. I made the appointment when everybody went back to work, something to do, something to keep myself busy, something to put in my new yellow Smythson diary with my initials in gold on the bottom right corner which would usually be filled already with appointments and meetings and now is a sad depiction of my current life: christening times, coffee meetings and birthday celebrations. At the Reiki session I’d sat in a small white room that was filled with incense and made me feel so sleepy I wondered if I was being drugged. Rita was a tiny woman, bird-like, in her sixties, but she twisted her legs into a position on the armchair that showed her agility. She was soft-faced, almost out of focus, and I’m not sure if it was the incense smoke that blurred her, but I couldn’t quite see her edges. Her eyes were sharp though, the way they took me in and held on to every word that I said so that it made me take note of my own voice and I could hear how clipped and contained I sounded. Anyway, apart from a nice chat with a supportive woman, and a relaxing twenty-minute lie-down in a nicely scented womb-like room, I didn’t feel in any way altered.

She’d given me one piece of advice though for my busy head. I’d immediately disregarded it as soon as I’d left, but now I am barely able to formulate a single thought for long enough to be able to see it through, to process it, to get rid of it, so I take her advice. I remove my socks and pad around the carpet for a while, hoping I’ll feel ‘rooted’ to stop my head from drifting again into ranty angry territory. I step on something sharp – the end of a clothes hanger – and curse as I inspect my foot. I cradle my foot in my hands. I’m not sure how rooted is supposed to feel, but this can’t be it.

She’d suggested walking barefoot, preferably on grass, but if not, generally barefoot as much as possible as soon as I returned to the house, The scientific theory behind the health benefits to walking barefoot, is that the Earth is negatively charged, so when you ground, you’re connecting your body to a negatively charged supply of energy. And since the Earth has a greater negative charge than your body, you end up absorbing electrons from it. The grounding effect has an anti-inflammatory effect on your body. I don’t know about all that but I need to clear my head and as I’m trying to cut down on the headache tablets, I may as well try barefoot.

I look outside. There is no grass in my garden. That was the terrible, unspeakable thing I did when I moved in four years ago. I wasn’t a fan of gardens, I was twenty-nine years old, I was busy, I was barely at home, I was never home long enough to notice my garden. To avoid the effort involved in its upkeep, I had the relatively nice garden that was there when I bought the place dug up and replaced it with maintainable cobble-locking. It looked impressive, it cost a fortune, it horrified the neighbours. I put some nice black pots outside my front door with plants that stayed green all year round, pruned into clever modern twisted shapes. I cared a little bit about how it affected my new neighbours, but I was never home to discuss it with them at length, and I reasoned with myself that it would save me paying a gardener – because I wasn’t about to do it myself; I wouldn’t know where to start. There is still grass on the pathway outside of my house, which is maintained by my neighbour, Mr Malone, who did this without asking me. I think he sees it as his because he was here first, and anyway, what do I know about grass? I am a grass-defector.

I’d thought that buying my own house at the age of twenty-nine – a semi-detached, four-bedroom family home – was quite a mature and grounding thing to do. Who knew that when I dug up the garden I was losing the very thing that could have kept me grounded.

I check your house and your jeep isn’t there and all the lights are out. I never need to worry about anybody else’s house. I never seem to care. I put on a tracksuit and go downstairs barefoot. Feeling like a sleuth, I run on tiptoe across the cold paving down my driveway and straight to the grass that lines the path. I check the grass for dog poo. I check for slugs and snails. Then I pull up the ends of my tracksuit bottoms and I allow my feet to squelch into the wet grass. It is cold but it’s soft. I chuckle to myself as I walk up and down, surveying the street at midnight.

For the first time since I’ve moved in, I feel guilty for what I’ve done to my garden. I look at the houses and see how mine is dark and grey amidst the colour. Not that there is much colour in the gardens in January, but at least the bushes, the trees, the grass, break the grey concrete of the paths, the brown and grey of my paving.

I’m not sure if going barefoot in the grass is helping anything other than the onslaught of pneumonia, but at least the cool air has soothed my hot, over-wired head and freed up some space. This is unusual behaviour for me. Not the walking on grass at midnight, but the lack of control. Sure, I’ve had stressful days at the office where I’ve needed to regroup, but this is different. I feel different. I’m thinking too much, focusing on areas that didn’t require thinking about before.

Often, when I’m searching for something, the only way I can find anything is to acknowledge out loud what it is, because I can’t see it unless I fully register and envision in my mind what it is I’m looking for. For example, rooting around in my oversized handbags for my keys, I say either in my head or aloud, ‘Keys, keys, keys.’ I do the same in my house: I wander from room to room, saying or muttering, ‘Red lipstick, pen, phone bill…’ or whatever it is I’m looking for. As soon as I do that, I find the thing quicker. I don’t know the reason for this, but I know that it makes sense, that it’s true, that Deepak Chopra would be able to explain in a more sophisticated, informed, philosophical manner, but I feel that when I tell myself what it is I’m looking for, then I fully know what it is that I must find. Order given: dutiful body and mind respond.

Sometimes the very thing I am looking for is staring me straight in the face, but I can’t see it. This happens to me a lot. It happened this morning when I was looking for my coat in my wardrobe. It was right in front of me, but because I didn’t say, ‘Black coat with the leather sleeves,’ it didn’t appear to me. I was just idly searching, eyes running over clothes and not finding anything.

I think – in fact, I have come to know – that I have applied this thinking on a larger scale, I’ve applied it to my life. I tell myself what I want, what I am looking for, I envision it so that it’s easier to find, and then I find it. It has worked for me all my life.

So now I find myself in a place where all that I’ve envisioned and worked hard for has been taken away, it is not mine any more. First thing I do is try to get it all back again, make it mine again, straight away, immediately; and if that’s not possible – which it usually isn’t, because I’m a realist, not a voodoo practitioner – then I must find something else to look for, something else to achieve. I’m obviously talking about my job here. I know I will get back to work eventually, but I have been put on hold. I have been stalled, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I’m on what is called ‘gardening leave’. It has nothing to do with gardening, thankfully, or I’d have a very long year power-hosing and weeding between the cracks of my cobble-locked garden. Gardening leave is the practice whereby an employee who has left their job or who has been terminated is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. It’s often used to prevent employees from taking with them up-to-date and perhaps sensitive information when they leave their current employer, especially when they are leaving to join a competitor. I wasn’t leaving to join a competitor, as I’ve already explained, however Larry felt certain that I would work with a company we were in relative competition with, a company I had tried to schmooze to buy ours. He was right. I would have worked with them. They called me the day after I was fired to offer me a job. When I told them about the gardening leave they said they couldn’t possibly wait that long – twelve months gardening leave!! - and so they went off to find somebody else. Not only has the length of my gardening leave chased away other employers, I have absolutely nothing to do while I wait. It feels like a prison sentence. Twelve months gardening leave. It is a sentence. I feel as if I’m gathering dust on some shelf while the world is moving on around me and I can’t do anything to stop it or join in. I don’t want my mind to start growing moss; I’ll need to continuously power-hose it, to keep it fresh.

Blades of wet grass stick to my feet, working their way up my ankles as I walk back and forth on the patch of grass. So what happens when I’m put on hold for an entire year and there’s nothing I can do about it? What do I do?

I pad up and down on the wet grass, my feet starting to feel cold but my mind buzzing with a new idea. A new project. A goal. An objective. Something to do. I must right a wrong. I will uproot the very ground I walk on, which will be easy because I feel as if I have been uprooted already.

I will give the neighbourhood a gift. I will bring back the garden.

5

‘He’s beautiful,’ I whisper, looking at the tiny baby in my friend Bianca’s arms.

‘I know,’ she smiles, gazing at him adoringly.

‘Is it amazing?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, it’s… amazing.’ She looks away, her smile a bit wobbly, her eyes sunken into the back of her head from two nights’ lack of sleep. ‘Hey, have you started a new job yet?’

‘No, I can’t – you know, the gardening leave thing.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, then winces and goes quiet for a moment. I don’t dare interrupt her thoughts. ‘You’ll find something,’ she says, giving me a sympathetic smile.

I have grown to hate that smile on people. I am in the Rotunda Hospital, once again finding myself visiting somebody as they do something else. It has occurred to me lately that most of my visits have been this way. Calling into a friend at work, dropping by one of my sister’s classes to watch, seeing my dad while he is busy with Zara, chatting to friends while they are watching their children swimming or dancing, or at a playground. Every time I see people lately it is me interrupting their life, them busy with something – distracted heads that have one eye on me and another on their job – while beside them or across from them I am still, patiently waiting for them to finish what they’re doing to answer me. I am the still person in every scene of my life and I have started to see myself from afar each time it happens, like I’m outside of myself, watching myself be still and silent while the others move around, tend to their work, their children. Since realising this, I have tried not to meet anyone during the day when they are in the middle of something and I am not. I have tried to make appointments for nights out, dinners, drinks – times when I know we can be on even ground, face to face, one on one. But it is difficult, everybody is so busy, some can’t get a babysitter, we can’t seem to synchronise a night out that suits everybody, and so we struggle to arrange anything. It took me weeks to organise a dinner party in my house this weekend. Then I will be busy, and they can be still. In the meantime, here I am in the hospital, sitting at the bedside of one of my dearest friends who has just had her first baby, and while I am happy for her, of course I am, and was secretly delighted about the nine months maternity leave so that I could have company for the remainder of the year, I know the reality is that I will not see her very much, or if I do, she will be busy and I will be still, I will sit opposite her or beside her and wait for her to be ready, holding half her attention.

‘We were thinking, me and Tristan…’ Bianca breaks into my thoughts.

My body turns rigid as I sense what’s coming.

‘He’s not here, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me asking you…’

I feel dread but I fix my face into what I hope is the perfect look of interest.

‘Would you be his godmother?’

Ta-da. Third one in two months, it has to be a world record. ‘Oh, Bianca. I’d love to,’ I smile. ‘Thank you, that’s such an honour…’

She smiles back at me, delighted by her request, one of the most special moments in her life, while inside I feel like a charity case. It’s as if they’ve all made a pact to ask me to be godmother in order to give me something to do. And what will I do? Go to the church and stand by their side while they hold the baby, while the priest pours water, while everybody does something and I stand idly by.

‘Did you hear about your friend’s son?’

‘What friend?’

‘Matt Marshall,’ Bianca says.

‘He is not my friend,’ I say, annoyed. Then, deciding it’s best not to argue with a woman who has just given birth, I ask, ‘What did his son do?’

‘He put a video up on YouTube telling the world how much he hates his dad. Mortifying, isn’t it? Imagine talking about a family member like that.’

The baby in Bianca’s arms lets out a scream.

‘This little fucker keeps biting my nipple,’ she hisses, and I’m immediately silenced as her mood swings again and darkness descends in the hospital room.

She moves her three-day-old son into a different position, holding him like a rugby ball, her enormous breast bigger than his head and looking like it’s smothering him. The baby sucks and is silenced again.

It is almost a beautiful moment, apart from the fact that when I look at her she has tears streaming down her face.

The door opens and her pale husband Tristan ducks his head in. He sees his firstborn and his face softens, then he looks up and sees his wife and his face tightens. He swallows.

‘Hi, Jasmine,’ he steps inside and greets me.

‘Congratulations, Daddy,’ I say gently. ‘He’s beautiful.’

‘He’s got a mouthful of fangs, is what he has,’ Bianca says, wincing again.

The baby screams as he’s pulled away from her chapped red raw nipple.

‘Seriously, Tristan, this is… I can’t…’ Her face crumples.

I leave them to it.

I tell myself while driving that I am not interested in watching your son on YouTube. I tell myself I won’t stoop to your level, that I have far more important things to do than think about you and absorb myself in your world, but all I actually have to do that day is shop for dinner. Shopping for one person doesn’t depress me as it does some of my other single friends; I am happy to be alone and everybody needs to eat, but it has come to this. Eating. Eating was something I had to squeeze into my busy day because I had to, to stay alive. Now it is something to string out, make an afternoon of. The last few days I have made elaborate meals for myself. Yesterday I spent fifty-five minutes in Eason’s browsing the shelves for recipe books, spent sixty minutes buying the ingredients, which took me two and a half hours to prepare and cook, and then I ate it in twenty minutes. That was my entire day yesterday. It was enjoyable but the novelty has worn off many of the things I was looking forward to doing in my ‘time off’.

When I pull into the supermarket car park, the day surprisingly bright and sunny for the first time in weeks though it is still cold, I take my phone out of my bag and go straight to YouTube. I type in Matt Marshall and immediately ‘Matt Marshall’s son’ pops up as an option. I select it. Posted late last night, it already has thirty thousand views – which is impressive.

Though I have never seen your son close up, the image of him is immediately familiar to me. It is what I see most days as he leaves for school, head hidden under a hood, his face downward, earphones on his head, red hair peeking out from under his hood as he walks from the house to the bus stop. I have been his neighbour for four years and it occurs to me I don’t even know his name, but the comments beneath the video tell me that it is Fionn.

Way to go, Fionn!

My dad is a loser 2, know how u feel!

Your dad shud be locked up 4 da shit dat he says.

I am a registered psychologist and I am concerned by your outburst, please contact me, I can help.

I’m a big fan of your dad, he helped my son when he was being bullied in school, he helped shed light on bullying laws in Ireland.

May the angels heal your inner anger.

Your dad’s a loser and you’re a fag.

A small slice of the supportive comments the viewing public have made.

Fionn is fifteen years old and from his uniform each morning I can tell he attends Belvedere, a costly private school in Dublin. Though I haven’t watched it yet, I already know that they will not like this. Here on the screen I can see he has brown eyes, his cheeks and nose are lightly freckled. He is looking down at the webcam, his laptop at an angle to take him all in so that the lights on the ceiling are blaring in the camera. His nostrils are wide and flaring with anger. There is music in the background, I guess he is at a party, I’m guessing he is drunk. His pupils are dilated, though perhaps the anger is causing that. What ensues is a four-minute rant about how he would officially like to separate himself from his loser dad, you, who he believes is not a real dad. He says that you are an embarrassment, a waster, his mum is the only person who keeps things going, you have no talent. And on it goes, a well-spoken boy, attempting to be harder than he is in a badly constructed attack on you, outlining why he believes you should be fired and never rehired. It is a rather embarrassing rant that makes me cringe and watch from behind my hands. The music in the background gets louder, as do male voices. He takes a quick look behind him and then the video is over.

Despite the way I feel about you, this does not fill me with any kind of happiness or entertainment. I feel bad for watching it, I feel bad for you, for all of you.

I do a quick shop, feeling glum as I hurry down the aisles. Sometimes I forget why I feel that way, I just have this feeling that something bad has happened to me and affected my life. Then I remember why I feel down and I try to shake it off, because it has nothing to do with me. Trouble is, even though I know it’s silly of me, I can’t help feeling connected to what happened.

I keep the dinner simple – aubergine parmigiana – and I finish the last glass of the bottle of red wine from the night before. I settle down to ponder your problem as if it is mine. What should we do about Fionn, Matt? There is no action in your house. Your wife’s car is gone, and you are all out. Nothing.

Dr Jameson’s bedroom light goes out. I have no solutions, Matt.

I have fallen asleep on the couch for the first time in my life and at some hour I wake up, very confused as to where I am; the only light in the room is the flickering, muted TV. I jump up and kick my plate and cutlery to the floor, smashing my wine glass. I’m fully alert now, heart pounding, and I realise what has woken me. It is the familiar sound of your jeep speeding down the street. Avoiding the broken glass at my feet, I go to the window to see you driving erratically, swerving into your driveway coming dangerously close to your garage door as usual. However this time you don’t brake and you crash directly into the white door. The garage door shudders and vibrates, the noise echoing loudly off the sleeping houses. I can picture Dr Jameson waking with a start, fumbling to remove his eye mask. On cue, Dr Jameson’s bedroom light goes on.

The garage door stays standing, the house doesn’t topple on to your car. Unfortunate really. Nothing happens for a while. ‘Paradise City’ is still playing, blaring. I can see you, unmoving in the driver’s seat. I wonder if you’re okay, if the airbag has exploded and knocked you out. I think of calling an ambulance for you, but I don’t know if it’s needed and it could be seen as wasting emergency services’ time. Though I very much do not want to leave the safe haven of my home, I know I can’t just leave you there.

You slept in the car last night, not even bothering with your usual routine of banging at the doors and windows of the house, but somewhere between me falling asleep and waking up, you’d managed to get inside the house. I wonder if your son let you in. I wonder if it had become too much for him and he’d disobeyed his mum’s orders to ignore you and instead answered the door and confronted you. Already fired up from the video he’d made, he told you what he thought of you. I’d like to have seen that. I know that’s weird.

Tonight you are worse than usual. I suspected this would be the case. I’m sure you know about the YouTube posting. I listened to the radio to see if was true about your suspension and there was another DJ filling in for you and the team. You and the team have all been suspended for your naughty New Year’s Eve antics and I see you have used your time not to spend a rare midweek evening at home with your family or to ponder your actions, but by drinking the night away. It was odd not to hear your voice on air; you’ve become synonymous with that time of night in most people’s homes, cars, workplaces, vans and lorries on long overnight drives. Learning of your suspension makes me surprisingly not as happy as I’d imagined, but then I come to the conclusion that it might be a good thing. It might make you think about all the lowly things you have said and discussed on your show, and how that has affected people and how you can improve yourself and thereby improve the lives of so many that you have such influence over. It makes me think of the one that makes me hate you, the entire reason for this anger I feel towards you.

Sixteen years ago, on another station at another hour, you hosted a discussion about Down syndrome. It was about many aspects of Down syndrome, and some of it was informative, thanks to the angry but firm woman who called in from Down Syndrome Ireland to explain the realities. Unfortunately she was deemed too calm and patient for your show and you quickly hung up on her. The others were uneducated, obnoxious ignoramuses who were given far too much airtime. Much of the discussion was about CVS, Chorionic Villus Sampling, and amniocentesis, also referred to as amniotic fluid test or AFT, which is a medical procedure used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and foetal infections. The most common reason to carry out such a test is to determine whether a baby has certain genetic disorders or a chromosomal abnormality such as Down syndrome. Women who choose to have this test are primarily those at increased risk for genetic and chromosomal problems, in part because the test is invasive and carries a small risk of miscarriage. I can see why you wanted to have this conversation; it is worth having the conversation, it could help women make the decision, if dealt with in a mature and honest way – but not in your way, not in the way your show handles things, trying to stir up controversy and drama. Instead of handling it in a mature, honest way you invited lunatics on to show the worst side and voice their uninformed opinions of Down syndrome. For example, an eejit anonymous man who had just discovered his girlfriend was having a baby with Down syndrome and what rights did he have about stopping this?

