I shout out. I tell the kids to open my wallet and take out the money for the ice cream. Contractions of pain shoot up my spine and I have a flashback to Jenny screaming to the doctors in the hospital to get Maeve out of her because she thought that she was going to die. I cross my arms and I rub my palms up and down the top part of my arms and I start to shiver violently even though I am burning up. I am rubbing bits of tentacles further into my body. Mikey asks me if he should get strawberry or lime sauce on his ice cream. I scream, strawberry, because even in my desperation I know that strawberry is his favourite flavour and it’s what he wants to hear. I can hear Jenny asking me if I am all right, if I can breathe. And I wonder how it is that she’s even here with us on the beach. She should be at home working on her paintings, her sculptures. And now I recall that she has joined us because there has been an overnight storm and there is no end to the possibilities of what she may find after the sea has ravaged the headland. I can see her standing over me and she is wearing a flowing white dress with a floral pattern that seems very much at odds with how I’m feeling now.

As I lie on the ground I make the decision to get dressed because I am shivering now in my swimming shorts and then I immediately reject such a decision because I am aware that I’m entirely incapable of doing such a thing. The cloud formation overhead is at once foreboding and poetic and I wonder in my heart why is it that there is a scarcity of what you could consider deeply attractive men native to the Irish hinterland compared to, say, the French. And yet Jerome Fagan must be doing something right and in my twisted agony I curse him for it.

It isn’t strictly a jellyfish, the Portuguese man of war, and of course I learn all this in time. A group of gelatinous cells – a siphonophore – which occasionally hangs out in Irish waters that I have been unfortunate to encounter. I get some sympathy from Jenny the next day but it is insufficient compared to the magnitude of what I have been through.

45. Jerome Is in My House

I cannot control an emotion surfacing; I can, however, control what I do with it.