I tell Jenny that I am here in this world to love her. I have loved her since the day that I spotted her in the gallery on Lennox Street. Nothing has changed, I assure her. She is loved and my love for her is as deep as a vast ocean. It is longer than the distance to where the sea meets the horizon. I notice that there are tiny splashes of freckles gathering at the top of her nose from the recent bouts of sunshine.

I keep away from trust.

But only for a moment. This drink idea seems wrong somehow and I come straight out and ask her what the fuck she’s at agreeing to meet his highness for a drink. I feel like we’ve been through this before, some kind of a warped emotional déjà vu. I want him away from her. He’s hanging around, I tell her. Why else would he have put his kid in the same club as Mikey and Joey? Of all the fucking clubs in Dublin he chooses the one our kids are in. I ask Jenny if she is capable of seeing how this might appear, of what it means. She tells me that Jerome is on his own and that he is lonely and that it’s the least she can do.

Where are you going? I ask her.

She doesn’t respond as she goes to her desk. I follow her and I tell her how I am trying to empathize with Jerome fucking Fagan but I end up by saying that he has a fucking nerve. She sits down and takes up a bottle of rapeseed oil. She takes a pencil from an old Golden Syrup tin, filled with pencils of varying weights and textures, and makes some initial swoops. I am no longer a living being in the room with her, it’s like she’s lost to herself after making sweeping statements like they mean nothing – a casual mention of having a drink with an ex-lover and I’m supposed to just take that and get on with it, move on to something else. Making these fucking arrangements behind my back. It’s not right and I examine the cuticles on my fingers and I pull at loose skin and I feel a sharp sting as I tear a thin strip of skin away, too deep.

My mother had a thing about keeping her cuticles neat and her nails manicured. Sometimes she would let me paint her nails. It made me feel important and it is a wonderful thing to have a sense of one’s importance, especially so at an early age. It occurs to me that the word importance isn’t too far off impotence and I consider this fact carefully.

Jenny has such a fierce look of concentration on her as if her very face carries a do-not-disturb sign but I have every intention of getting her attention.