I was seventeen years old, at a party with a guy I had fancied for ages. Everyone was drunk, someone’s parents had gone away, and instead of listening to music it had been cool to listen to Matt Marshall. I didn’t mind you then; in fact I thought you were cool, because it was cool to hear the kinds of things you were discussing back when we were still trying to find our own voice. But the conversation made me feel ill, the conversation drifted from the speakers and continued into our room at the party and I had to listen to my friends, who should have known better, and to people I didn’t know, and the guy that I fancied, giving their opinions on the matter. Nobody wanted a child with Down syndrome. One person said they’d prefer one to a baby with AIDS. I was sickened by what I heard. I had a beautiful sister asleep at home, with a mother who was undergoing treatment for cancer who was more distraught about leaving my sister than leaving anything else in her life, and I couldn’t quite take what I was hearing.

I just got up and walked out. The guards picked me up along the coast road. I wasn’t falling around the place, but I was quite emotional and the alcohol only made me worse so they brought me to the station for my own safety, and a warning.

Mum was sick, she needed her rest. I couldn’t call my aunt after what had happened over the past few weeks in her house between me and her son Kevin, nor could I go back to stay in her house after the event, so they called Dad. He’d been out on a date with a new girlfriend, and they collected me in a taxi, him in his tuxedo and her in her ballgown, and they brought me back to his apartment. They’d both been throwing eyes at each other and giggling in the cab; I could tell they were finding the entire thing so much fun. As soon as we got to the apartment they went straight out again, which was a blessing.

So I stand at the window now and watch your unmoving body in your jeep, not caring whether you see me watching or not because I’m worried. Just as I’m thinking about going outside to assist you, the jeep door opens and you fall out. Head first, your back facing out as if you’ve been leaning it against the door. You slide down slowly and your head hits the ground. Your foot is tangled in the seat belt on the leather seat. You don’t move. I look around for my coat and then I hear you laughing. You struggle to untangle your foot from the seat belt, your laugh dying down as you become irritated and need to concentrate on freeing yourself as the blood rushes to your head.

You finally free yourself to begin your shouting/doorbell-ringing/banging act, but there is no response from the house. You honk the horn a few times. I’m surprised none of the neighbours tell you to be quiet; perhaps they’re asleep and they can’t hear. Perhaps they’re afraid, perhaps they watch you as I do, though I don’t think so. The Murphys go to bed early, the Malones never seem to be disturbed by you and the Lennons beside me are so timid I think they would be afraid to confront you. It is only Dr Jameson and I who seem to be disturbed by you. Your house is completely still and I only notice now that your wife’s car is not parked on the street as it usually is. The curtains are not drawn on any of the windows. The house appears empty.

You disappear around the back of the house and then I hear you before I see you. You reappear pulling a six-seater wooden table across the grass. The legs of the table destroy the grass, digging up the soil, leaving deep tracks as though you’ve been ploughing. You heave the table from the grass and on to the concrete. The wood drags across the ground, across the driveway behind the car, making an awful screeching sound which goes on for almost a minute. Sixty seconds of screeching and I see the Murphys’ lights go on down the street. Once you have dragged the wooden table on to the grass in the front garden, you disappear into the back garden again and take three trips to carry the six matching chairs. On the last trip you return with the sun umbrella and struggle to position it in the centre hole. You fire it across the garden with frustration and as it flies through the air, it opens like a parachute, takes flight and then lands, open, in a tree. Out of breath, you retrieve a carrier bag from the jeep. I recognise it as being from the local off-licence. You empty the bag, line up the cans on the table and then you sit down. You put your boots up on the wooden table, making yourself at home, and settle down as though you couldn’t be more comfortable and you couldn’t be more at home. You invade my head with your voice and now you are an eyesore, right in front of my house.

I watch you for a while but I eventually lose interest because you’re not doing anything other than drinking and blowing smoke rings into the still night sky.

I watch you watching the stars, which are so clear tonight that Jupiter can be seen next to the moon, and I wonder what you’re thinking about. What to do about Fionn. What to do about your job. Are we not so different after all?

6

It is 8.30 a.m. and I am standing in the garden with a builder named Johnny, a large red-cheeked man who acts like he detests me. Nobody is saying anything; he and his colleague, Eddie, leaning on the jackhammer, are just looking at me. Johnny peers over at you in the front garden, asleep in your garden chair with your boots up on the table, and then back at me.

‘So what do you want us to do? Wait until he wakes up?’

‘No! I-’

‘Well, that’s what you said.’

It is exactly what I said.

‘That’s not what I said,’ I say, firmly. ‘Isn’t eight thirty too early to start making so much noise? I thought the official start time for building works was nine a.m.’

He looks around. ‘Most people are at work.’

‘Not on this street,’ I reply. ‘No one works on this street.’ Not any more.

It is an unusual thing to say, but it is entirely true. He looks at me, confused, then back at the guy with the jackhammer like I’m crazy.

‘Look, love, you said you needed this done immediately. I have two days to finish this job and then I’m on to something else, so I either start now or-’

‘Fine, fine. Start now.’

‘I’ll be back at six to take a look.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Another job. Eddie can handle it.’

Without a word, Eddie, who looks about seventeen, puts on his headphones. I hurry inside. I stand at the window in the TV room that faces your garden and I watch you at the table, head back, in a peaceful sleep after your drunken stupor. You have a blanket draped over you. I wonder if your wife did this or if you got it from the car during the night after you woke up, freezing. Common sense ought to have told you to stay in the car and put the heater on, but you’re not one for listening to sense.

Something most definitely seems off this morning. Aside from the fact you are sleeping in the middle of your destroyed garden on lopsided, badly placed garden furniture for everybody to see, your house would usually be busy at this hour. The kids are back at school, your wife should be coming and going as she drops them off and goes about her errands, but there’s nothing happening this morning. There have been no signs of life from the house, the curtains are exactly as they were yesterday morning. Your wife’s car is gone. The umbrella is still stuck in the tree. There are no visible signs of your family at home.

Suddenly the jackhammer starts up and even from inside the house the noise is so loud that I feel the vibrations in my chest. I think for the first time that I should have alerted the neighbours to the disruption that will be occurring over the next few days as they dig up my perfectly fine paving to make way for some grass. They would have done that for me, I’m sure.

You leap up from the chair, arms and legs flying everywhere, and look around as if you’ve come under attack. It takes you a moment to assess where you are, what’s happening, what you have done. And then you take in the builder in my garden. You immediately charge over to my house. My heart pounds and I don’t know exactly why. We have never spoken before, not so much as a hello or a wave in passing. Apart from when you caught me watching you from my bedroom window on New Year’s Eve, you have never even acknowledged my existence, nor I yours, because I detest you and everything you stand for, because you couldn’t understand how any mother, even a dying mother, could be sad about leaving her child with Down syndrome in the world without her. I relive the comments I heard you and your callers say on that night that I fell in hate with you and by the time you reach my garden I am ready for the fight.

I can see you shouting at Eddie. Eddie cannot possibly hear you over the noise and the headphones, but he can see the man standing in front of him, mouth opening and closing angrily, hand on one hip, the other arm pointing to a house, demanding to be heard. Eddie ignores you and continues digging up my expensive paving. I make my way to the hall and I pace before the door, waiting for you to call. I jump when the doorbell rings. Just once. Nothing rude about it at all. A single push, a bright briiing, nothing at all like the routine with your wife.

I open the door and you and I are face to face for the first time ever. This is for my sister, this is for you, Heather, this is for my mother, for the unfairness in her having to leave the daughter she never wanted to leave. I say this to myself over and over, opening and closing my hands, ready to fight.

‘Yes?’ I say, and already it’s confrontational.

You seem taken aback by my tone.

‘Good morning,’ you say patronisingly, as if to tell me, that’s how to begin a conversation, as if you know the tiniest, minutest thing about polite conversation. You hold out your hand. ‘I’m Matt, I live across the road.’

This is very difficult for me. I am not a rude person, but I look at your hand and back at your unshaven face, your bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol emanating from every pore, your mouth that I dislike so much because of the words that come out of it, and I move my hands to the back pockets of my jeans. My heart drums maniacally as I do this. For you, Heather, for you, Mum.

You look at me, incredulous. You take your hand back, shove it into your coat pocket.

‘Have I missed something? It’s eight thirty a.m. and you’re digging up the ground! Is there something we should all know about? Some oil reserves, perhaps, that we can all share?’

You are still drunk, I can tell. Despite your feet being planted firmly on the ground, your body is moving in a circular motion like Michael Jackson’s leaning dance move.

‘If it’s disturbing you so much, maybe you’d find it easier to camp in your back garden for the next few days.’

You look at me like I’m the biggest, craziest bitch and then you walk away.

There are many things that I could have said. Many many ways I could have conveyed my disappointment in the way you discussed Down syndrome. A letter. An invitation to coffee, perhaps. An adult conversation. Instead I said that, on our first meeting. I am immediately sorry, not because I may have hurt you, but because I think I may have wasted an opportunity to actually do something important in the right way. And then it occurs to me for the first time that you probably don’t even remember that particular show. You have done so many, they probably mean nothing to you. I’m just an obnoxious neighbour who didn’t tell you about her building works.

I watch you cross the road to your house. Eddie is still ignoring the world and digging up the ground, the sound of it drumming in my head. You walk up and down the front and back of your house, staring in the windows, trying to figure out how to get in. You stagger a little, still drunk. Then you go to the table and I think you’re going to sit down but instead you pick up a garden chair and carry it to the front door. You swing it back with all your might and then slam it once, twice, three times against the window beside your front door, smashing the glass. None of this can be heard over the sound of the drill. You turn your body sideways, your stocky build making it difficult for you to slide in through the narrow space you’ve created, but eventually you gain entry to your house.

Despite the fact I have witnessed you do this, you once again have made me feel like the irrational one.

7

Eddie works solidly for two hours, then disappears for three hours. During this time the machine is sitting in my front garden, which now resembles the scene of an earthquake. He has wreaked mayhem and I hate looking at it, but I can’t help it because I am watching out the window, not for you – I know you won’t surface for hours – but for Eddie who wandered off down the road still wearing his hard hat and never came back. I call Johnny, who doesn’t answer and his phone has no messaging service. This is not a good sign. He was recommended to me by the landscaper I’ve hired for my garden, which is also not a good sign.

My mobile rings and it’s a private number so I don’t answer. My aunt Jennifer has told me, drunkenly on Christmas Day, that my cousin Kevin is coming home in the New Year and wants to get in touch. This is the New Year and I have been fielding my calls like the CIA. Kevin left Ireland when he was twenty-two, at first travelling the world, and then eventually settling in Australia, though I don’t think Kevin ever settled. He went off to find himself after a flurry of family drama and never came back, not even for Christmas, birthdays or my mum’s funeral. This is the same Kevin who told me I’d die when I was five – and who told me he was in love with me when I was seventeen.

My aunt was away with my mum for the weekend on one of their retreats to help Mum and, as I always did then, I was sleeping over in their house. My uncle Billy was watching TV and Kevin and I were sitting in the back garden on the swing set, spilling our hearts out to one another. I was telling him about Mum being sick, and he was listening. He was doing a really good job of listening. And then he told me his secret: that he’d just discovered he was adopted. He said he felt betrayed, after all this time, but it suddenly made sense to him, all the feelings he’d been having. About me. He was in love with me. Next thing I knew, he was on me, hands everywhere, hot breath and slippery tongue in my mouth. Whenever I thought about him after that I’d wash my mouth out for as long as I could. He may not have been my cousin in blood, but he was my cousin. We’d played Lord of the Flies in the trees at the back of his garden, we’d tied his brother Michael up and roasted him on the spit, we’d played dress-up and put on shows standing on windowsills. We’d done family things together. Every memory of him I had was tied up in him being my cousin. I felt disgusted by him.

We didn’t speak after that. I never told my aunt, but I knew that she knew. I assumed my mum had told her, but she never discussed it with me. After that first year she went from being nervously apologetic about what had happened to being irritated by me. I think she felt that my forgiving him would be the one thing that would bring him back to her. He hadn’t left the country at that stage, but Kevin had never wanted to be a part of anything or anyone, not least his family, he’d always been troubled, he’d always been unsure of himself and everyone around him. I’d had enough to deal with at that time; his issues were too much for me. Maybe that’s cruel, but at seventeen there was no understanding of his problems; he was my gross adopted cousin with problems who’d kissed me, and I wanted him the hell away from me. But now he is back and one of these days I will have to face him. I don’t have an issue with him any more, I no longer have the need to wash my mouth out when I think of him. Nevertheless, even though I have nothing of importance to do, I can think of better ways to spend my days than engaging in an awkward conversation with a cousin who tried to French kiss me on a garden swing sixteen years ago.

It is while I’m watching out the window and waiting for Eddie to return that the house phone rings. Nobody has the number apart from Dad and Heather, and it is usually only Heather who calls, so I answer it.

‘Could I speak with Jasmine Butler, please?’

I pause, trying to place the voice. I don’t think it’s Kevin. I’m imagining he would have an Australian accent now, but maybe not. Either way, I don’t think it’s him. Aunt Jennifer would have to be incredibly cruel to give him the number. There’s an accent that I can’t quite place hiding behind a Dublin accent, somewhere outside of Dublin but inside Ireland. A gentle country lilt.

‘Who is speaking?’

‘Am I speaking to Jasmine Butler?’ he asks.

I smile and try to hide my amusement. ‘Could you tell me who’s speaking, please? I’m Ms Butler’s housekeeper.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry,’ he says, perfectly happy and charming. ‘And what is your name?’

Who is this? He called me and now he is trying to take control, but not in a rude way, he is utterly polite and has a lovely tone. I can’t place the accent. Not Dublin. Not Northern. Not Southern either. Midlands? No. Charming, though. Probably a salesman. And now I have to think of a name and get him off the phone. I look at the hall table beside me and see the pen beside the charging base for the phone.

‘Pen,’ I say, and try not to laugh. ‘Pen-ny. Penelope, but people call me Penny.’

‘And sometimes Pen?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’ I smile.

‘Can I get your surname?’

‘Is this for a survey or something?’

‘Oh no, just in case I call you again and Ms Butler isn’t home. On the off chance that that happens.’

I laugh again at his sarcasm. ‘Ah.’ I look down at the table and see the notepad beside the pen. I roll my eyes. ‘Pad.’ I cough to conceal my laugh. ‘Paddington.’

‘Okay, Penelope Paddington,’ he repeats, and I’m sure he knows. If he has any sense, he knows. ‘Do you know when Ms Butler will be home?’

‘I couldn’t say.’ I sit down on the arm of the couch, still looking outside, and I see Dr Jameson at the front door of your house. ‘She comes and goes. With work.’ Dr Jameson is looking in through the broken glass. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s a private matter,’ he says politely, warmly. ‘I’d prefer to discuss it with her herself.’

‘Does she know you?’ I ask.

‘Not yet,’ he says, ‘But maybe you could tell her I called.’

‘Of course.’ I pick up the pen and paper to take his details.

‘I’ll try her on her mobile,’ he says.

‘You have her mobile?’

‘And her work number, but I called the office and she’s unavailable.’

That stops me. Somebody who knows me well enough to have all three numbers yet has no idea that I was fired. I am flummoxed.

‘Thanks, Penelope, you’ve been a great help. Have a good day.’ He hangs up and I’m left listening to the dial tone, confused.

‘Jasmine,’ I call to myself in a sing-song tone. ‘An absolute weirdo just called looking for you.’

Dr Jameson is walking across the road to me.

‘Hello, Dr Jameson,’ I greet him, seeing the white envelope in his hand and wondering what on earth the street is planning now and how much I need to contribute.

‘Hello, Jasmine.’

He is dressed perfectly as usual in a shirt and V-neck sweater, trousers with the perfect crease down the middle, polished shoes. He is smaller than me, and at five foot eight I feel like an exotic, unnatural creature beside him. My hair is bright red, fire-engine red, or booster scarlet power as L’Oréal calls it. Naturally I’m brown-haired, but neither me nor the rest of the world has seen that since I was fifteen, the only traces of it now are my eyebrows, as my scalp is increasingly sprouting grey hairs rather than brown. The red, I’m told, makes my eye colour stand out even more than usual; they’re a shade of turquoise that I’m used to most people commenting on. My eyes and my hair are the first things anybody ever sees of me. Whether I’m at work or at a party, I always, absolutely always go out with my ultra-jet-black eyeliner. I’m all eyes and hair. And boobs. They too are rather large, but I do nothing unnatural to accentuate them, they stick out and up all by themselves, clever things.

‘I’m sorry about the noise this morning,’ I say, genuinely meaning it. ‘I should have warned you in advance.’

‘Not at all…’ He waves his hand dismissively, as though in a rush to say something else. ‘I was across the way, looking for our friend, but it seems he’s otherwise detained,’ he says, as if our friend – meaning you – is out in the back garden making animal balloons for a group of kids and not passed out on the bathroom floor in a pool of his own vomit. Just guessing.

‘Amy gave this to me for Mr Marshall – we can call him Matt, can’t we?’ The way he looks at me conspiratorially makes me think that he knows I’ve been watching, a lot. But he can’t know that, unless he’s watching me, and I know that’s not true because I watch him.

‘Who’s Amy?’

‘Matt’s wife.’

‘Ah. Yes. Of course.’ Like I’d known but had forgotten. I had not known.

‘I think it’s rather urgent that he receives this’ – he waves the white envelope – ‘but he’s not responding. I would leave it in the, er… open window, but I couldn’t be sure that he’d get it. Besides there’s a copy which I’d like to give to you.’ He holds out an envelope to me.

‘A copy of what?’

‘The house key. Amy cut two extra keys for the neighbours – she thought it might come in handy,’ he says, in a surprised way, when we both know it is the most obvious and sensible thing we’ve ever heard. ‘I don’t think she’s there, or that she’ll be there for a while,’ he says, his eyes piercing into mine.

