When we finish our dinner it is close to eight. I ask her where she’s meeting Jerome and when she says, the Grange, I tell her that the place is full of wankers and I remind her that she has said this on numerous occasions. I want to put her off. The idea of herself and Jerome cosy as fuck in the Grange and me at home with the three kids like an idiot worrying about whether or not they will get a good night’s sleep and cleaning the little bits of Astro that fall all over the boys’ bedroom floors as they discard their football boots without a care in the world. Scraping unidentifiable black muck from underneath Joey’s and Mikey’s nails with a cocktail stick. By the time I get rid of them to bed I’ll be too flaked out to even watch television.

35. Migraine

April 1997

I sat in the darkness, and looked out the front window and watched how the light from the street lamp spilled into the room, filling me with control. I told Jenny I loved her and I waited for her to respond and hoped she would say she loved me. She stroked my face and said, you too.

There were flashes where Jenny thought she was about to genuinely make it and that shows would be forthcoming. Maybe her patience had been worthwhile and finally she was moving beyond a place where she experienced an absence of recognition to a place where she might experience its presence. It seemed close. It was within touching distance and I could feel her hope, like a dying man experiences air hunger.

She worked so hard. Collages – surges of rubbish from the city, the flâneuse in her collecting detritus and not poetry or words. Hers were walk pictures. She still had most of her sea paintings from the group show on Lennox Street where we’d met and I urged her to try and push them out again to the galleries. She told me that she’d moved beyond that work and that they felt amateurish to her and partially untrue to herself and to her ability. I loved her so much, more then, with her vulnerability so evident, and I massaged her neck. I talked about the glory of moonlight, how it is something vivid and how it is obvious that it can offer you spiritual enlightenment. I had belief and I told her to hold her nerve with the work. I felt her fingers pressing into mine in response. It felt so good to help her.

Jenny was suffering from migraines. She went quiet in those moments and she couldn’t work properly, sometimes for a day or two at a time. I was the fixer in the relationship and there was a time and a place for everything and when Jenny had migraine, it was healing time.