I wanted to run to my books. I wanted to read poetry. I wanted to scream verses by John Donne and other verses like Bukowski’s ‘the trash men’ because that is what the euphoria felt like, if you could describe it as a mood. I didn’t care, though. I felt ambidextrous to life, like I could take it in my two hands and juggle the happiness around, it was unbounded and I no longer had anything to fear. She was mine. Jenny was mine. We were having a child.

When Maeve was born and, later, Mikey and Joey, my Jenny was there for them. Their demands were so encompassing that it meant Jenny’s work suffered. As soon as I came home in the evenings they were mine to deal with. And slowly I realized that the flash of life that she’d shared with me in the earlier days was a flash, and nothing more. And I was jealous and I wanted that flash of our old life back. The time when she wouldn’t bother staying up late to work but would come to bed and, if the children were quiet, or later asleep, she would hold me and I could feel the glisten of perspiration on her chest when we made love and I wanted to be able to smell that sweat.

The belief in our happy life that I gifted her. The way she listened to me and took from it what she wished and the freckles on her nose, accentuated in summer, and our garden freshly planted and the children growing with it and the slips of plants from Jenny’s father’s garden, whom we would occasionally visit on Sundays. He was a coffee man and I was a tea man. He never really bothered talking to the children. He didn’t seem to talk much to Jenny either, and hardly ever to me.

And yet we took his slips.

44. The Portuguese Man of War

August 2017

I lie in a foetal position on the urine-streaked ground beside the shelter at the end of the ramp on our beach where I used to come often with Jenny, just the two of us. The shelter has some great graffiti from time to time but mostly, inane messages like ‘Bono doesn’t pay any tax’ or ‘Kill all singer song writers’.