Ah. Understood.

I move my hands away from the key and envelope that he’s thrusting at me.

‘I think it’s best if you keep these, Dr Jameson. I’m not the right person to mind them.’

‘Why so?’

‘You know my life, I’m coming and going all the time. I’m so busy. Work and… you know, things. I think it would be better to leave them with somebody who is here more.’

‘Ah. I was under the impression that you… well, that you are home more often these days.’

Stung. ‘Well, yes, but I still think it’s better that you keep them.’ I am standing my ground.

‘I have a key already, but I’m going away for a fortnight. My nephew has asked me to go on holiday with his family. This is the first time,’ his face lights up. ‘Rather polite of them, though I’m sure he had to be convinced of it by Stella. Lovely lady. And I do appreciate it. Spain,’ he says, eyes twinkling. ‘Anyway…’ his face darkens, ‘I’ll have to find a home for these.’ He looks extremely bothered by this.

As guilty as it makes me feel, I can’t do this. I can’t take somebody’s key into my home. A perfect stranger. It’s weird. I don’t want to be involved. I want to keep to myself. I know I watch you, but… I can’t do this. I won’t be moved, despite his worried, befuddled face. If I had a job, I wouldn’t be in this suburban mess right now, having to care about other people’s issues that they ought to be keeping to themselves.

‘Maybe you could give them to Mr and Mrs Malone.’ I have no idea of their names. I’ve lived next door to them for four years and I still don’t know, even though they send me a Christmas card every year with both their names on.

‘Well, that’s an idea,’ he says uncertainly, and I know why he is uncertain. He doesn’t want to bring them trouble. When you are locked out of your house in your angry drunken state it should not fall upon Mr and Mr Malone, who are in their seventies, to deal with your problems. The same can be said of the Murphys and the Lennons. He’s right, I know this, but I just can’t. ‘Are you sure you won’t?’ he asks one more time.

‘Positive,’ I say firmly, shaking my head. I will not get drawn into this.

‘I understand.’ He nods, lips pursed, and takes the envelope back into his two hands. He fixes me with a look and I know that he has witnessed the same nightly scene that I have. ‘I do understand.’

He bids me farewell and I have to break into a run to prevent him stepping into the road as an ambulance comes racing along at full speed. We both automatically look across to your house, thinking something must have happened, but the ambulance stops outside the Malones’ house and the paramedics rush to the door.

‘Oh, goodness,’ he says. I have never known anyone to say as many crikeys, fiddlesticks, goodnesses, goshes, and okey-dokeys as Dr Jameson.

Standing beside him, I watch as Mrs Malone is carried out on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her face, and loaded into the back of the ambulance. A grey-faced Mr Malone follows behind them. He looks shell-shocked. It breaks my heart right there and then. I hope it wasn’t my fault. I hope it wasn’t the drill in my garden that gave her a heart attack as it had almost given you one.

‘Vincent,’ he says, seeing Dr Jameson. ‘Marjorie.’ I assume this is his wife and feel terrible for never knowing her name. Poor Marjorie. I hope that she is okay.

‘I’ll take care of her, Jimmy,’ Dr Jameson says. ‘Twice a day? Food in the cupboard?’

‘Yes,’ Mr Malone says breathlessly as he is helped into the back of the ambulance.

No. Not the wife.

The doors close and the ambulance speeds off, leaving the street as empty as it was, as if nothing has happened at all, the siren quietening as it drives further away.

‘Dear, dear,’ my neighbour says, seeming shaken too. ‘Goodness gracious.’

‘Are you okay, Dr Jameson?’

‘Vincent, please – I haven’t practised for ten years now,’ he says absent-mindedly. ‘I’d better go feed the cat. Who will feed it while I’m gone? Perhaps I shouldn’t go. First this’ – he looks at the envelope and key in his hand – ‘now the Malones. Yes, perhaps I’m needed here.’

I feel nothing but guilt and dread, and a slight grudge that the universe has conspired against me. It would be rude of me to suggest another neighbour at this point, though it is what I want to do. Two no’s in one day would not make me look good.

‘I’ll feed the cat while you’re away,’ I say. ‘As long as you show me where everything is.’

‘Rightso.’ He nods, still shaken.

‘How do we get in?’ I look at their empty house, perfect with its garden gnomes, its little signs for leprechauns crossing, and fairy doors stuck on to a tree for their grandchildren, slab stones leading all around the garden to explore behind trees and under weeping willows. The blinds are from the eighties, beiges and salmon pinks, all scrunched up like puffballs at the top of the windows, chintzy china on the windowsills and a table near the window filled with photographs. It is like a dollhouse stuck in a time warp, lovingly decorated and cared for.

‘I have their key,’ he says.

Of course he does. It seems everybody has everybody’s keys on this street apart from mine. He looks down at the envelope in his hands, your single key inside it, as though it’s the first time he’s seen it. I notice his hands are shaking.

‘Vincent, I’ll take that,’ I say gently, placing a hand over his as I take it from him.

And so that is how I end up with the letter from your wife to you and a spare key to your house.

Just so you know, I never wanted them from the start.

8

Eddie returns and does another two hours’ work. I know this because I am in the middle of forking cat food into Marjorie’s bowl when she leaps out of her skin with fright at the sound of the drill and she disappears. I think about searching for her but I don’t want to wander around the rooms and intrude, and she’s a cat, she’ll be fine. Eddie is hard at work when Johnny returns to inspect the job and it’s as if he never left at all. He listens to my complaint about Eddie without blinking, or without commenting, inspects the work, declares that they’re on schedule and they leave in a battered red van half an hour early because they have another job. They don’t go far, they reverse directly into your driveway and hop out. I’m aware that I’ve turned into a curtain twitcher but I can’t help it, I’m intrigued. Johnny measures the broken window panel beside the front door, then they take a wooden board from the back of the van, and I can’t see them but I can hear them sawing from behind the open doors. It’s only five thirty and it’s pitch-black outside. They are working in relative darkness, lit only by the porch light, and there is a faint glow coming from the back of the house, the kitchen. You must be awake now.

They spend ten minutes securing the wooden board to your window, then they hop into the red van and drive off. My garden is nowhere close to being complete.

I have your letter in my hand. Dr Jameson has made me promise that I will hand it to you directly. He and I must know that you’ve received it so he can tell Amy. I’ve left the key to your house on my kitchen counter, it looks alien there but I can’t think of where to put it. The key seems to stick out, almost throbbing on the table; wherever I sit or stand my eye is drawn to it. It feels wrong, having something of yours in my home. I look down and turn over the letter. I guess your wife, Amy, has left you, finally, and has entrusted her neighbours to make certain her words, her reasoning – I’m sure she would have taken a long time, painstakingly labouring over the letter – will reach you. I feel that I owe it to her to see that you get this letter. I should enjoy giving it to you, but I don’t and I’m glad about that. I’m not numb to human emotions the way you are.

I put on my coat and pick up the envelope. My mobile rings, a number I don’t recognise. Thinking it is the peculiar salesman, I answer it.

‘Hi, Jasmine, it’s Kevin.’

As my heart sinks into my stomach I watch as you leave the house, get into your car and drive away while I listen to the cousin who tried to kiss me tell me he’s home.

I can’t sleep. Not just because I’ve arranged to meet with my cousin Kevin in a few days – out, not in my home so I can leave him when I want to – but because I’m trying to run through all the possible scenarios that could happen later when you return. Me giving you your key, your letter, me opening your door, you attacking me in your drunken state, throwing a chair at me, shouting at me, who knows. I did not want to take this on, but neighbourly duty made me feel obliged.

I’m wide awake when you drive home. ‘Paradise City’ is blaring again. You brake before you hit the garage door, you take the keys from the ignition, you stumble to the door, trip over your feet a few times while you concentrate on the keys jingling in your hands. It takes you a while, but you get the key in the door. You stumble inside and close the door. The hall light goes on. The landing light goes on. The hall light goes off. Your bedroom light goes on. Five minutes later your bedroom light goes off.

Suddenly my bedroom is eerily quiet and I realise I’ve been holding my breath. I lie down, feeling confused.

I am disappointed.

At the weekend I have my dinner party. There are eight of us. These are close friends of mine. Bianca is not here, she is at home with her newborn son, but Tristan has come out. He is asleep in the armchair by the fire before we even sit down to our starters. We leave him there and begin without him.

Most of the conversation revolves around their new children. I like this, it’s a distraction. I learn a lot about colic and I put on a concerned face when they discuss sleep deprivation; then they move on to weaning, discussing appropriate vegetables and fruits. A daddy has to google whether kiwi fruit is an acceptable first fruit. I get a thirty-minute earful from Caroline about her sex life with her new boyfriend since separating from her dirt-bag husband. I also like this, it’s a distraction. It’s real life, it’s things that I want to hear about. Then attention turns to me and my job, and though they are my friends and I adore them and they are gentle, I can’t bring myself to talk about it honestly. I tell them I am enjoying the break and join in with them about how great it is to be paid to kick around at home. They laugh as I try to make them jealous with exaggerated stories of lie-ins and book-reading and the mere luxury of time that I have to myself to do whatever I please. However it feels unnatural and I’m uncomfortable, like I’m playing a part, because I don’t believe a word of what I’m saying. I am never more grateful to hear the sound of your jeep. I hope that you are more trashed than usual.

I haven’t told my friends about your recent drunken late-night antics. I don’t know why this is. It is perfect fodder. They would love to hear all about it, and what makes it juicier is that you’re famous. But I can’t bring myself to tell anyone. It’s as if it’s my secret. I’ve chosen to protect you and I don’t know why. Perhaps I take your behaviour and your situation too seriously to make a joke about it at a dinner party. You have children, a wife who has just left you. I loathe you, everybody who knows me properly knows that, and nothing about you makes me want to laugh at you. I pull the curtains so that they can’t see you.

I hear you banging, but everybody continues talking, this time a debate about who should get their tubes tied and who should get the snip, and they don’t notice your noise. They think I’m joking when I say that I would like the snip, but I haven’t been concentrating.

Suddenly everything is quiet outside. I can’t concentrate and start to feel agitated, nervous that they will hear you, that the boys will want to go outside and see you, jeer at you or help you, and ruin my private thing that I have with you. I know this is odd. This is all that I have and only I can truly understand what goes on with you at night. I don’t want to have to explain.

I clear away the dessert plates; my friends are talking and laughing, the atmosphere is great and Tristan is still asleep in the armchair, baking by the open fire. Caroline helps me and we spend another few minutes in the kitchen while she fills me in on the things she and her new boyfriend have been doing. I should be shocked by what I hear, she wants me to be shocked, but I can’t concentrate, I keep thinking of you outside. And the key is beside me on the counter, still throbbing. When Caroline nips out to go to the toilet, I make my escape; grabbing the letter and your key, I pull on my coat and slip outside without anybody noticing.

As I cross the road I can see you sitting at the table. It is 11 p.m. Early for you to return home. You are eating from a McDonald’s bag. You watch me cross the road and I feel self-conscious. I wrap my arms around my body, pretending to feel colder than I do with the alcohol keeping me warm. I stop at the table.

‘Hi,’ I say.

You look at me, bleary-eyed. I’ve never seen you sober, up close. I’ve never seen you drunk up close either; you were in between when we met the other morning so I’m not sure exactly what state you’re in, but you’re sitting outside eating a McDonald’s at eleven o’clock at night in three-degree weather, the smell of alcohol heavy in the air, so you can’t be fully compos mentis.

‘Hi,’ you say.

It’s a positive start.

‘Dr Jameson asked me to give this to you.’ I hold out the envelope.

You take it, look at it and put it down on the table.

‘Dr J’s away?’

‘He said his nephew invited him to Spain.’

‘Did he?’ You light up. ‘About time.’

This surprises me. I didn’t know that you and Dr Jameson were close. Not that your response hints at closeness, but it hints at some kind of relationship.

‘You know Dr J’s wife died fifteen years ago, they had no kids, his brother and his wife both passed away, the only family he has is that nephew and he never visits or invites Dr J to anything,’ you say, clearly annoyed about this. Then you burp. ‘Excuse me.’

‘Oh,’ is all I know to say.

You look at me.

‘You live across the road?’

I’m confused. I can’t tell whether you are pretending we have never met or if you genuinely don’t remember. I try to figure you out.

‘You do. In number three, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I finally say.

‘I’m Matt.’ You hold out your hand.

I’m not sure if it’s a new beginning; it could be staged, in which case you will pull your hand away and stick out your tongue as soon as I reach out to you. Whatever your motive, if you’ve forgotten my rudeness from a few days ago, this is a fresh chance for me to do what I should have done.

‘Jasmine,’ I say, and reach out to take your hand.

It’s not so much like shaking hands with the devil as I thought. Your hand is ice-cold, your skin rough like it’s chapped from the winter chill.

‘He also gave me a copy of the key to your house. Your wife made copies for him and me.’ I hold it out to you.

You look at it warily.

‘I don’t have to keep the key if you don’t want me to.’

‘Why wouldn’t I want you to?’

‘I don’t know. You don’t know me. Anyway, here. You can let yourself in and keep the key if you want.’

You look at the key. ‘It’s probably better if you keep it.’

You carry on looking at me and I start to feel uncomfortable. I’m not sure what to do; you clearly have no intention of moving, so I go to your front door and open it.

‘Are you having a party?’ you ask, looking across at the parked cars.

‘Just dinner.’

I feel bad then. You’re eating from a McDonald’s bag; am I supposed to invite you in? No, we’re strangers, and you have been the enemy since I was a teenager, I can’t invite you in.

‘What are you doing to your garden?’

‘Putting down grass.’

‘Why?’

I laugh lightly. ‘Good question.’

You pick up the envelope. ‘Will you read this to me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why don’t you read it?’

‘I can barely see straight.’

But you don’t seem that drunk and your speech is fine.

‘And I’ve left my glasses inside,’ you add.

‘No.’ I fold my arms and back away. ‘It’s private.’

‘How do you know it’s private?’

‘It’s for you.’

‘It could be a neighbourhood thing. Dr J’s always organising something. A barbecue.’

‘In January?’

‘A drinks reception about recycling then.’ You like that and you chuckle. I can hear the cigarettes in your chest, a wheezy, dirty laugh.

‘He said it’s from your wife.’

Silence.

At certain angles I see your handsomeness. It’s the way you tilt your head when you’re thinking, or maybe it’s the moonlight, but whatever it is you have moments when you transform. Blue eyes, strawberry-blond hair, button nose. Or maybe that’s how you always look and my dislike for you taints you.

You put the envelope down on the table and push it with one finger towards me. ‘Read it.’

I pick it up and look at it. Turn it over a few times.

‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’ I place it down on the table. You stare at the envelope and say nothing. ‘Goodnight.’

I walk back to the house, straight into the sound of the raucous laughter of my friends. I take my coat off. Tristan is still asleep on the chair. I don’t think anyone has noticed I’d even left. I rejoin the table with another bottle of wine and sit down for a moment, before getting up to open the curtains a little. You’re still at the table. You look up and see me and then you stand and go into the house, close the door behind you. I can still see the white envelope on the table, glowing under the moonlight.

A light rain starts.

I watch the envelope as the rain gets heavier. I can’t concentrate. Rachel is talking about something now, everybody is listening, her eyes are filled, I know that it’s important, it’s about her dad who’s sick, they’ve just learned he has cancer, but I can’t concentrate. I keep looking out the window at the envelope as the rain gets heavier. Rachel’s husband reaches for her hand to help her continue. I mumble something about getting her a tissue, then go outside without my coat, run across the road and retrieve the envelope.

I don’t know you, and I don’t owe you, but I do know that we all have a self-destruct button and I can’t let you do that. Not on my watch.

9

Johnny and Eddie finally finish digging up my paving one week later than promised, citing so many excuses and technical reasons that I don’t know where to begin arguing with them, but at least one hundred square metres has been cleared for laying turf and the remainder of my garden is still my lovely paving. My dad tells me to hang on to the broken stones that they have dug up from the ground because he believes they have value, so I keep them in a small skip on my driveway. His beliefs are vindicated by Johnny’s sudden eagerness to help ‘get rid’ of them for me. I try to think of ways that I can use them, but really I have no idea and suspect that I will probably throw them out.

Dad and Leilah invite me and Heather to lunch on Thursday. On Mondays Heather works in a restaurant, clearing tables and stacking the dishwasher; on Wednesdays she works at the cinema, escorting people to their seats and cleaning up the popcorn and mess afterwards, and on Fridays she works at a local solicitor’s office, doing the post, shredding papers and photocopying. She loves all of her jobs. On Saturday mornings she attends her drama and music class and on Tuesdays she goes to a day service where she hangs out with friends. It only leaves Thursdays and Sundays for us, and my work hours used to mean that Sunday was our day. It’s been that way for the past ten years. I would go to the ends of the earth to avoid missing that day with her. Our activities vary; sometimes she has very specific aims in her head, other times she is quiet and will let me make the decision. We go to the cinema a lot: she loves animation and knows every single word to The Little Mermaid. Sometimes all she wants to do is sit on the floor in front of the television and watch it on repeat. My Christmas gift to her was a trip to see Disney on Ice. They dedicated the entire first act to The Little Mermaid and I have never seen Heather so quiet, so completely lost in anything in all of my life. It was beautiful, and being with her is always beautiful. When Ursula the Sea Witch came on stage, an enormous blow-up Octopus slid across the ice and there was evil witch music and loud cackling. Lots of children started crying and I was worried that Heather would be afraid, but she held my hand and gave it a squeeze, and whispered to me, ‘It will be okay, Jasmine,’ so I knew that she was minding me, she was worried about me being afraid. She is my older sister and is constantly protecting me, even when I think it’s me that is protecting her. When the show was over and the lights went up and the mess of spilled popcorn and slush puppies was revealed and all the magic was gone, she looked at me, her hands on her chest where her heart is, her tear-filled eyes enormous behind her thick glasses, and she said, ‘I am moved, Jasmine. I am so moved.’

