She walks to her desk and I hear her banging about. I crush dried chilli for the tomato sauce and she comes over to me and places her arms around my back and it feels welcome. She places her head into my back and I can feel the hardness of her forehead and her breath. Through my light blue linen shirt I can just about make out her breath as she speaks and despite the warmth of her breath she tells me that if I ever lay my fucking hands on her again that she will take the children and that she will run from me. I am cold. I push down on her hand and she is clenching a chisel. There is a certain clarity when you are surprised.

She tells me that she will indeed be meeting Jerome for a drink and I don’t say anything. The regret I feel for pushing her to the ground is beginning to ferment inside me and the passion that I feel for my wife is somehow mixed up with trepidation. She turns around to face me and she holds the chisel very close to my face and I feel particularly vulnerable now that I have lost my beard. I am a child once more, being threatened with a beating with a wooden spoon. She leans in so close to my face that I can see the pores in her nose, the small hole which now looks like an enlarged pore where she used to wear a stud. The delicate hairs above her upper lip, her coffee-stained teeth, her breath – the words I want to hear from her mouth – I love you. And not those other words – words that if strung together in the correct order will make the sentence that she’ll leave me and that she’ll take the kids.

All the time the chisel in her hand.

I will have to watch myself.

I have a vision of Jenny sucking his penis, hunkered down in the darkness of the street outside the pub. I have a vision of the trouble I went to, trying to open Denise’s bra, down in Cork, and how this difficulty was my trigger to stop doing what I was doing.

34. Jenny’s Walk

I rush the whole way home from work. I even miss out on a free bottle of Lucozade being given out at the train station by two cute but slightly overweight Lucozade girls. As I’m running past them, in my haste to get on to the DART I cannot but wonder what in the name of God, the good, if any, they might do for the sales of Lucozade, if anything sales might plummet. Being home early is the first sign that I am making amends. Jenny will want to get out for her walk.