Jenny talked to me about her work all the time, and I listened. Nobody wanted to hear stories about hopes and dreams and ambitions. You had to know the right people in Dublin, it was as simple as that, and you were doomed if you missed the boat, but I didn’t say that to Jenny. I listened to her banging on about the tangibility of dreams, how a dream can be so clear in your head but when you attempt to voice it, to extract it, like a painful decaying, festering tooth, it becomes fuzzy and not at all the way it is in your mind. The tooth hiding there in the recess of your mouth is causing you pain but the brain itself cannot feel pain and that is why it is possible to do brain surgery with a local anaesthetic. I wondered about the pain Jenny was supposedly suffering and I wondered if it was imaginary.

I was her sounding board, her first port of call. She would talk through her ideas about her work with me and I would offer whatever advice I had. She would take this counsel and play with it and oftentimes she would act on it. These were happy times. If she ignored it I would feel emptier inside than I had before she came to me for help.

I urged her to generate constant positivity around her. We were there for her comfort, the children and I, we would wrap her up. It was faith that pushed people to do great things with their lives. Nobody got where they were by just looking and not pushing. I was all talk about self-belief and motivation and Jenny, it seemed to me, refocused.

Her new project involved newspapers. She gathered reams and reams of print and it seemed as though the letters weren’t just letters that made up words, and the words weren’t mere words that made up sentences. She was looking at the print in terms of form and shape.

She talked about her fear of the sea. And I reiterated my love for the water and of my deepest respect for it. She said that it was her latent fear of the sea that had given her the inspiration to depict it, and that was what she had achieved with her work on Lennox Street. She was searching for some inspiration that could equal that fear. I didn’t know what to believe, how she could fear something and be willing to explore it, it was admirable really. Her relentless depiction was her way of confronting her fear. I couldn’t confront mine.

She had an idea of shredding the newspapers, tearing through all those letters, all those words. Mixing the pieces of torn newspaper with water and glue and then moulding them into bricks. She talked about wrapping the bricks in plastic and what that might achieve and then she considered wrapping old phone books in plastic.