“Who do you know at Donegal Pass Police Station?” she asked coldly.

“No one,” he replied.

“Then what are you doing with their number?” and she pointed to the top of the newspaper where the young policeman had written it down.

“Oh fuck,” he said.

“Jack what are you at? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

He explained. She got up abruptly and he followed her out into the lane.

“Are you a fool?” she snarled. “You’d be found on some waste dump in the morning.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I know them,” she snapped crossly, and she walked on. He followed her. She stopped and faced him.

“But your father was a policeman.”

Her face twisted in scorn. “That’s why I know.”

“I need to do these things, he said.”

“How can you be so stupid?” Then her tone changed. “Promise me you won’t go.”

“I think I should go.”

“If you go with them,” she said, “then don’t return to the house.”

Estranged, they walked towards the taxi rank.

Each Tuesday he went to the dole and stood silently in the queue. Then he spent all the cash between the Chinese supermarket and the Pakistani grocer who sold spices and spoke with a strong Belfast accent. He never wanted to find himself owing to Catherine. He had accepted advances from two theatres towards scripts that did not exist. Then, in the guilty throes of a hangover, he prepared an outline for a play, and sent it off to Eddie Brady, who had produced two of his plays.

“What’s it about?” she asked him.

“I don’t know yet.”

She saw no finished texts and yet it was always by the typewriter that Catherine would find him when she came home. “Do you write at all?” she asked him. “Sometimes,” he said. Each evening a bottle of wine was opened. He’d try to straighten up and talk sense after his afternoon rambles. Her evening’s drinking began. So his day was divided into two drinking bouts, his on his own, and then his with her.

When he was out she looked through the notes on his desk which were often filled with nonsense rhymes or Belfast speech patterns he had written down as he heard them. Notes about Mayo. Descriptions of what people wore. A collection of voices and moods that had no relation to each other. Speech overheard in pubs, on the street, in the back gardens, by the docks.