I love her, I love everything about her. The only thing I would change about her is the discomfort she often feels due to her hypothyroidism which manifests sometimes for her as fatigue, sluggishness and irritability. I would watch her like a hawk, but she won’t let me. After years of trying to teach her in ways that she could understand, what I finally learned about my sister is that Heather always has been and always will be the teacher and that I am her student. Her speech is often unclear, though I can generally understand her, and she has difficulty with her motor skills and her hearing, but Heather can tell you the name of every single Disney character in every single Disney movie, and the writers and singers of every song. She loves music. She has quite a collection of vinyl – despite me introducing her to iPods and iPads, she’s an old-school girl at heart and prefers her records. She can tell you the musicians playing the instruments and who has produced and arranged every song. She reads the small print on every album and offers the information at the drop of the hat. When I saw that she had an appetite for this, I fed it and continue to feed it, buying her music, bringing her to live performances. When I was fourteen, I took Heather on a playdate with a little boy called Eddie, with Down syndrome. Eddie loved music too, especially the song ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ by Elvis. While speaking with his sister I learned that, because he likes the song, they let him play it on repeat all day, which annoyed everybody in the household. But none of them could have been as annoyed as I was; it made me furious that they failed to recognise that this boy had a love for music, not just that one song. They weren’t helping to bring out the best in him. When Heather shares her knowledge, people are always surprised and impressed. And what happens when she sees that they’re impressed by her? Like all of us, she flourishes.

The most admirable, almost magical thing about Heather is her insight into people, more specifically her insight into their insight into her. I see their views of her reflected in her own behaviour. She can read strangers like no one else I’ve encountered in my life. When speaking with someone who views her with pity or who wants to get away from her, she shrinks, she almost disappears, she becomes a person with Down syndrome because she knows that that is all they see of her. When she is in the company of someone who doesn’t care about Down syndrome, like children before they learn to tease, or someone who has experience with the condition, she absolutely glows, she blossoms, she becomes Heather, the person. She often senses these things before I do, and I have learned to understand strangers or at least their opinions of her through Heather. She has the ability to get straight to the truth. This is something that many children possess, but perhaps we lose it as we get older. Heather, on the other hand, has honed this with age and as a result, her sense of right and wrong are so finely tuned.

I drive Heather to where Dad, Leilah and Zara live in a three-bedroom apartment in Sutton Castle. Built in 1880 by the Jameson family – no relation to Dr Jameson that I know of – it is in a prestigious location on seven acres of landscaped gardens overlooking Dublin Bay. The castle was a hotel where we often ate Sunday lunches as a family; it was refurbished during the boom time and the main house was broken up into seven apartments. It’s an impressive home, kept beautifully by Leilah in her bohemian style. At thirty-five, Leilah is around the same age as Heather and I, yet she seems so far away from becoming any kind of a friend of mine. She is a young woman who married my dad and for that I will always wonder what is wrong with her. I have no actual problem with Leilah, but distance is my friend and that’s where I keep her. Heather on the other hand warmed to her immediately, holding her hand on the first meeting, which made Leilah blush. It was an act that neither Leilah nor Dad knew was the greatest compliment ever given. Heather has correctly sensed my feelings toward Leilah and, though we’ve never discussed it, she tries to find things that Leilah and I have in common, like a mother trying to help two little girls become friends at a party. It is endearing and sweet, and I love this about her. Even though we both go along with it purely for Heather’s sake, it does oddly enough help us to communicate.

Zara pulls the door open dressed as a pirate. She punches the air before us with a plastic hook on the end of her hand and yells ‘Arrrrrrrgh, mateys!’

I feel Heather flex beside me. Heather is fond of Zara, though a little unsure. Zara, at three, can be temperamental. Her loud protests, or sudden explosive tears, or even extreme hyperness can make Heather very unsettled.

‘Well, arrrrrgh yourself.’ I go down on my knees to hug her, battling her pirate protestations and walk-the-plank threats, and I end up lying on the floor with her straddling me, the tip of her hook held to my neck. Heather swiftly sidesteps us and softly makes her way down the hall and into the living area.

Zara presses the plastic hook against my skin, and pushes her face near mine. ‘If you see that Peter Pan, you tell him I’m lookin’ for him – him and that little fairy he’s with.’ She glares at me meanly then jumps up and runs down the hall.

I’m left lying on the ground alone, laughing.

On this occasion I’ve brought a bracelet-making set for Heather and she settles down at the table to focus on sliding the beads on to the string. Zara is keen to play with it too and though we tell her calmly that it is not a toy, that it is Heather’s, that Zara must play with her own toys – and the new vet set that I brought her – she has a meltdown, which makes Heather extremely tense. I can see her shoulders bunch up as she focuses threading the beads, her cheeks getting hotter as Zara’s wails get louder. Leilah’s voice is calm and firm and she removes Zara from the room. I stay beside Heather, my elbow on the table to keep my head propped up, and I watch her intently.

‘What are you doing, Jasmine?’ she asks.

‘Watching you.’

She smiles. ‘Why are you watching me, Jasmine?’

‘Because you’re beautiful,’ I say, and she smiles shyly and shakes her head.

‘Jasmine!’

I laugh and continue watching her. She giggles, but then eventually disappears into bracelet-making concentration zone. Zara returns into the room quietly, her eyepatch discarded to reveal two sad red eyes. Lollipop in hand, she settles in her corner of the room and plays with the new vet game I bought for her, talking to herself in badly constructed sentences with random words thrown in that she has overheard from us. Heather gives her a quick look and concentrates on her beading. It is easy company for twenty minutes while the two girls concentrate, while Leilah prepares the lunch. I’m not being lazy, we both know it’s best that I stay in the room with Zara and Heather in case any further conflict arises.

The smell of garlic drifts from the kitchen as Leilah massages butter and garlic into the lamb. She snips rosemary from the herb garden on the balcony and, after rinsing it off, makes quick little nips into the flesh and inserts the rosemary. My dad isn’t home; he’s playing golf and will be back in time for lunch, so I put on Tangled, the only movie that Zara will concede to watching, and I settle down on the couch for a lazy hour. I wake to feel little butterfly kisses on my face. Heather is smiling down at me, and just seeing her is the most beautiful way to wake up.

‘Dad is here, Jasmine,’ she says.

I’m groggy, with my shoes off, and my dress up around my waist, and who follows Dad into the living room but Ted Clifford. Ted is over six feet tall and very broad. He fills the doorframe and I feel Heather freeze beside me, her body tensing. In fact everybody tenses, including Leilah, whose look of composure drops for a moment to show that she had no idea Ted was coming to visit.

‘Ted,’ she says, not hiding her surprise. ‘Welcome.’

‘Hello, Leilah,’ he says, giving her a wet kiss and an overly familiar hug. ‘I hope you don’t mind me invading your lunch, but Peter lost the golf which meant he had to invite me!’ He guffaws loudly.

Leilah smiles, but I can see the true meaning beneath, the tightness around the mouth, the warning signals in her eyes. It ruffles Dad’s feathers a bit.

‘This must be little Zara,’ Ted says, looking down at Zara. From her position on the floor she is looking up at him as if he is the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk. She looks at Leilah uncertainly, a wobbly smile-cry expression on her face, but Ted ignores the signs and scoops her up in his arms to plant a big smacker on her face. Leilah diplomatically lifts Zara from his arms and Zara wraps her legs tightly around Leilah’s waist and buries her head into her neck to hide from the giant. All the while Dad is beaming, all the while I am seething because this is no coincidence: me and Ted in the same room barely two weeks after Dad raised the issue of asking him to find a job for me. Leilah works two half-days a week so that she can spend afternoons with Zara, Dad is retired, I am unemployed, Heather has a day off: it makes sense for all of us to be eating lunch on a Thursday, but it makes no sense that Ted would be here. He should be working. Instead he is here to talk to me. I feel the anger rising within me and can barely look Dad in the eye.

‘You know my daughter, Jasmine,’ he says, holding out his hand to display me.

Ted gives me the once-over and comments on how I’ve grown since we met last. Ted is sixty-five years old, no excuse to treat a woman half his age as though she has just reached puberty and it was all for his benefit. It is clear that he is not surprised that I am here. I’m either paranoid or right about this. We shake hands, and I intend to keep it at that, but he pulls me in for a wet kiss that I find myself wiping off my cheek immediately. Leilah looks at me, empathetic.

‘And this is Heather,’ Dad says.

As an aside. Not, this is my daughter Heather, no display of the arm, no grand gesture. I am sensitive when it comes to Heather – very; I think that is clear from my treatment of you – so I don’t always know if what I feel about other people’s treatment of her is real or heightened or simply a case of me projecting my fears. Everyone will probably always make mistakes when it comes to her, in my eyes. I do, however, feel that in thirty-four years Dad has done very little to overcome the awkwardness he feels when introducing Heather to strangers, particularly those that he looks up to, people like Ted that he has always had an embarrassing schoolboy crush on, constantly trying to please him, sell his company to and then ultimately undersell it because it’s Ted and he wouldn’t want Ted to think that he’s uncool. It is not necessarily that he is ashamed of Heather, because he is not so cold-hearted, but he is conscious of the fact that some feel uncomfortable around Heather. He deals with this by paying as little attention to her as possible, making as little a deal of her as possible, playing everything down, as if that will make everyone feel more comfortable. Of course his apparent lack of affection for his daughter has the opposite effect. I have on many occasions raised this with him, but he thinks I’m overly emotional and irrational about the whole thing.

‘Ah,’ Ted says, looking at Heather in a way that I don’t like. ‘Hallo!’ he says in an unusual voice. ‘Well, I can’t leave you out, can I?’ he says and reaches out to shake her hand.

This is a risky move.

As a student of Heather I have learned that all individuals, regardless of disability, are sexual beings. Ensuring that Heather, whose physical development outstrips her emotional development, understands the physical and more particularly the psychological aspects of sexuality has always been of concern to me. It is a continuing lesson, more than ever now, when she yearns for a boyfriend. The last thing I want is for her to be rejected or ridiculed, never mind abused.

To deal with this, from a young age we learned the Circles concept, a system that helps categorise the various levels of personal relationship and physical intimacy. The reason why someone like Ted concerns me is because he has a misguided take on intimacy, seeing as he has kissed and picked up a three-year-old, squeezed a wife, checked me out, and now doesn’t want Heather to feel left out. I think this is one time that Heather would be more than happy to be left out.

The Purple Private Circle represents the individual; in this case Heather. The Blue Hug Circle comes next. This represents people who are closest to the person in the purple circle, both physically and emotionally, and it’s where close-body hugs are the norm; this circle includes me, Dad, Zara and Leilah. Next comes the Green Faraway Hug Circle. Close friends and extended family members are assigned to this circle. Sometimes friends may want to be closer than this, but Heather must tell them exactly where they stand. Then comes the Yellow Handshake Circle, for friends and acquaintances whose names are known, followed by the Orange Wave Circle for other, more distant acquaintances, such as children who may want to hug and kiss Heather but she knows she must not, that she must wave at them instead. No physical or emotional contact is involved at this level of intimacy. Finally there is the Red Stranger Circle. No physical contact or conversation is exchanged with people in this category, unless the person is identified by a recognisable badge or uniform. If somebody tries to touch Heather when she doesn’t want to be touched, Heather should say ‘Stop.’ Some people remain strangers forever.

Heather and I are firm in keeping to this, no matter how uncomfortable it makes people feel. While Dad knows the circles code exists, it was Mum who taught it to us. Dad never involved himself in these kinds of things.

I watch Heather looking at his outstretched hand in confusion. I know that she knows what to do, but she looks at me for support.

‘Orange, Heather.’ Though personally I’d rather keep him in the red zone.

Heather nods then turns to him and waves.

‘Only a wave for me?’ he asks, like he’s speaking to a child and not a thirty-four-year-old woman.

He moves closer and I am about to step in front of him and tell him to stop when Heather holds out her hand. ‘Stop. You are not in my Blue Hug Circle.’

But Ted doesn’t take her seriously. He chuckles at what she has said, not giving it any consideration, and wraps his arms around her in a bear hug. Heather immediately starts screaming and I pull at his arms to get him away from her.

‘Jasmine!’ Dad says, as he watches me trying to wrench Ted’s arms off her. Leilah gives out to Dad. Zara starts crying and Heather is screaming, manically.

Ted backs off, hands in the air as if he’s the victim of a hold-up, saying, ‘All right, all right, I’m only being friendly,’ over all the noise.

Dad is apologising to Ted, trying to get him to sit down at the table, barking at Leilah to get him a drink and make him comfortable, but Leilah isn’t listening.

‘Are you okay, Heather?’ Leilah is by my side.

Heather is still screaming, huddled in my arms, and I know that the best thing is for us to leave. She will not want to settle at the table for dinner with him here, after he broke a rather serious rule of hers.

‘There’s no need to overreact,’ Dad says, following us out into the hall. Heather is hiding her head in my chest, cuddling into me, and I wish Dad would shut up. He is talking to me, but she might think it’s her he’s saying it to.

‘Dad, she told him no.’

‘It was only a hug, for feck’s sake.’

I bite my tongue. I don’t even know where to start with telling him off, but before I can get a word out, he erupts.

‘That is the last time this happens. We’re not doing this any more. I’ve had enough,’ he says, anger rising in him in a way I haven’t seen in years. ‘No more of this!’ He points at me and Heather and then the dinner table, as if this entire episode has happened before and it is our fault.

‘Any excuse,’ I snap back at him, and I leave the apartment.

I offer to bring Heather home with me, to stay overnight at my place, but she declines, giving my face a maternal pat before she gets out of the car, as if she’s sorry that this has all been too much for me. She is happier when she is in her own home, surrounded by her things.

I, on the other hand, return home alone.

10

I am disappointed Heather doesn’t stay overnight with me for a number of reasons: one, because I like her company; two, because I want to make sure she is okay after the incident at Dad’s; and three, because it would have been a great way for me to cancel the dreaded meeting with my cousin Kevin, which is to take place tomorrow. Or maybe even bring her to see Kevin with me, but Heather is too busy with her Friday job in the solicitor’s office.

Our meeting is planned for noon in Starbucks on Dame Street beside the Wax Museum. Lots of tourists, nothing intimate. I will be able to leave when I want to.

Deep down I know that it will be fine. He will apologise for his twenty-two-year-old self, tell me how he always felt lost and alone, an outcast who used force and fear as a way of maintaining control over a life that he felt was out of control. He will tell me that he has done some soul-searching on his travels – kept a journal, started a novel, or maybe he’ll have gone all ‘hairy feet and sandals’ and become a poet. Then again, maybe he ended up working in a bank. He probably met a woman – or maybe a man, who knows – and now that he is content with who he is, he is able to face who he was and apologise for the incident all those years ago. I know that the ice will quickly melt and we can forge on, laughing about how we tied his brother Michael to a tree, danced around him dressed as Indians and accidentally fired an arrow into his leg; or how we stole Fiona’s clothes while she was skinny-dipping and put them on the rocks so that she was forced to climb up to get them, barefoot and butt-naked. I might mention the whole ‘You are going to die, Jasmine’ talk that changed the course of my thinking for ever, and maybe I will go as far as mentioning Santa Claus.

When I see him, I am surprised by his appearance. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but it’s not what I see. He is thirty-eight and so I should have prepared myself for that. Seeing him makes me feel old; we’re grown up now. Suddenly everything disappears and I just feel a fondness towards him. My cousin. So many memories come flooding at me, so many with my mother in them, and I am dumbfounded by how overcome I feel. It has been a long time since I’ve felt that longing for my mum; it leaves me feeling winded and lost and childlike again, as if I’m reaching for something that is beyond my grasp. For a while her smell lingered at home and I would wrap myself up in her bed in an effort to be close to her; other times I would get a whiff of her perfume from somebody else and I would stop midstride, almost hypnotised as I was transported and locked in the vivid memory of her. But it happened less and less as the years passed by. Everything that used to remind me of her, everything that I saw and heard – restaurants, shops, roads we’d driven down, buses we’d sat on, parks, songs on the radio, phrases overheard in passing conversations – absolutely everything linked back to her in some way. But of course it did, she died when I was young, when she was still the centre of my world, before I’d had a chance to start making a life for myself. As I’d stayed in the same city that all of those memories were made in, I thought that I would never lose them. Whenever I needed her – my mum fix – I’d go back to those places, hoping to bring her back, summon her energy. Instead, the act of going back made new memories, and every time I went I would add another layer on top of her memory, until eventually I’d buried them completely and all of those places stopped being about my past with her and became my present. It is rare, twelve years on, that I am struck like this, and I know it is because of him, because I haven’t seen him since she passed away, so everything I can tie him to is connected with her. He looks up and sees me, and he beams. I feel okay. This is going to be nice, nostalgic. I immediately feel guilty for the Starbucks venue and wonder if I should move our meeting to a restaurant nearby.

He has found a small table, with two chairs where we will have to sit diagonally to avoid our knees meeting. I was hoping to get there first to grab two sinking armchairs well away from each other. He gives me a big hug, a long warm embrace. His hair is thinning, he has wrinkles around his eyes, I think he is the only person I have gone so long without seeing. It’s a big leap for the brain and it’s oddly disconcerting.

‘Wow,’ I say when I sit down and stare at a familiar face peeking out at me from behind an unusual mask of time. I don’t know where to start.

‘You haven’t changed,’ he beams. ‘Still have the red hair.’

‘I do,’ I laugh.

‘And those eyes.’ He looks at me intently, then shakes his head and laughs.

‘Eh. Yes. Decided to keep the eyes.’ I laugh. Nervously. ‘So…’ Long silence while we stare at one another. He is beaming and keeps shaking his head as if he can’t believe it. I get it, but enough now, let’s move on. I’m once again happy we didn’t choose an actual lunch date.

‘Coffee?’ I say, and he jumps up.

I take a look at him as he orders at the counter. Brown cords, V-neck jumper, shirt, quite conservative, not exactly the latest trend but respectable, responsible, a far cry from the ripped-jeans, long-haired troublemaker.

When he sits down, the routine questions begin. Jobs, life, how long are you here, are you still in touch with Sandy, do you still see Liam, do you remember Elizabeth? Who married who, who’s having babies with who, who left who. How Aunt Jennifer is so happy he’s returned. I knew I shouldn’t have said it as soon as I did. It was a simple enough thing to say, but I should have kept it lighter, more vague, devoid of anything issue-related. Mentioning his ‘adoptive’ mother who he hadn’t travelled home to see in over ten years – though she had visited him – was not safe territory. I kick myself. His posture changes.

