It is a strange thing when you lose control of your body. Your voice. I want very much to say that Jerome has another thing coming if he expects it to be all roses in the garden from now on but I don’t laugh, instead I say, why not? I sit beside Jenny and I prise the bottle of beer from her fingers. They are so graceful and self-assured and I try to lift up her top but the delicate lace clings and it only rises to her navel. I open the top button of her trousers and she tenses. I read this rapid movement as desire and I push my hand into her crotch. She clings to me. Her hair falls over her face and she uses her hands to brush it from her eyes and she looks over to her desk and then she looks at me and her eyes are not like my Jenny’s.

39. Everything Moved So Fast

July 1997

It felt like a compulsion, a shotgun and I was holding the trigger. It was in my hands, the relationship, and I didn’t know exactly what to do with this control.

And it came suddenly, surprising almost like the arrival of the first dew on the grass in the morning.

I was in the part of the flat that I liked to call my office. It was nothing more than a large shelving unit where I kept my favourite books, ones that I couldn’t part with. I had thrown away a good many before, books that I had no particular love for, but I kept all my favourites for no particular reason other than sentimentality, which I was taught was somehow wrong. It was erroneous to allow yourself to become too emotionally attached to objects, this was something my father had told me.

I cleaned the bookshelves. I relished the fact that we were living together. Having her there when I came home from the magazine. Having her there after I had finished a late shift at the Crown, even in the long summer when the tourists coming through the doors reached saturation point and the only languages that myself and Andy seemed to hear were full of Mediterranean-soaked fluidity and whatever Irish voices were in the pub were overwhelmed. The Spanish were so polite but they didn’t drink enough and in order to attract more locals we decided to hold a weekly draw. It worked in rural parts, why not Dublin?