I wait with a greediness for it to be later and yet I don’t wish time to move forward. I wait the same way I waited impatiently for darkness to come as a child at Hallowe’en. It never seemed to come fast enough so I could go out to the neighbours and beg for chocolate. The chocolate and the sweets were scant and I laugh aloud now in the sitting room about how many times I have told the children that they are destroyed by sugar, by junk when they go out on their rounds. I have to sink my teeth into the soft skin of the token apples that are left at the end of each of their bags underneath all the junk that they upend on the floor to segregate. Good lollipops and less good ones, and cheap and dangerous ones where the stick comes out when you least expect it to, and you are left with a lump of something horrible that tastes like nothing in particular. Mikey and Joey and Maeve rolling around the floor surrounded by heaps of mini Mars Bars and fun-size Smarties and Haribo jellies and crisps, smoky bacon Wheelies and Hula Hoops.

The beer is cold, never getting any warmer. I go to the downstairs toilet and my piss is wholehearted. I go back to the sitting room to my sitting position and I am beginning something here.

I wait until it is half one in the morning and then I go to Jenny. I place my hands on her throat and I squeeze and it takes so much effort and I have got somewhere and I have to go further and I have to be careful that I do enough. And there is fight in her as she wriggles violently, I think, but I cannot be sure because I am so caught up with her neck that I cannot properly register her body, not fully, but I am aware of her beautiful arms flailing and it seems to go on forever but then she no longer moves and her arms are just there.

I go into the bathroom and I vomit beery sick and that feeling you get when you know that you’ve drunk too much as soon as you wake up and you take an Alka-Seltzer and you knock it back too quickly and you puke it up around ten minutes later after you have crawled back to bed to lie down and try to get yourself together. And my vomit is like that vomit. It is violent and then the retching starts and then it stops and I wipe my hands on my jeans and I move into the boys’ room.