‘She’s happy to have me back here, of course, but she’s finding the circumstances difficult. I’m back to find my birth parents,’ he says, his hands cupped around the enormous mug of coffee. He is looking down, all I can see are long black eyelashes, and when he looks up I recognise those lost, confused, tortured puppy eyes. He is still searching, though he seems less angry, the spiteful look is gone. We talk about seeking his biological mother some more, about his long-lost sense of identity, his inability to settle down and have his own children without understanding his own lineage, about not being able to settle in relationships, about feeling tied to someone else, elsewhere all this time. I hope I am reassuring him. And then we get to the awkward moment.

‘What I said on the swing…’ he begins, as if it was five minutes ago and not sixteen years, ‘It was wrong of me to do what I did. I was young, I was so confused, I scared you, I know that, and I’m sorry. I went away and tried to figure it out, tried to figure everything out really, I told myself that I must have got our friendship confused. We always had so much in common, I always felt you understood me. The whole thing with you and your dad…’ Which confuses me again, because there was nothing between me and dad, but never mind. ‘I went away and tried to forget you, but when I was gone, all the other women…’ And it gets uncomfortable for a while as I hear about his long list of conquests with whom he does not feel at peace, and then, BAM! ‘I couldn’t stop thinking of you. All the time, my mind kept coming back to you. But I knew how you felt about me. How the whole family felt about me. It’s why I couldn’t come back. But now… Jasmine, I haven’t changed my mind at all from that moment on the swing. I am utterly in love with you.’

I am usually an emotionally stable person. I feel that I cope with things well. I am not dramatic, I am rational, I reason things relatively well. But this… I can’t. Not now, in the middle of my own stuff. I apologise, then stand up and take my leave.

When I get home later, I find the landscaper packing up his van. Though the days are slowly stretching longer, the sky is again black. The new grass is still in rolls, piled up in my driveway in the streetlight.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask him.

He can hear the edge in my voice; he looks a little taken aback.

‘You said the grass would be finished today,’ I say.

‘The ground took me longer to prepare than I thought. I’ll have to come back on Monday.’

‘Monday? You told me you work weekends. Why can’t you come tomorrow?’

‘Another job, I’m afraid.’

‘Another job,’ I say in a disturbing hiss of a voice. ‘Why don’t people finish one job before starting another?’ He doesn’t respond to this so I sigh. ‘I thought the turf was supposed to be laid within a day of delivery.’

‘They’re stored in a shaded area, no frost expected this weekend. It’s perfect conditions.’ He looks at the turf in a long silence as if waiting for it to speak on its own behalf. He shrugs. ‘If you really need to, open the rolls and water them.’

‘Water them? It hasn’t stopped raining in a week.’

‘Well then.’ He shrugs again. ‘Should be fine.’

‘And if they’re not, you’re paying for them.’

I watch him drive away. I stand in my garden, hands on my hips, staring him off as if my look alone is going to make him stop the van and finish the job. It doesn’t. I survey the pile of grass beside me. The first day of February tomorrow. Almost three weeks of waiting for this garden when I could have used the money to go on a holiday, to sit on someone else’s green grass.

You leave your house, wave at me. I ignore you because I’m mad at you again, I’m mad at everyone and you are always first on my list, you will always feel my wrath. You get in your jeep and drive away. Dr Jameson is away, Mrs Malone is still in hospital, as is Mr Malone who is keeping vigil. I no longer have to feed the cat full-time but only when Mr Malone asks, which doesn’t bother me so much any more as Marjorie has turned out to be quite the conversationalist. I look around. I can’t tell whether anyone’s home in the other houses, but it feels like an empty street. There is nothing I can do about the garden, only pray that a deep frost doesn’t suddenly descend on my new grass.

That night I can’t sleep. I am tossing and turning with anger over my father: his treatment of Heather, his attempt to line me up for a job in his old company – for I’m almost convinced that’s what he’s doing. I am further distressed by Kevin’s declaration of love for me yet again and my messy garden bothers me. Everything feels unfinished – worse than unfinished: torn, as if everything’s been ripped and left ragged at the ends. It is a peculiar way to explain it, but that’s how I feel. I can’t settle with all of these thoughts, these angry thoughts that can’t be contained or filed away somewhere else while I sleep. I have nothing to distract me. Ordinarily I would have a meeting to plan for, an aim, an objective, a new idea, a presentation – something, anything to take my mind off the useless thoughts that circulate in my head. Getting up, I go downstairs and turn the security lights in the front garden on full. They are so bright they are like floodlights. What I see angers me. Inefficiency. My blood boils.

I put my coat on over my pyjamas and go outside. I look at the stacked rolls of grass and I look at the cleared patch of soil to my right. If you want something done properly, you should do it yourself: always my philosophy. It shouldn’t be too hard.

I pick up the first roll of grass and it is heavier than I thought it would be. I drop it, curse and hope I haven’t broken it. I stare at the space and try to figure out how to do this. Then I roll. Two hours later I am dirty and sweating. I’ve lost the coat, which restricted my movements, and instead layered up with an old fleece. I’m covered in muck, grass, sweat and at one stage there are even tears of frustration: for the grass, for the job, for Kevin and for Heather and my mum and the fingernail that I chipped when I bumped it against the skip. I am so lost in myself, in my chore, that I almost jump out of my skin when I hear a cough breaking the silence.

‘Sorry,’ I hear you say suddenly.

It is three a.m. I look across the road to your garden and I can’t see a thing. I see the shape of the garden furniture, but the rest is blackness, all lights are out on the house. My heart is pounding while my eyes furiously search the dark. Then I see the glow of a cigarette, brightening as it’s inhaled. It’s you. How long have you been there? I didn’t hear or see your jeep arrive, and I still don’t see it now, which means you have been there the entire time. I want to cry. I mean, I have been crying, quite loudly, thinking nobody could hear me.

‘Got locked out,’ you say, breaking the silence.

‘How long have you been there?’ I repeat. Now that I know that you’re there I can start to see the outline of you, sitting in the chair at the head of the table, the same chair as usual.

‘Few hours.’

‘You should have said something.’

I go inside the house to get the spare key and when I walk outside you’re standing at your door.

‘Why is it so dark over here?’

‘Streetlight is broken.’

I look up and realise that’s why I couldn’t see you. Dr Jameson will be annoyed about this when he returns. On the ground underneath is smashed glass which has fallen and one of my bricks from the skip is in the middle of the road. I wonder why I didn’t hear that happening, I was so sure I hadn’t slept. I look at you accusingly.

‘It was too bright. I couldn’t get any sleep,’ you say softly. You don’t seem that drunk, you are composed, you’ve had time to sober up – in my company, when I didn’t even know you were there – but I can smell the alcohol.

‘Where’s your jeep?’

‘Clamped in town.’

I hand you the key. You open the front door and gives it back to me.

‘You should have said something,’ I say again, finally looking you in the eye, then glancing away, feeling so vulnerable.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you. You seemed busy. Sad.’

‘I’m not sad,’ I snap.

‘Sure you’re not. Four a.m., you’re gardening, I’m smashing lights, we’re both fine.’ You do the chesty chuckle that I hate. ‘Besides, it was nice not to be alone out here for once.’

You give me a small smile before gently closing the door.

When I return to the house I realise my hands are shaking, my throat is dry and closed, my chest feels tight. I can’t stop moving. I haven’t quite realised what a frenzy I am in until I see that I have walked muck everywhere in confusing circles on the floor, the stop-start trail of a madwoman.

It’s the middle of the night, but I can’t help it: I pick up the phone.

Larry answers groggily, he always answers. He leaves his phone on all night, constantly expecting to hear the worst news about his daughter every time she leaves the house to go to a disco or stay over in a friend’s house in a skirt that’s too short, wobbling with Bambi legs on heels that she can’t balance on. The stress of her will kill him.

‘Larry, it’s me.’

‘Jasmine,’ he says groggily. ‘Jesus. What time is it?’ I hear him fumbling around. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Not really, you fired me.’

He sighs. He has the decency to sound embarrassed in the stuttering, half-asleep, respectful response he gives me, but I interrupt him.

‘Yeah, yeah, you said that before, but listen, I need to talk about something else. This gardening leave. It’s not working for me. We need to cancel it. Stop it.’

He hesitates. ‘Jasmine, it was part of the contract. We agreed-’

‘Yeah, we agreed, four years ago when I didn’t think you were going to fire me and then force me to sit on my arse for an entire year. I need you to stop it.’ I sound wired, strung up, like I need a fix. I do. I need work. I need work like a heroin addict needs a fix. I am desperate. ‘It’s killing me, I swear, Larry. You don’t know what this shit does to your head.’

‘Jasmine,’ he is alert now, his voice steady. ‘Are you okay? Are you with-’

‘I’m fucking fine, Larry, okay? Listen to me…’ I tear off the chipped nail with my teeth and realise I’ve pulled away too much; the air hits the exposed nail bed and it stings and causes me to suck in air loudly. ‘I’m not asking for my job back, I’m asking you to reconsider. Actually, not reconsider, just stop this gardening leave thing. It’s unnecessary. It’s-’

‘It’s not unnecessary.’

‘It is. Or else it’s too long. Shorten it. Please? It’s been over two months already. That’s okay. Two months is fine. Lots of companies leave it at two months. I need to be busy – you know me. I don’t want to turn into him across the road, some nocturnal crazy owl man that-’

‘Who’s across the road?’

‘It doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, I need to work, Larry. I need-’

‘No one’s expecting you not to do anything, Jasmine. You can take on projects.’

‘Fucking projects. Like what? Build a volcano of baked beans? This isn’t school, Larry, I’m thirty-fucking-three. I can’t NOT work for a year. Do you know how hard it will be for me to get back to it next year? After a whole year? Who wants someone who hasn’t worked for a year?’

‘Fine. So where will you work?’ He is getting feistier, fully awake now. ‘Exactly what line of business do you have in mind? Tomorrow, if you were able to go back out there and get a job – tell me where you’d go. Or would you like me to help you out with that answer?’

‘I…’ I falter, because he’s intimating something, which is confusing me. ‘I don’t know what you’re-’

‘In that case I’ll tell you. You’d go to Simon-’

I freeze. ‘I wouldn’t go to Simon-’

‘Yes, you would, Jasmine – you would. Because I know that you met with him. I know that you two had coffee. Straight after you walked out of here, you walked into a restaurant with him. Grafton Tea Rooms, wasn’t it?’ He’s angry now and I can hear the sense of betrayal in his voice. ‘The same place where you both used to meet when you were trying to sell the company that you weren’t supposed to be selling – isn’t that right?’

I’m not expecting him to stop talking so suddenly and my silence is like an admission. By the time I’m ready to speak for myself again, he has resumed:

‘See, Jasmine, you have to be careful, don’t you? Never know who’s watching you. Did you think I wasn’t going to hear about that one? Because I did, and I was really fucking pissed, to be honest with you. I also know that he offered you a job and that you said yes, but he wouldn’t work with you under the gardening leave terms. I know that because his legal people got in touch with our legal person to enquire about the exact details. Seems a year is too long for him. You’re not worth waiting that long for. So don’t call me up now, begging me to go easy on you, not when you were going to betray me-’

‘Excuse me, who are you to talk about betrayal? We started that company together, Larry, together…’

We continue talking over one another, the same conversation we had eleven weeks ago when I was fired. In fact, the same conversation we had before I was fired, when he’d heard that I was making preparations with Simon to put us in a good position to sell.

It is pointless, and neither of us is prepared to back down until I hear his wife in the background, a sleepy, angry interruption, and Larry apologises softly then comes back on the phone, loud and angry and clear.

‘I’m not going to waste my time with this conversation. But hear me loud and clear, Jasmine: I. Will. Not. Drop. The. Gardening. Leave. Clause. Right now, if I could make it two years long I would. I don’t care what you do for the year – take a holiday, go on a fucking retreat, try finishing something you’ve started for once in your life – I don’t care, just don’t fucking call my number again, and especially not at this hour. It’s one year. One fucking year and then you can get back to starting and selling and never finishing, same as you always do, okay?’

He hangs up, leaving me shaking, reeling with anger.

I pace the kitchen, mumbling about finishing things that I’ve started, angrily compiling a list of as many things as I can think of. He has hit a nerve. It was sudden and surprising and it has hurt me more than anything else he has said, more than the act of firing me. It is in fact, the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me and I am shaking. I continue to debate the point with him in my mind, but it is useless as I am me and I am him, and me as me will always win. I look at the mess of a garden, which sends me into a spiral of anger. I go outside and kick a roll of grass, my foot punctures the roll, and then I stamp on it, sending it tumbling off the pile and down on to the ground, opening and unravelling. The grass splits at the hole where I’ve kicked it. Embarrassed by my actions, and surprised, I look up and see your curtains flutter. I go back inside and slam the door.

I spend a long time in the shower, crying with frustration, the hot water stinging my skin and leaving it red and raw. I finish with one clear vow in my mind. I will not lower myself to becoming your company, particularly at night. I believe this has been my lowest point and I will not fall to this level again. I will rise above this, I will rise above you. It is not just the Larry conversation that has upset me. What got me to that point in the first place was you. It was you who caused me to charge home and pick up the phone and call him. Because it was your words that made me look at myself, at my situation, and made me want to get out of it.

I hear your voice over and over: it was nice not to be alone out here for once. You have brought me into your world, without my permission, without my say-so, you have included me in your crisis, in your state of mind, you have likened me to you. And by doing that you have made me feel ashamed, because I have always believed your words are poison, that they are the worst thing about you, that they are dangerous.

But when I let my guard down, your words gave me warmth. It was nice not to be alone out here for once. When you said those words, they comforted me. I did not feel alone then either.

I will not let you do that to me again.

11

For the first time in a very long time when I wake up my room is flooded with yellow light and a sense of calm. It is unusual, different to the blue-grey light that barely lit the room over the past few months. It is the first of February and though spring has not yet sprung, it gives cause to believe it just might win the battle. There is a sense of it in the air, or perhaps it is because for the first time in a very long time I have woken up late. I don’t like lie-ins, they make me feel lazy; even after a late night I find a long walk by the bay is the only cure for me, but after the physical exertion of my late-night gardening I am exhausted. As soon as I move, I feel the stiffness in my limbs.

My radio tells me that I have slept for eight hours and once again the country has been battered by storms, ‘storm factory’ being the new term we’re growing used to hearing, along with ‘polar vortex’ – no doubt new names for babies in 2015. They warn that there’s another fortnight of mayhem on the way, thanks to unsettled weather from the Atlantic. The calmness outside is deceiving. Three cities are underwater, five-metre swells are forecast, and the talk on most stations turns to global warming and the melting polar ice that is fuelling the storms. January rainfall was 70 per cent above the norm and the outlook for February is more of the same. But not today. I look out the window and feel revived by the clear blue sky, the wispy occasional clouds. Even though I am still sore from my late-night workout in the garden, and embarrassed about you seeing it, I bury all that at the back of my mind.

I survey my hard work and am disappointed – no, devastated by what I see. At first I think somebody has come by and deliberately ransacked my newly laid turf, but on closer inspection I realise that I am in fact the culprit. Only with the benefit of my bedroom bird’s-eye view I can see that it encapsulates perfectly my state of mind last night as I was doing it. It resembles a badly sewn, unfinished patchwork quilt, and I am horrified by what I see. It’s as though my diary has been left open for everybody to read my deepest, darkest thoughts, and now I need to slam it closed before I am revealed to the world. I can’t wait until Monday for the landscaper to return and fix my mess. There’s no way I can endure two days with my fragile mental state displayed in the front garden for all to see.

Online research – something I should have made time for last night instead of letting adrenaline and anger rule me – is the answer. It educates me in how exactly to go about fixing the problem. One hour later I have returned from the garden centre and I’m ready and armed. Never do something that can’t be undone, that’s what I always tell myself, and I repeat it now as I assess the task ahead of me. Messy, time-consuming, challenging and frustrating, but possible. The landscaper had already prepared the soil for me perfectly; it had taken him longer than he’d said, but he had done it. Even though I had foolishly trodden all over the grass last night, as I realise today that I shouldn’t have, I carefully roll each piece of turf up again before lifting it to its correct place. I lay the first row along the straight edge where the soil meets the stones, slowly unrolling it to minimise damage. The one I had kicked my heel through still lies on the driveway like a corpse at a crime scene. I place the next roll as close to the last as I can and ensure good contact with the soil by tapping down firmly with the back of the rake. All this I now know I should have done last night, but I also know that I would not have had the patience for it. Last night was about moving, being busy, doing something – not about doing it right.

As I rectify my mistakes on this oddly calm day, I feel a stillness coming over me. I forget about everything that has riled me up so much over the past few days and weeks, and devote all my concentration to the job in hand. Distraction. My mind quietens as I continue the process for a few hours, covering the area in a brickwork pattern. I’m about to turn my attention to the sides, trimming the edges with a straight-edged board and a half-moon cutting tool, both of which I have bought for the purpose, when a car drives past the house. I don’t recognise the driver as one of my neighbours, but this happens a lot on weekends when people take drives along the coast and then explore the surrounding residential streets. I am used to seeing cars passing by, the back seats filled to the brim with kids, their faces pressed up against the glass for a gawk and older couples having a browse on their slow Sunday drives. We have the perfect cul de sac for window-shopping: it is pretty, welcoming, the kind of place people like to imagine themselves living in.

The driver has to do a three-point turn as it’s only a short road. I watch him checking the numbers on the houses, which is not an easy task as everybody has chosen to display them differently in different places. You have a black plaque with pretty pink flowers to display your number, Dr Jameson has a goose in flight and next door has a garden gnome with one hand holding up a 2, the other hand is holding up his trousers, which have dropped to display enormous red-and-white heart boxer shorts. Mine is the least exciting of all: a black letter box attached to the wall with 3 on it.

He parks outside my house and gets out. I am positive he can’t be looking for me, so I continue my gardening, but I’m unable to concentrate knowing he is looking around. Then I’m conscious of the fact his eyes have settled on me. I hear footsteps as he comes closer.

‘Excuse me, I’m looking for Jasmine Butler.’

