There was moonlight shining into the window of the flat. I told Jenny not to sleep, to stay awake; to hold the night’s happiness. She said that the light meant something and she felt safe with it. I held her close. Perhaps there was something to be said about all the fuss about the darkness into light walks that would spring up about the country, years later. Light, it seemed, was so amazing it could even prevent suicide.

I was careful with the weight of my body as I lay on her and the penetration I performed was weighted in its own gentle way.

We were getting married.

43. It Couldn’t Get Any Better

July 2004

We were full of the early flush that you get as newlyweds which people warn will quickly disappear, but you hope won’t happen. When we decided we needed a house of our own to feel like a proper married couple, it wasn’t like the lights went out at the end of a party and we were told politely that we had to leave. It was dangerously exciting.

It was at that stage where you could lie about your salary and it was decent of Graham to exaggerate mine on paper for the bank. We managed to buy a place. It wasn’t Killiney but it was close enough to the beach and that was all I cared about. There was a shop, a pharmacy and a pub. It served our needs.

Jenny started to consider having children, she wanted life to grow in her body. I was delighted. We finally seemed to want the same thing and this unleashed an optimism from inside my heart and my bones.

She must have told Jerome about the wedding, even if she didn’t invite him, because we got a present delivered to the house. A throw from Avoca – a mixture of turquoise and cream and grey and its texture was mohair-warm and I imagined it would scratch your skin but Jenny didn’t seem to worry about such a thing. To her it was fluffy-perfect. In the evenings, in the early days, before we had Maeve and Mikey and Joey, Jenny would lie on the couch, snuggled into it. She often covered her legs with it when she was working at her desk. It was spattered with paint and she didn’t care about the stains. Jenny saw them as testament to the fact that she was working.

I continued to sell life assurance and although I’d only been in the job a year, I felt as though I’d known Graham O’Neill for a significant part of my life, but with the mortgage repayments, I had no option but to put up with it.