Her work was going quite well and we often talked about it in the evenings. We sipped Jacob’s Creek or Corona with a wedge of lime pushed down into the neck of the bottle. She spoke of the possibility of a collaboration. I told her to be careful about sharing her work. I couldn’t stand the idea of a shred of Jenny’s brilliance being overshadowed. I was worried that she didn’t have the strength in her to keep pushing herself forward and I urged her to be strong. I didn’t feel strong, I just said it because I wanted so badly for her to believe in herself. I used an analogy of tennis players and how they go out on to the court to win Grand Slams and do whatever it takes and it is ultimately everything to do with psychology, and nothing more.

But I also assured her that life wasn’t all about work and her career. Some day I wanted a family and it seemed like the right time to bring this up. I was quite taken aback when Jenny said that the very notion of a foetus siphoning nutrition through the umbilical cord, sucking every available bit of goodness from her body, was terrifying and how the force of that might impact her work. Her outburst seemed terribly dramatic. I said that things happen for a reason and not to worry too much about the future. All that mattered was the here and now.

Later in bed, I turned off the bedside light and we lay in the dark. I wanted everything to be perfect. Jenny spoke of her ambitions and her dreams. She spoke of the sea and how she missed growing up beside it. She could wake up in the morning and head down to the promenade and she would brush her hair on the beach and the flyaway strands were taken with the breeze.

We all end up back into the earth, she said.

I wrapped my arms around her back and pushed my forehead in against her neck where I felt safe and warm and all good. I didn’t like talk of morbidity and death and I told her this in the bedroom darkness.

I lay snuggled into her. She spoke of the astringent pungency of dried-out urine in the gutters on the streets of the capital, when it wouldn’t rain for a while and the feeling of relief after a downpour, how the air would feel lighter and everything would feel refreshed and I said wasn’t that a good thing? She said that other cities didn’t smell nearly as putrid as Dublin did in summer, that you couldn’t smell stale blood and puke and dried-up booze and Chinese takeaway puke and urine, and she said the Irish had to be dirtier than other people, in other cities.