I look up, wipe sweat from my grimy forehead. He’s tall, brown-skinned, with chiselled high cheekbones. His eyes are a striking green, which jar with his skin tone, and his Afro rises and then descends down over his eyes in tiny tight corkscrew curls. He is wearing a black suit, white shirt, green tie, shiny black shoes. He makes me remind myself to breathe.

From the way I’m looking at him dumbly, he thinks I haven’t heard him.

‘Are you Jasmine Butler?’

He is remarkably familiar but I haven’t seen him before, I would remember that. And then I realise it’s his voice I recognise. The telephone salesman.

‘Or perhaps you’re Penelope Paddington,’ he says, and as he purses his lips together to hide his smile, two enormous dimples appear on his cheeks.

I smile, knowing I’m caught out. ‘I’m Jasmine,’ I say, my voice coming out in a croak. I clear it.

‘My name is Monday O’Hara. I called you a few times on the phone during the last couple of weeks.’

‘You didn’t leave your name or contact details,’ I say, wondering if I heard his name correctly.

‘True. It’s a private matter. I wanted to talk to you myself, and not… your housekeeper.’

I continue to look at him. So far he hasn’t given me enough to get off the grass for, or even welcome him into my home.

‘I work for Diversified Search International. I’ve been hired by DavidGordonWhite to find suitable candidates for a new position, and I think you more than meet the requirements they are looking for.’

I feel myself floating as he continues.

‘I called your office quite a few times but couldn’t reach you. I didn’t leave any messages there, don’t worry. I didn’t want to raise a red flag so I told them it was a personal matter. But they were stronger gatekeepers than I assumed they’d be; you may or may not be happy to hear that.’

I struggle with how to respond to that. It was clear when we spoke on the phone that he doesn’t know I’ve been fired. I am unsure as to why nobody told him that, perhaps because technically I haven’t been fired, I am still contractually tied to them even though they won’t let me past the front door.

‘You’re a difficult woman to find,’ he says, with a smile, which is a beautiful thing to behold. Two definite dimples and a tiny chip in his front tooth: even his imperfection is perfectly perfect. In my humble opinion.

My house is a mess. I haven’t got around to cleaning the muck I trampled into the floor during my rampage last night and my dirty knickers are in a pile on the kitchen floor in front of the washing machine, waiting for my towels to finish their cycle. I cannot bring him into the house.

‘I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday, but I find out-of-work hours are the best time to deal with people. I’m very conscious of the need to keep your office from finding out about our contact.’

I’m still thinking about the state of the house, a long pause that he mistakes for mistrust, so he apologises and digs in his pockets and retrieves a business card. He hands it to me. He has to lean his long arms across the grass to reach me; he knows not to step on the grass and I like that. I examine the card. Monday O’Hara. Headhunter. Diversified Search International. The whole thing makes me smile.

‘We don’t have to talk now, I just wanted to make contact first and-’

‘No, no, now is perfect. Well, not right now…’ I run my hand through my scraped-back dirty hair and find a crusty leaf in it. ‘Would you mind if I took twenty minutes to quickly change? We could meet at the Marine Hotel around the corner?’

‘Perfect.’ There’s a flash of that gorgeous smile, but then it’s all locked away in a very square jaw and he nods, business-like, at me and makes his way back to his car. I have to work hard not to dance into my house.

I sit in on an oversized couch in the Marine Hotel lobby, feeling refreshed and looking more human, while Monday heads off in search of a waiter. I feel nervously excited about what’s to come. At long last, something that feels like a step forward. He has no idea that I’ve been fired, and I still haven’t told him, or even let on that I’m no longer working there, and if it does slip out, he doesn’t need to know that it wasn’t my decision to leave. I know exactly why I’m keeping it to myself: because I want to play. I want to play along, feel like the desired woman with two companies fighting over her, instead of the loser, fired from her job and with nothing on the horizon. Or maybe, just maybe, in an embarrassing bout of ego and weakness, I don’t want the handsome man to see me as the fired failure that I currently feel like.

A woman and a little girl, her daughter, around four years old, sit at the table in front of me. The little girl picks up her spoon and lightly taps on the glass.

‘I’d like to make toast,’ she says, and her mother howls with laughter.

‘A toast, Lily.’

‘Oh,’ she giggles. ‘I’d like to make a toast.’ She clinks the glass again, stretches her neck and puts on a posh, serious face.

Her mother cracks up laughing again.

The little girl is funny, but it is her mother’s reaction that makes me join in the laughter. She is laughing so hard, she’s crying and patting at the corners of her eyes to stop it.

‘So what’s your toast about?’

‘The toast would like to thank,’ Lily says in a deep, posh voice, ‘the butter and the jam.’

Her mother rolls over on the couch, laughing.

‘And the egg, for making it into soldiers.’

Lily sees me listening and stops, embarrassed.

‘Don’t let me stop you,’ I call. ‘You’re doing a great job.’

‘Oh,’ her mother sits up and wipes her eyes, trying to catch her breath. ‘You crack me up, Lily.’

Lily makes a few more speeches, which have me laughing to myself. I sit still as can be while they are busy together, but I will not be still and alone for long. My headhunter returns. This man has hunted me, it feels animalistic. I feel myself blush and I try to put a stop to the ridiculous antics in my head. I fix all my attention on Monday, all thoughts of the little girl gone from my mind.

‘I ordered you a green tea,’ he says, checking.

‘Perfect. Thanks. So, your name is Monday. I’ve never heard that before.’

He leans over, placing his elbows on his knees. This brings him quite close, but to sit back would be rude so I get lost in his face and then try to remember that I shouldn’t be, that I should be concentrating on the words coming through his chipped white tooth and out of his sumptuous mouth and why I am here. Because he has found me, sought me out, and thinks I’m a highly qualified, wonderful person. Or something like that.

I can tell he is completely at ease with my question, and has no doubt been asked it a thousand times.

‘My mother is nuts,’ he says with an air of finality, and I laugh.

‘I was hoping for more than that.’

‘Me too,’ he replies, and we smile. ‘She used to be a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra. Now she gives lessons in a caravan in Connemara, in the garden of a house that she refuses to live in because she’s convinced she saw the ghost of her dad. She named me Monday because I was born on a Monday. My middle name is Leo because I was born in late July. O’Hara is her surname, not my father’s.’ He smiles and his eyes move from mine to my hair. ‘Her hair is as red as yours, though I didn’t inherit that. Just her freckles.’

It’s true, he has a beautiful smattering of freckles across his nose and the tips of his cheeks. I picture a red-haired woman with freckles and pale skin in a field in Galway with a cello between her thighs. It’s a bit racy.

My turn. ‘My granddad brought my mum a bunch of winter jasmine from his garden when she was in hospital after I was born. So she named me Jasmine.’

He seems surprised. ‘People rarely reciprocate my name story.’

‘If you have a name story, you have to tell it,’ I say.

‘I don’t usually have a choice,’ he says. ‘A mere introduction requires explanation. It’s the same for my sister, Thursday.’

‘You do not have a sister called Thursday!’

‘No.’ He laughs, enjoying my reaction.

‘Well, I do have a sister. My granddad brought a bunch of heather to my mum after she was born. So she called her Heather.’

‘That’s a bit predictable,’ he teases, curling his lip.

‘I suppose. My brother Weed lucked out.’

He narrows his eyes suspiciously, then laughs.

‘Where’s your dad from?’

‘Spanish sailor.’

‘You don’t look Spanish.’

‘I’m joking. The Snapper? Anyway. No, it’s my mother’s equivalent – a travelling salesman, apparently. Never met him, no idea who he is, she’s never told anyone. Though my friends and I used to guess it was every black man that we saw when I was growing up, which there obviously weren’t many of in Galway. It used to be a game. Guess who Monday’s dad is. There was a busker on Quay Street who played the saxophone; my friends used to joke that it was him. When I was twelve I asked him.’ He laughs. ‘It wasn’t him, but he said he’d meet my mum if I wanted.’

It’s sad but we both laugh, and then he suddenly snaps out of it and into business mode. ‘So. The job.’ He lifts a leather folder on the table and unzips it. ‘I have been hired by DavidGordonWhite – are you familiar with them? If not, here you go.’

He places a business folder down before me. Very corporate, very serious, very expensive-looking: a photo of a man and a woman in pinstripe suits in front of a glass building, both of them looking into the sky over the camera as if a meteor is headed at them but they are not in the least bothered. My heart sings. They want me. They need me. They think that I am highly qualified and wonderful. They think that I am necessary, that I am an asset. They want to pay me to distract me from the world and real worldly issues. I am beaming and I can’t help it.

‘They’re a tax advisory company,’ I say.

‘Top ten in the world. Correct. You are aware that corporations such as these have corporate social responsibility programmes?’

‘PR exercises,’ I say.

‘You might not want to mention that in the interview.’ He grins, then the professional face is back. ‘If it were just a PR exercise then it wouldn’t qualify as a charity, which is what they have in mind: the DavidGordonWhite Foundation, a charity campaigning for climate justice – human rights and climate change. They want you to work for them…’ He pauses, obviously waiting to see whether I will ask a question or if he should continue. I am so disappointed I don’t know what to say. It’s not a proper job; they want me to work for a charity. ‘I’ll keep talking about everything, you stop me if you have any questions, okay?’

I nod. I am annoyed. At DavidGordonWhite. At him, for fooling me with his handsomeness and flattery, making me think I was being offered a proper job. I feel my cheeks flush. He talks and talks and talks about the job. Nothing in what he says piques my interest.

Eventually he stops and looks at me. ‘Shall I continue?’

I want to say no. I want to say more than that, I’m feeling hot-headed, but I mustn’t take out my personal frustrations on this man, handsome as he is.

‘I’m confused as to why I’m in the running for this,’ I tell him. ‘I have never worked with or for a charity. I create start-ups, I make them into brilliant successes, and then I sell them on for as much money as possible.’

Even I know that that is an awful way to describe what I do. In fact it sounds like something Larry has barked at me in the past, when in reality I am incredibly passionate about what I do. There is more involved than what I have said, but I want to make it sound as far away from a charity as possible. He has got it wrong. How did my name pop up in the system when he typed in ‘charity’, apart from the fact I’m starting to feel like a charity case.

He seems a little surprised by my outburst but takes a mature moment to choose his next words, fixing me with his caring, green-eyed, I-understand-where-you’re-coming-from look. ‘You would be responsible for the general control and management of the charity. It is a business like any other and it’s starting from scratch.’ He can see the uncertainty on my face and he is trying to sell it to me.

He goes on to talk about what I’ve done in all of my businesses, as though I don’t know myself, but it is clever, it is an ego boost and he has researched me well. He openly admires me, praises my decisions and good work, and I am feeling mightily flattered and as though there is no one cleverer than me. I am being reeled in. He tells me that while he was asking around for the best candidate my name came up on a few different occasions. His handsomeness helps, because I want to please him, because I want him to think that I am talented and clever and all of those things; he is the perfect hire for a headhunter, able to fill people with self-belief, convince them that there is something out there greater for them than what they are currently doing. He almost has me. I mean, he has me, but the job… not so much. My gut isn’t jumping up and down the way it usually does when I have an idea for a new project, or come across someone else’s idea that I can improve on.

He looks at me, hopefully.

My green tea arrives. As the waiter places it before me I have time to think. This job is not for me, but there is nothing else on offer. I’m torn between expressing interest and being honest. And I like him, which should be an aside, and it really is, but at the same time it’s inescapable. Being fired has knocked the confidence out of me, has made me question the how, what and why of every decision I make. Do I wait for the right thing, or do I grab the first thing, just in case?

He studies me, intensely, those hazel green eyes gazing deep into mine, and I feel as if I’m falling into them, being sucked in. Then I feel like an idiot because all he is doing is looking at me and I’m the one reacting. I break our stare, though he continues to watch me. I’m convinced he knows, that he is seeing deep into my soul. I can’t do it, I can’t lie to him, this one person who is offering sunshine in the middle of the longest of my winters.

‘Actually, Monday, I’m sorry…’ I rub my face, ashamed. ‘There seems to be a misunderstanding. I no longer work at the Idea Factory. I lost my job over two months ago. A disagreement between me and the co-founder.’ I feel my eyes spark as I talk. ‘So, I don’t have a job at the moment.’ I don’t know what else to say. Feeling my cheeks flush, I take a sip of the green tea just to give me something to do. It burns my tongue and all the way down my throat and it’s all I can do not to react, but at least it’s headed off the tears that were about to come.

‘Okay,’ he says, quietly, his posture relaxing and changing to a different mode. ‘Well, that’s good, right? They don’t have to steal you away from another job. You are actively looking, I assume?’

I try to look bright-eyed and wonder whether to explain the gardening leave. I can’t do it. I can’t watch the only opportunity I’ve had for a new job fall by the wayside by admitting my dirty little secret: that I’m on Larry’s payroll for another ten months, preventing me from working. Nor can I not tell him, a headhunter. He makes my mind up for me by filling in the silence.

‘I’m going to leave this with you…’ He slides the folder across the coffee table. ‘It’s information about the position. You can read up on it then give me a call. We can meet again, discuss any questions you might have.’

I look at the folder, suddenly desolate, forlorn. What had begun as an ego boost, the highest of all highs, has left me feeling flat. It is not a job that I want, but I know that I need one. I take the folder and hug it to my chest. He downs his espresso and I try to drink up my scalding tea so that we can go.

‘We can meet again before the interview,’ he says, showing me to the door and holding it open for me.

I smile. ‘Who says there’ll be an interview?’

‘I’m sure there’ll be one,’ he says confidently, pleasantly. ‘It’s my job to know that you’d be right for the position, and I happen to be very good at my job.’ He gives me a big smile to ease the sales pitch, make it seem less phoney. It should have come across as a cheesy sales pitch, but it doesn’t. Something tells me he is great at his job. His voice takes on a gentle note as he adds, ‘And it would be good for you, Jasmine.’

We’re outside. The day has turned, the wind has picked up again; in the space of an hour the trees have started to whip from one side to the other, violently, as if we’re on some tropical island – only we’re not, it’s Ireland and it’s February. Everything is skeletal and grey, people walk by with screwed-up faces, purple-lipped, tight blue hands glowing in the dull light or thrust into their pockets.

I watch him walk to his car.

It didn’t bother me when he pretended he knew me and flattered me, but it bothers me when he pretends he knows me and speaks the truth. Because although we’ve only known each other one hour, he’s probably right. As things stand, a job – any job – would be good for me. It might be the only thing that can stop me slipping into whatever it is I’ve been slipping into.

12

The storm that swept in that evening reached hurricane level, with winds in some parts of the country touching 170 kilometres per hour. According to the news there are two hundred and sixty thousand people without electricity. There are reports of accidents on the motorway, trucks blowing over, falling trees crushing cars, images of destruction on people’s houses, roofs being lifted off buildings, windows shattered from flying debris. The east coast was relatively unaffected. I see branches littering the road, leaves, wheelie bins lying down and surrendering, and children’s toys where they shouldn’t be, but compared to those whose homes are flooded we are incredibly lucky. However it has been a wild night for our street, and for so many reasons.

While trying to read my folder and discover how human rights and climate change are related, I am interrupted by you. It is different to the usual interruptions. You don’t drive home with your music blaring: you are already at home, in fact you are completely sober. This isn’t entirely unheard of, you are not all guns blazing every night, and it is not always on the same level. Since your wife left you, you have been quieter; there has been no one to scream at, and even though some nights you have forgotten this and shouted as if she was there, you have quickly remembered that there is no one to hear you and settled down to sleep in your car or at the garden table. While all the other garden furniture in the neighbourhood has been flying around in the terrible storms – the Malones lost a favourite gnome when it fell over and smashed its face in – yours has remained entrenched in your bog marsh of a front garden. It lists to one side, the right-hand legs having sunk deeper into the grass than those on the left, and I have watched you at night doing the thing that seems to help you focus on whatever it is your mind is pondering: again and again you place your lighter on the higher end of the sloped table and then watch it roll down into your open palm at the lower end. I don’t know if you even realise you are doing it; the expression on your face suggests your mind is somewhere else entirely.

Most nights you’ve either remembered your own key or driven off elsewhere when you couldn’t find it, but I have had to let you into your house with the spare key three times in total. Each time you stumbled into the house and closed the door in my face, and I knew that you would not remember it the following day. It is ironic, to me at least, that the very thing that I hate you for is something that you probably have no recollection of, and the very things that feed that hatred you forget every single time you wake up.

At three a.m. this morning it is not your car that disturbs me from my reading, it is your son, Fionn. The wind is so loud that I can’t make out the words, but the shouting is being whipped around in the air and occasionally tossed in my direction: random words that don’t add up to enough to reveal the subject of the argument. I look out of my bedroom window and see you and Fionn in the garden, the pair of you screaming, arms waving. I can see your face, but I can’t see Fionn’s. Neither of you is wearing a coat, which tells me you weren’t planning on this discussion under the stars. Fionn is a whippet of a thing, a tall, skinny fifteen-year-old who keeps being blown over every time there’s a gust of wind; or so it seems, until I realise it has nothing to do with the wind: he is falling-down drunk. You are solid, you are tall, you are broad, you have your trainers firmly planted on the ground; your body is wide and you look as though not long ago you were fit although you’ve become softer around the edges. I can see the hint of love handles, and your gut has swelled a bit since your wife moved out, or maybe it’s just that the wind is blowing your shirt tight against your waist and revealing a body I wouldn’t ordinarily see. You try to grab Fionn’s arms when they flail close to you, but each time you reach out to him, he swings his arms wildly, fists clenched, trying to hit you.

You manage to grab him by the waist and pull him towards the house, but he bends over and squirms out of your grasp. He punches out, fist connecting with some part of your body and you fall back as if hurt. But it isn’t that which makes me move, it is the two younger children standing at the open door, looking so petrified in their pyjamas, one squeezing a teddy bear to his chest, which has me out of bed and pulling on my tracksuit before I can give it a second thought. When I undo the lock on the front door I’m almost knocked over by the force with which it flies open, so strong is the wind. Everything in the hallway – the notepad on the phone table, hats, coats – seems to take off, scurrying to the far corners of the house like mice when the light is switched on. I have to battle to pull the door closed behind me; using two hands, I tug with all my might. The wind is icy, wild, angry. It rages, and across the road the two of you flail wildly at one another as if tapping into Mother Nature’s anger.

