We play about and we mark goals with jumpers and anoraks. We make the goals large, then we decrease them in size just to make things a bit more complicated, more challenging. I make obstacle courses from cups and plates and the two thermos flasks. I can hold the boys’ attention if I do the obstacle course too. They’re not content to allow me to sit back once I’ve set everything up. It’s all about my participation. I go along with them because I figure that’s what any good father should do. After a while I become tired and I tell the boys that I’m going to sit down and have a tea break. I attempt to read the sports section of the paper but Mikey and Joey start arguing about who has won and I tell them to shut up, to give me a small bit of peace, but they won’t let up. I tell them that if they shut up I will bring them over to the shop and buy them an ice cream. They stop arguing for maybe a minute and then in despair I tell them that the ice cream idea is off. It’s fucking over, I shout at them and there in the valley I feel like I’m going mad.

I’m shouting with increased vehemence and I’m telling the boys that they’re ungrateful. They, in their innocence, point out that they have in fact nothing to be grateful for, seeing as I have let them down on the ice cream front. I am at a loss because, in a way, I know they’re right. I stop in the middle of my rant and the boys ask me what’s wrong with me. Mikey asks me if I’m having a stroke but Joey assures him that this isn’t likely as I’m quite a fit dad for my age, compared to his school friends’ fathers. I reckon he’s on to something here, there’s no shortage of potato-heads at the school gates and that’s no lie. But they’re beginning to argue too much amongst themselves. I’m all for debating in general but there is something about Glendalough that in my mind demands peace. To be incessantly talking seems wrong somehow and I ask them to desist as I cannot think. It is in this moment of unexpected silence and clarity that I realize that Jenny and Maeve have not returned and that they have been gone almost two hours.