Those two precious weeks, hanging out on the beach and shopping in the market where we purchased the juiciest, choicest tomatoes that we’d ever seen and how we joked that any reasonable Irish person would attest that it is virtually impossible to get a decent tomato back home. I can still remember the pungent scent from my hands as I cupped them to my face, having secured a kilo of the best tomatoes at the market in Alicante.

I recall how I met Jenny’s father for the first time when he reiterated the story Jenny had told me about Jerome and the wine and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I knew all about it.

And there’s a crack on the ceiling of the sitting room. It looks like my mother’s royal icing on the Christmas cake that she used to make. The crack starts off as a straight line and then it breaks up like a branch on a tree and it is shaky, as if a child has drawn it with an HB pencil, and when things are shaky like this everything is wrong. I am on the cusp of something terrible and the things that I know and the people that I love – they are cracking and crumbling away from me. I could leave the ground, couldn’t I? I can imagine it. Take my eyes there, take my eyes; gouge them. If I take some drugs or lots of drugs then maybe I could rip them out of my head. But I am not a man for drugs.

I run a steak knife down my arm and I try to stick the point of it into a vein near my wrist. It is futile. The knife is too blunt at the tip somehow. It’s like a bad oar on a paddleboard. I need balance. I need leverage at the top of the knife and from its middle, I hold the paddle in my mind’s eye. I have never been on a paddleboard but I live with the memory of the documentary of a lifetime. A documentary about Australian paddleboarders that I watched with Jenny and Mikey and Joey and Maeve here on this couch two nights before, Jenny’s eyes fixed on the television screen but not connecting with it. I know a thing or two about connectivity. Connectivity is everything and that is all that I know. And I get up and I stumble, but I do not fall completely.

I go to the kitchen and I look in the first aid press for Jenny’s Valium. The sound of the television now and the children talking about how they could easily beat the Cube. Jesus Christ. A cube and that is it. Small feats and all of them to be performed behind transparent glass so everybody can see how stupid and clumsy you really are.