I see it happen, the thing you will never forgive yourself for, and though I am not your biggest fan, I know that it wasn’t intentional. You don’t mean to hit your son, but that is what you do. While trying to reach for him and protect yourself from his fists, you somehow make contact with his face. I happen to be looking at your face in that moment, and before I know what it is you’ve done, your expression tells me. Someone who had not seen your face might not have understood that it was accidental, but I did. Your eyes are suddenly haunted, scared – appalled. The revulsion is so strong, you look as if you’re going to be sick. You’re desperate to reach out to him and protect him, but he is screaming and pushing you away, holding his bloodied nose, shouting at you, accusing you, calling you names a father would never want to be called by his son. The children at the door are crying now and you are trying to keep them calm, and all the while the storm rages; the clumpy garden chairs, which had previously seemed embedded into the ground, suddenly blow over as if to join in the family drama. One chair topples backward, another is lifted and skids across the ground as if it is weightless, landing dangerously near the window. My intention is to protect the little ones, to bring them inside and distract them. I have no plan to intervene in father-son fisticuffs, I know that would not end well for me, but as I make my way towards you both, your son announces that he never wants to set foot in your house again and sets off down the road, alone, with no coat, drunk, against a one-hundred-and-something-kilometre wind, with a bloodied face – and that changes things.

And that is how your son ends up sleeping in the spare bedroom of my home on the stormiest night the country has seen. He doesn’t want to talk, and that is okay, I’m not in the mood either. I clean his face, thankful that your thump hasn’t broken his nose. I give him fresh towels, a pint of water and a headache tablet, an extra large NYPD T-shirt that somebody gave me as a gift years ago, and I leave him alone. Then I sit up all night, drinking green tea and listening to him making trips from the bedroom to the bathroom, where he throws up relentlessly.

Shortly before four a.m. I wake to the sound of a bird. This confuses me; I’m sure the bird is in some kind of distress, has been stolen from its nest in the middle of the night. But no; as I listen, I realise it is simply singing. It seems like another lifetime when I heard birdsong at four a.m. It is bright by seven, the air is still, no wind, no rain, it is pleasant, Mother Nature looking as though butter wouldn’t melt, while around the country people deal with the devastation and destruction she heaped on them during the night.

With a cup of coffee in hand I survey my front garden, glad that I had laid most of the turf when I did. The remaining rolls of grass lie destroyed, broken and ripped apart, caught under the wheel of my car.

The moment you see me, your door opens and you cross the road, as though you’ve been waiting for me to open the door all night.

‘Is he okay?’ you ask, concern etched across your face. I genuinely feel sorry for you.

‘He’s still asleep. He was up all night being sick.’

You nod as you digest that, a faraway look on your face. ‘Good. Good.’

‘Good?’

‘Means he’ll be less eager to do it again.’

I survey the broken grass scattered around the ground.

‘All your hard work,’ you say.

I shrug, as if it’s no big deal, embarrassed still that you witnessed my hard work, which could also have been described as a complete meltdown. My garden is flat but slopes to a lower level, which runs to the side and back of my house. The second level is paved in the same stone as the driveway, but the slope is an ugly mess, devoid of grass. I hadn’t managed to do that part. Another job not finished. I think of Larry and I get hot and angry inside.

‘You could make a rockery with those,’ you say, indicating the broken stones in the skip. ‘My grandparents had a hill in their garden. They turned the entire thing into a rockery. Planted in between it. I could get Fionn to help. They’re probably heavy.’

My head runs through a dozen sarcastic, ungrateful things to say to that, frankly, ludicrous idea, but I bite my tongue.

You are looking past me into the house, hoping for an invitation.

‘You should let him sleep it off,’ I say.

‘I know. I would, but his mum is coming soon.’

‘Oh. When?’

You look at your watch. ‘Fifteen minutes. He’s got a rugby match.’

‘Not a great day for a hangover.’ That’s one more thing Belvedere won’t be too happy about. ‘What happened?’ I don’t want to know, but at the same time I do.

‘I was supposed to pick him up from rugby yesterday. He wasn’t there when I arrived. Went out with his friends. Came home last night, high as a kite. Well, not high, drunk. I think.’ You frown again then, looking into my house. ‘Started having a go at me.’

‘Look, we’ve all been there,’ I say, remembering the times I’d overdone it as a teenager. Why I offer you solace is beyond me. You, the man who’s rolled home having had too much to drink more times than he’s had a cooked breakfast, but you seem to appreciate the gesture. ‘Look,’ I clear my throat, ‘I still have that letter-’

Suddenly Amy’s car pulls up in front of your house. You stiffen.

‘He’s in the spare bedroom, upstairs on the left.’

‘Thanks.’ You head into the house.

I watch her go into your house and the door closes and all is silent. Moments later, you come down the stairs, closely followed by Fionn, who looks shocking. A brown-black bruise on his nose, dried blood caked around it. Despite my best efforts to clean him up, it must have bled again during the night. He looks white and drawn, exhausted and hungover. As soon as the light from the open door hits him, he winces. His clothes are crumpled and I’m sure I’ll find the NYPD T-shirt hasn’t been slept in. He shuffles along behind you and your wife appears at the front door of your house with her hands on her hips.

I don’t want to see any more. I don’t want to be drawn in to give my side of the story, I want to stay out of your life, but somehow I keep being pulled in. Once indoors, I listen nervously for the doorbell, afraid you’ll call over to continue the battle here, but then I see an image on the television which makes me freeze.

It’s the little girl. From the hotel yesterday. The four-year-old wispy blonde with her pixie face, blue eyes, button nose, who wanted to make a toast. The television is muted so I could listen out for Fionn, so I don’t know what they’re saying, but it can’t be good. Her photo is followed by an image of her mother. Big smiles from both of them, the little girl – Lily, I recall – is sitting on her mother’s knee, her mother’s arms wrapped around her daughter; they look at the camera as though somebody has said something funny. Behind them is a Christmas tree from a few weeks ago. And then there is an image of a car and a truck on the motorway, the car crushed, the truck overturned, and I have to sit down. I turn up the volume and listen to the facts – both dead, the driver of the truck critical – and I am wracked with grief.

When the doorbell rings I ignore it, still listening to the news. It rings again. And again. Still crying, and angry about the intrusion, I charge to the door and pull it open. I am confronted with three startled faces.

‘I’m sorry,’ Amy, your wife, says. ‘I’ve called at a bad time.’ The anger I sense from her immediately dissipates.

‘No… I just… I just saw some bad news.’

They look over my shoulder. I’ve left the door to the living room open and the television is still switched to the news. ‘Oh, I know. Isn’t it awful? They only live around the corner – Steven Warren’s wife.’ She looks at you. ‘Did you hear? Rebecca died. And the little girl…’

‘Lily,’ I say, her name catching in my throat.

‘I hadn’t heard,’ you say.

We’re all lost in our silent thoughts for a moment. Fionn, thinking this is his cue to speak, blurts out in a croaky voice, ‘Eh, thanks for last night.’

‘You’re welcome,’ I tell him, unsure what exactly Amy believes went down.

Relieved to be out of the firing line, Fionn wanders back across the road to the house, dragging his feet, his crumpled trousers dropping low beneath his boxers. You and your wife are still looking past me at the television. Amy is actually watching it, you are trying to figure something else out entirely.

‘I saw them yesterday afternoon – Rebecca and Lily,’ I say their names as if I know them, which feels like a lie, but it’s the truth.

‘It happened yesterday afternoon. You must have been one of the last to see them,’ Amy says, and that statement does something to me. It’s not an accusation, I know that, it’s not really anything, she is merely thinking aloud, but it gives me a sense of responsibility. I’m not sure what to do with that. It’s as if I have some form of ownership over them, over the last moment of their lives. Should I share it with people, so that the right people have the moment with them that I had? Put it back to the way it should have been. I am over-analysing this, I know, while you are standing there, looking at me, but I suppose that is what shock does. And I am tired, having not slept very much for fear Fionn would collapse, hit his head, choke on his own vomit, or up and leave in the middle of the night and then I’d be in trouble for losing a minor.

‘Matt, you know them too.’ Amy turns to you.

‘I don’t really-’

‘You do, you used to play badminton with him.’

Of all the things I could have heard, this makes me raise an eyebrow at you.

‘A long time ago.’

‘He always asks for you.’ She turns to me. ‘Matt will go round there with you,’ she offers.

‘Pardon?’

‘He’ll go with you. To pay his respects. Won’t you? Do you some good,’ she says, and not in a nice way. ‘Anyway, sorry to disturb you, I only wanted to say thank you, for taking care of Fionn.’

She backs away. You remain at the door, looking to me for your next instruction, doing as you’ve been told by the wife who just left you, as if hoping that obeying her will put you in her good books. Or maybe I’m wrong. Then it occurs to me that you’re trying to tell me something. You’re messaging something to me. I look deeper into your eyes. Try to figure it out. You want me to defend you. To tell her what I saw. I call out to her.

‘Amy – about last night. The knock was an accident. Matt didn’t mean to-’

I stop because I can tell from the way she glares at you, the way her face looks at you with such hate and disgust, that I’ve put my foot in it. She had no idea that you’d hit him.

Amy starts bundling the children into the car and you run over to say your goodbyes. The engine has started up, she is ready to go, seat belts are on, doors are closed. You have to pull at the handle, forcing her to unlock the door so you can open it and stick your head in the car to kiss the two children in the back. You give Fionn an awkward pat on the shoulder but he doesn’t look at you. You close the door, give the roof two taps and you wave them off. Nobody is waving back at you; in fact nobody even turns to see you. I feel for you and I don’t know why I do because I witnessed everything that your wife experienced, from the outside at least: the late nights, the drunken behaviour… I don’t understand why she didn’t leave you sooner, and yet I watch you standing alone outside your house, hands shoved into your jeans pockets, watching your family driving away, leaving you alone in the big house that surely they should be staying in and not you, and my heart goes out to you.

‘Come on,’ I call.

You look up.

‘Let’s go to Steven’s house.’

I suspect it’s the last thing you want to do, but you need distraction. I know it’s the last thing I want to do, but I could use some distraction too.

You grab your coat, I grab mine, and we meet in the middle.

‘Sorry about what I said there,’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t have. I was only trying to-’

‘It’s fine, she would have found out anyway. Better it came from me first.’

In fact it didn’t, but I think what you mean is that it came from your side and I’m unsure as to how I’ve found myself on your side when every night I watched you banging on the doors, locked out, I was willing her not to let you in.

‘Where are Amy and the kids staying?’ I ask, as we walk down the road.

‘Her parents’ place.’

‘Is she coming back?’

‘I don’t know. She won’t talk to me. Those sentences you heard were the most she’s said in days.’

‘She wrote you the letter.’

‘I know.’

‘You should read it.’

‘That’s what she says.’

‘Why don’t you read it?’

You don’t answer.

‘Here.’ I hand you the letter. You look at it in surprise for a moment, then take it and stuff it in your pocket. I don’t believe you will read it, but at least I have given it to you. My part is done. I feel a little relief, but I’m not content my job is done. You haven’t even opened it.

‘Are you going to read it?’

‘Jesus, what is it with you and this letter?’

‘If I was given a letter by my wife who’d just left me, I’d want to know what it says.’

‘Are you a lesbian?’

I roll my eyes. ‘No.’

You chuckle.

‘I’ve noticed you’re not working,’ you say. ‘Time off or-’

‘I’m on gardening leave,’ I cut you off, before I hear whatever offensive term you’re about to use.

‘Right.’ You smile. ‘You know that doesn’t actually mean you have to do your garden.’

‘Of course I know that. What about you? I read that you lost your job.’ I say it bluntly, harshly, and you look at me and study me in that confused, intrigued, insulted way that you do when I snap at you, which is often when I remember that I don’t like you.

‘I didn’t lose my job,’ you say. ‘I’m on leave – gardening leave, too, as a matter of fact. Only, unlike you, I’ve decide to sit in mine.’

‘Moonbathing,’ I say.

You laugh. ‘Yeah.’

Heather and I always called it that when we were younger: lying out under the moon. The thought of Heather reminds me of my views on you and I clam up. I know you notice the change in me, the way I go from hot to cold with you within seconds.

‘It’s only temporary though, the leave. Pending an investigation into my conduct,’ you put on the formal voice.

I read between the lines. ‘You’re suspended.’

‘They’re calling it gardening leave.’

‘For how long?’

‘One month. You?’

‘A year.’

You suck in air. ‘What did you do to get that?’

‘It’s not a prison sentence. I didn’t do anything. It’s so I don’t work for the competition.’

You study me in the long silence it takes me to gather my composure. ‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I have a few ideas.’ I say. ‘It’s good to have the year to think about them.’ I do not believe one word of what I have just said. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll go back to it when I get the all-clear. I have a radio show.’

I look at you to see if you’re joking, but you’re not. I’d have thought you would assume everyone knows who you are, that you wear your name on your chest like a badge of honour – though I’m unsure as to where the honour would lie – but you’re not joking. You have not assumed that I know who you are. I like this about you, and it makes me dislike you more. You can’t win.

‘I’m aware of your show.’ I say this in such a disapproving voice that you chuckle in that chesty, wheezy cigarette laugh.

‘I knew it!’

‘You knew what?’

‘That’s the reason you are the way you are with me. Uptight. Edgy. Always on the defensive.’

If my friends were to describe me, these are not the words they would use. I am taken aback to hear myself described as such. I don’t like it that someone would think that of me, and for some reason I don’t want you to think that of me, though that is exactly how I have portrayed myself. I had forgotten that you wouldn’t know this isn’t how I always am; you wouldn’t understand the effort I have to make, deviating from the real me in order to be positively rude to you. My friends would say I’m a free spirit; I always do my own thing, never dance to the beat of anybody else’s drum, never have. They might say I’m headstrong, stubborn, at the worst, but they would only know the free-and-easy side of me, whereas you bring out the worst in me.

‘You’re not a fan.’

‘You better believe I’m not a fan,’ I say, hot-headed again.

‘Which one insulted you?’ You pop a nicotine gum into your mouth.

‘What do you mean?’ My heart pounds. After all these years, we are actually here, at the point where I can explain. Here we are. My mind works overtime to find the words to explain how you have hurt me.

‘Which show? Which issue? What did I say that you didn’t agree with? You know, I have an instinct for listeners who hate the show. As soon as I walk into a room, I can tell whether someone’s a fan or not. My sixth sense. It’s the way they look at me.’

Your arrogance disturbs me. Trust you to take a negative – people hating you – and turn it into a positive. ‘Maybe it’s you and not the show,’ I say.

‘You see, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.’ You smile and click your fingers. ‘That kind of underhand comment. It’s not me, Jasmine. It’s the show. I lead the discussion. It doesn’t represent my personal views. I invite guests on air for the debate.’

‘You stir it up.’

‘I have to. That’s what gets them calling in. Gets the debate going.’

‘And you think these debates are necessary?’ I say. I’ve stopped walking and we’re standing face to face outside Steven’s house, where the lawn has disappeared beneath a mass of flowers and gifts, teddy bears, candles and handwritten cards. ‘It’s not as if your show does anything to educate people about the facts. All you do is invite a bunch of lunatics on to vent their oppressive, racist, uneducated opinions.’

You look at me seriously. ‘Every person, every voice on there is real. They represent what real people in this country are thinking. I think people need to hear that. It’s no good spending all your time with your politically correct friends, thinking the world is a wonderful open and understanding place, only to turn up at the voting booths and suddenly discover it’s not. Our show gives everyone a voice. As a result of our show, some of these issues have been discussed in the Dáil: bullying, same-sex marriage, we’ve closed down dangerous nursing homes, crèches…’ you start to list things off on your fingers.

‘You seriously think you’re doing the country a service?’ I ask, flabbergasted. ‘Surely that only applies if it’s a decent debate. Not when it’s idiots who are half drunk, or high, or who’ve escaped a lunatic asylum. Allowing those people to air their opinions is a good thing? They should be silenced, if anything.’

‘Good idea, Kim Jong-un. Free speech bad,’ you say, clearly annoyed.

‘Perhaps you should invite him on your show – give the man a chance to share his fine opinions. Anyway, from what the newspapers are saying, it sounds as if your show isn’t coming back on air,’ I say, chin high in the air and walking up the pathway to the front door, hoping that will silence him, that I can get the last word in. My final bitchy, defensive, edgy, uptight comment.

‘Oh, it is. Bob and me are like that.’ You hold up your crossed fingers. ‘Bob’s head of radio, he’s been with me since the start. He’s only doing this to follow procedure. Wouldn’t look right if he didn’t. When a show gets as many complaints as we did, you have to go through the motions.’

‘You must be so proud,’ I say, pressing the doorbell.

‘I really must have pissed you off something good,’ you say, your breath close to my ear. When I look at you, your eyes are twinkling mischievously. It occurs to me that you like it that I dislike you, and in a sick way, I do too. Disliking you has given me something to focus on. Disliking you has become my full-time job.

Suddenly the door opens and a woman with red eyes, a red nose, crumpled tissues in hand answers. She recognises you straight away, seems delighted and honoured to find you at her door, and quickly ushers you inside. This baffles me – don’t people hear what I hear? You are gentlemanly enough to let me enter first.

Inside, the kitchen is filled with people standing around engaging in long silences that are occasionally broken up by small talk, reminiscing and nervous laughter. The table is overflowing with food: lasagne, cakes and sandwiches that neighbours have dropped by. We are shown through to the living room, where a man sits alone in an armchair staring out the window. The walls are filled with professional studio photographs of the young family: black-and-white portraits of Steven, Rebecca and Lily. Mummy and Daddy in black polo necks against a white backdrop, little Lily in a pretty white dress, glowing under studio lights like an angel, showing a big smile with tiny teeth. One of Lily holding a lollipop, one of Lily twirling, one of Lily laughing, one of Lily sticking her tongue out while Mummy and Daddy look on, big smiles on their faces.

I recognise Steven from the photos and as someone I see regularly around the area, in the supermarket, butcher’s, jogging along the bay…

‘Matt,’ he says, standing up and offering you a hug.

‘I’m so sorry, Steven,’ you say, and you both hold the hug for a long time. Close badminton buddies. I look around and then stare at the floor awkwardly while I wait.

‘This is my neighbour, Jasmine. She lives around the corner, on my street.’

‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ I say, offering my hand, which he takes.

‘Thank you,’ he says solemnly. ‘You’re a friend of Rebecca’s?’

‘I… No… Actually…’ I feel silly. I’m not sure where to start. Perhaps this was a mistake. I’m not sure. The responsibility I felt earlier has waned and now I feel like an intruder. The woman who answered the door is in the room too and all eyes are on me. ‘I saw them both yesterday afternoon at three p.m. In the Marine Hotel.’

He looks confused. He turns to the woman. She looks confused.

They both look at me. They don’t believe me.

‘I’m not sure they were there…’ he says, frowning.

‘Lily was having a hot chocolate. “Hot choc stop,” she called it.’

He smiles, covers his mouth and chin with his hand and sits on the arm of the chair.

‘She was in great spirits. Rebecca couldn’t stop laughing. I could hear her as soon as I walked into the lobby. Lily was trying to make a toast.’

He looks at the woman, who I now understand to be his sister; I can see the likeness. ‘Because of the party last week, Beth,’ he says, and she nods happily, her eyes filling. Steven looks back at me, his face open, gentle, eager for more to come from my mouth. You are watching me too and that is slightly off-putting, I don’t know why you make me so nervous, but I try to ignore that you’re there and speak only to Steven. The more I look at him, the more I see the resemblance to Lily in his blonde lashes and his elfin face. So I stand there, a complete stranger in his home, and I tell him about her toast, about her many toasts, about the conversation she and her mother were having, about the conversation I had with her. I tell him every single thing that I can remember. I stress the laughter, the happiness, the utter joy of their last hour together before they got in the car and began the journey to visit Rebecca’s parents on that stormy day. I tell it because I would want to know.

Steven absorbs it all, almost as though he’s in a trance yet taking in every word I’m saying, studying me as I say it, probably trying to figure out if I’m for real, hoping that I am, then eventually believing that I am. He watches my eyes, my lips, and when he thinks I’m not looking runs his eyes over me. And then when I’m finished there is silence and it probably seems to him that they have been killed again, as they go from being present to suddenly gone. His face crumples and he breaks down. I freeze, not knowing what to do, wanting to comfort him but knowing it’s not my place. His sister steps in instead. You pat him on the shoulder and leave the room. I follow, feeling like a spare part, feeling awkward; my every move is mechanical, I’m convinced I’ve made a mistake in coming here and sharing what I shared, but I’m not sure. I want you to reassure me, but at the same time I don’t want reassurance to come from you.

Once outside, you discard the nicotine gum and light a cigarette. My face burns crimson as we walk and you don’t say anything the entire way home. When we stop outside my house, you look at me and maybe you sense my inner turmoil, or maybe you see my discomfort, or perhaps my face is a picture of the despair that I feel, because your eyes linger for a moment, your handsome face studying mine, soft, caring, still curious and studious as it always is, trying to figure things out, as if I’m a puzzle, but a humorous one.

You stub out your cigarette. ‘I’d have wanted to know too,’ you say. ‘That was nice.’ You reach out and squeeze my shoulder.

I realise I’ve been holding my breath the entire way and finally release it. The relief I feel surprises me; you have done that to me, you count to me, but this jars with what I have always felt about you.

‘Jasmine!’ A familiar voice breaks into my thoughts and I spin around to see Heather sitting on my front porch. She stands up and makes her way over to us.

My head swirls as I realise that you are about to come face to face with the person I have tried to protect against you all of my adult life.

13

One Sunday a month Heather’s circle of support meets. We have had these meetings ever since she was a teenager; in fact, Mum was the person who set all this up and even while she was undergoing treatment she continued to attend, no matter how sick she was. Even when I was a teenager and had better things to be doing with my time, she insisted that I come along. Although I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I am now glad that I did, because when Mum passed away I knew exactly how things were run and what direction they needed to go in. Person-centred planning is a group of people who meet together regularly to help somebody achieve what they would like to do in their lives. Heather is in charge of who she wants to invite and what she wants to talk about. We talk about Heather’s PATH – Planning Alternative Tomorrows with Hope – we talk about her dreams, how she could achieve these dreams, what is going on in her life and what are the next steps she needs to take. We talk about making her dreams a reality.

The meeting used to be weekly in the days when she was making plans for school, secondary school and what she wanted to study in college – which ended up being a residential college to learn how to live independently, how to get about on public transport, how to shop for food and essentials, cooking skills and preparation for the workplace. It was important to keep the meetings regular while she planned the direction she wanted her life to go in, but when the time came it was Heather herself who decided to switch to monthly meetings.

People who have attended in the past have included teachers, her support assistant – who Heather interviewed herself – someone from her college, the careers officer, her employers, and always me. Dad has come along a handful of times, but he isn’t good in these situations. He misunderstands the purpose. It is about planning, yes, and it is about doing. But it is also about listening to Heather and hearing how she feels about her place in the world and where she wants to be. Dad doesn’t have the patience to listen to these things. If it’s a job she wants, he’ll get it for her; if it’s an activity she wants to do, he’ll sort it out for her. But what I’ve learned from this process is that it helps me get inside Heather’s head. I want to hear the explanations for how and why and when. Like the time she announced that she wanted to leave her job packing bags at the local supermarket, even though it was a job she had spent a long time planning for. Dad was present at the meeting and wanted to rush through it all, gung-ho about getting her out of there because he hated her doing that job anyway. He completely missed the fact that the reason she wanted to leave the job was because somebody at the supermarket was being mean to her. The lady at the till was moving too fast, constantly snapping at her heels, making her feel like she wasn’t doing a good job, taking over the packing to hurry up the process when she felt Heather wasn’t moving fast enough. These are exactly the sort of things we need to hear from Heather at the meetings.

The meeting was planned for two p.m., yet here she is at one o’clock, making her way over to me and you, face to face with the man who embodies everything I have tried so hard to protect her from since I was a child. Words cannot describe how I feel in this moment, but I’ll try. I have gone from feeling warm and consoled by your words once again, consolation I was deliberately seeking from you – and that in itself makes me feel conflicted – to wanting to protect my sister from you. No wonder you can’t figure me out.

I fix all my attention on Heather, step towards her so she doesn’t come any closer to you, positioning myself so we’re two against one, with my arm wrapped around her shoulders protectively. I can’t look at your face; I don’t want to see how you might sneer or judge or analyse, or try to calculate another part of me through seeing her. I only look at her, beam at her with pride, oozing love for her from every pore, hoping you’ll pick up on it, remember your show, feel awful about it, reassess yourself, your job and your whole life. I give it that much energy. I’m sure Heather will sense how disgusting you are, how deplorable and unfair and nasty and judgemental you are. Regardless of what you say about it being purely to get the debate flowing, those words still pass through your lips, you are the source, the root, the creator. Heather possesses this talent to read people and there is never a better moment than now to see this skill in action. I want you to hold out your hand to her, I want her to deny you as she did with Ted Clifford. I want to see you wriggle and squirm with that surprised face you give me when I snap at you, when I turn from hot to cold.

‘Hello,’ I hear you say.

‘Hello,’ Heather responds.

She looks at me, then nudges me, wanting to be introduced.

‘This is my sister Heather,’ I say. ‘The most amazing person in the world.’

She giggles.

‘Heather, this is Matt. A neighbour,’ I say flatly.

You give me that intrigued, curious, studious look again. You know my hot and cold, my in between.

You wave at her. This bothers me, because it is correct behaviour for somebody in the Orange Wave Circle. Then Heather reaches out her hand. I turn to her in surprise, but she is looking at you with a polite smile on her face. I want to stop this exchange, this handshake with the devil, but I’m not sure that I can explain why I’m doing that to Heather, especially after the ruckus at Dad’s house – who I still haven’t heard from.

‘A pleasure to meet you, Heather,’ you say, shaking her hand. ‘That’s a cool bag you have.’

She is wearing the shoulder bag that I got her for her birthday five years ago. She wears it every day and keeps it looking brand new, making sure she cleans it, snips it of any tears. It’s a retro-style DJ bag, which is for storing vinyl records, along with the portable record player. Seeing as she prefers to listen to her vinyl records, I thought it would be a nice gift for her to be able to bring it from place to place. And she does, almost everywhere. The picture on the outside is of a vinyl record, so even on days when she’s not transporting her collection, she uses it to carry her purse, lunch and umbrella to and from work. Always those three things; I plead in vain with her to carry her mobile.

‘Thank you. Jasmine got it for me. It fits fifty records and my portable record player.’

‘You have a portable record player?’

‘A black Audio Technica AT-LP60 fully automatic belt-driven record player,’ she says, unzipping her bag to show him.

‘Hey, that’s very cool,’ you say, stepping forward to look in but not stepping too close. ‘And I see you’ve got some vinyl records there too.’

You are genuinely surprised, genuinely interested in her, genuinely want to see what she has in her DJ bag.

‘Yep. Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson…’ she flips through her collection and I watch your face.

‘Grandmaster Flash!’ you laugh. ‘Can I…?’ You reach towards her bag and I prepare for her to deny you.

‘Yes,’ she says happily.

You slide it out of its compartment and study it. ‘I can’t believe you have Grandmaster Flash.’

‘And the Furious Five,’ she corrects you. ‘The Message featuring Melle Mel and Duke Bootee, recorded at Sweet Mountain Studios, produced by Sylvia Robinson, Jiggs Chase and Ed Fletcher. Seven minutes eleven seconds in length,’ she continues.

You look at me, astonished, then back at her. I can’t help but glow with pride.

‘That’s amazing, Heather! You know everything about these records?’

And Heather goes on to tell you about her Stevie Wonder record: when it was recorded, each song on the album – she even names the session singers, the musicians. You are mightily impressed, amused, entertained, and you tell her so. Then you tell her that you’re a DJ. That you work on radio. Heather is interested at first, until she hears that mostly what you do is talk. She tells you that she doesn’t like listening to talking, she likes music. You ask her if she has ever been to a recording studio to see how musicians record their songs and she says no, then you tell her that you could bring her if she likes. Heather is unbelievably excited, but I can’t speak, I am too stunned by the exchange. This is not how I thought this would go. Never. I start to back away, lead Heather to the house, say goodbye in some kind of vague way, while you two, already firm buddies, promise to keep in touch through me. Through me. Once we get inside, Heather is all talk about what you have promised her and I start to feel angry, trying to figure out ways to hurt you if you do not do what you have promised. And when that gets too violent in my head, I try to come up with ways to make Heather forget what you have said, preparing for the very strong probability that it will not happen, owing to the very strong probability that I will not let it happen.

Present at the meeting that day, aside from me and Heather, are her support assistant Jamie, whose only concession to winter wardrobe is to wear thick sport socks with her sandals; Julie, her employer from the restaurant; and Leilah, who is present for the first time. What I like about Leilah is that she doesn’t even try to apologise on Dad’s behalf; in fact she doesn’t even mention him, and I respect that. The good thing about Leilah is that she has never gotten involved. This is largely because there has never been anything to get involved in, but her presence is a lovely gesture and I’m guessing that in order to understand what happened at her home last week, she needs to understand Heather more.

While the others are waiting in the living area, I make a pot of tea and mugs of coffee. Heather is beside me.

‘Heather…’ I begin, trying to keep the lightness in my voice. ‘Why did you shake that man’s hand outside?’

‘Matt?’ she asks.

‘Yes. There’s nothing wrong, don’t look so worried, but you don’t know him and I’m just wondering… share with me.’

She thinks about it. ‘Because I saw you talking to him. And you looked very happy. And I thought, he is a nice man to make my sister happy.’

Heather never fails to surprise me.

I concentrate on organising the tray while trying to come to terms with the exchange between you and Heather. What I need to do right now is to shake you off. These meetings are important to Heather and they are equally important to me.

‘So, take it away, Ms Butler,’ I say like a cheesy TV host. Heather giggles.

‘Jasmine,’ she says, embarrassed, then composes herself. ‘I would like to do a new activity.’ She looks at me in a certain way and I know that this will concern Jonathan, the name I keep hearing. My heart starts to beat manically. Jonathan has been her friend for some time. He too has Down syndrome, and I know that she has a crush on him, which scares me because I know that he feels the same way about her. I can see it when he looks at her. I can feel it when they’re in the same room as each other. It’s beautiful and it terrifies me.

‘Jonathan has a job as a teaching assistant in a Taekwondo class,’ she explains to the others. I know this already because I went with her one week to watch him teaching under sevens and I wasn’t allowed to utter one word to her for fear she would miss one of his moves. ‘I would like to learn Taekwondo.’

Jamie and Leilah are wonderful at being genuinely interested in this and they ask her plenty of questions. While they do that, I worry. Heather is thirty-four years old and certainly not agile, just as I am no longer as agile as I once was, and so this class concerns me. However I appear to be the only one with misgivings, and so I find myself agreeing that she will try a class next Saturday morning instead of her pottery and painting class, which she has grown tired of after two years.

‘I have an idea,’ Leilah offers. ‘In case you don’t like the Taekwondo, or if it doesn’t work out for any reason, you could take part in one of my yoga classes. Maybe I could teach you and Jonathan together?’

Heather beams at this suggestion and so do I. I like this idea: time alone with Jonathan in Leilah’s company makes me comfortable, and Heather starts to plan yoga and Taekwondo into her already busy week. I make notes in my diary, noticing how her activities fill my blank pages.

‘Next,’ I call, and she laughs again.

‘Jonathan and I would like to go on a holiday together,’ she says, and there is a stunned silence that even Jamie doesn’t quite know how to fill. They all look at me. I want to say no. No, no, no – but I can’t.

‘Wow. Well. That’s. I see. Well.’ I take a sip of tea. ‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Daddy’s apartment in Spain.’

Leilah widens her eyes at me.

‘Did Dad say you could?’

‘I didn’t ask him. He couldn’t come here today,’ Heather says.

‘Well, I mean, I’m not sure if it’s free. Is it, Leilah? Is it free?’

‘I don’t know,’ Leilah says slowly, not liking that I’ve put her on the spot for such an important issue, and not realising I want her to say no, or else realising it and not wanting to lie.

‘She hasn’t even told you the date,’ Jamie says, not hiding her unhappiness with how this is going.

‘Springtime,’ Heather says. ‘Jonathan says summer is too hot.’

‘Jonathan is absolutely right,’ I say, my mind racing. I know now how Dad felt when I told him I was going on my first holiday with my boyfriend. Then I remember how I felt even broaching the subject with him, and I look at Heather and I finally relax. ‘Heather. You and Jonathan have never been away together before, and Spain is quite far for a first trip.’ I emphasise these words so she won’t think I’m shutting her down straight away. ‘Why don’t you go away for a night or two first, somewhere lovely in Ireland that you’ve never been before? You can get a train or a bus and be close to home but not too close?’

She looks uncertain. She and Jonathan have already saved their fare and set their hearts on Spain. Talking her back from such a big move takes a lot of gentle persuasion, but Heather listens, she listens to us all, she always does, she’s a clever woman, taking in everybody’s opinion.

Over the past few weeks I had come up with a plan to take Heather to Fota Island which lies in Cork harbour and is home to Ireland’s only wildlife park. I suggest this venue now, because I can’t think of anything else on the spot. She is immediately convinced. Spain is forgotten. Jonathan loves animals, he loves trains, this is perfect. I can’t help but feel sad, that the place I was excited to take her to will be an experience she shares with someone else.

‘So,’ I take a deep breath. ‘The bedrooms.’

I can tell Heather is embarrassed about this part so I take control.

‘Options are: two bedrooms or one bedroom with two single beds. Or…’ I can’t bring myself to say it. Jonathan and Heather are two people with desires and passions just like everyone else, but I feel like an overprotective parent whose child has announced she likes boys. I take a breath and force myself to say it: ‘Or one double bed in one room – but Jonathan might be a diagonal man, who knows?’ I add playfully. ‘He might take up the entire bed and you might roll out on to the floor in the middle of the night.’

Heather laughs.

‘Or maybe he snores,’ Jamie says. ‘Like this-’ She makes a loud piggy sound and we all laugh.

‘Or maybe his feet smell really bad,’ Leilah says, pinching her nose.

‘Jonathan does not smell,’ Heather says, pouting, her hands on her hips.

‘Oooh, Jonathan is so perfect,’ I tease.

‘Jasmine!’ Heather squeals, and we all laugh.

The laughter quietens and the room descends into silence, waiting for her decision.

‘Separate bedrooms,’ she says quietly, and we hurriedly move on. While Jamie is talking about the logistics of getting there, I wink at Heather and she smiles shyly.

This is not the first time Heather has been away: she has travelled before with groups of friends, but always with her support assistant or another adult that I know in attendance. This is her first time alone, with a man, and I have to fight the nervous ball of tension in my stomach, the lump in my throat and the tears that are welling.

We move on to discussing her next issue, which is that, while she is very grateful for the three jobs that she has during the week, her main love is music and none of her activities seem to cover this. She would love to work in a radio station or a recording studio, and she tells everybody in the group about the conversation she has had with Matt Marshall. Everybody remarks on what a wonderful coincidence it is that she has met him on the very day she wished to discuss this.

‘Jasmine, perhaps we could invite Matt Marshall to the next meeting to discuss the possibilities?’ Jamie suggests.

Heather is giddy with excitement at the prospect.

I always like these meetings to be positive, so I summon up all the cheeriness I can. ‘Perhaps we can plan it for the next time. Maybe. Perhaps. After I talk to him and see if there’s anything he can do. If he has time – though he is having a personal moment out of work at the moment. So… yes. Maybe,’ I finally say.

Leilah eyes me warily. I’m grateful when we move on to the next subject.

It is with a heavy heart that I close the door on everybody after the meeting is finished and go upstairs to my bedroom. I am not jealous of my sister, I never have been. I have always wanted a better life for her, even though I know that she is happy with the life she has. Today, however, it has occurred to me for the first time that she has always known the direction she has wanted to take in her life, she has always had a team to help her, advise her, guide her. She has always had it sussed. It is me who hasn’t. It is me who suddenly has absolutely no idea what I am doing, it is me who has no PATH whatsoever. The realisation hits me like a ton of bricks and I can’t seem to catch my breath. I couldn’t tell anybody my dreams if they asked me right now, nor my hopes and desires. If I was asked to put a plan into action, I wouldn’t know where to start.

I feel utterly lost.