I thanked him. I wondered what the hell I was going to do in the short term about my car – as I could see it was dented in about five places and the crack in the windshield was going to get me stopped by every cop driving by. And if they reported me to Uber …

As if reading my thoughts Elise said:

‘Don’t worry, Brendan. I’ll make a call to the Women’s Choice Group. I’m pretty sure they have an emergency fund for things like this …’

I was overcome by a sudden wave of exhaustion, a pain shooting up my arm; a pain I’d felt before during another bad moment when I thought I was about to drown in the craziness of others. I leaned against the now dented roof of my car.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ I said. ‘Please, get in the car.’

I didn’t want her to witness this. When it happened the last time – six weeks after I’d been made redundant and it looked like there was nothing in the future – the doctor on duty at St Vincent’s had me rushed into cardiology and slapped onto an ECG machine. No heart attack but he did warn me that I’d suffered from an overdose of stress and that I needed to keep a close eye on the way my body – especially my heart – reacted to moments when ‘your entire system overloads’. He also suggested that I learn some breathing exercises to combat the stress, then gave me a severe talking-to about my cigarette habit. I told him I was planning to quit … something that I knew was never going to happen. But I did download some free app about ‘calmness’ or some such stuff and learned one simple exercise I could do standing up or sitting down to try to restore some quiet to my body when I felt it going into freefall and limit the pain going up and down my left arm.

So while Jackie continued shouting at Elise I shut my eyes and imagined that there was a straw going from my nostril into my lungs and that I was drawing air down through this straw and holding in my tobacco-charred lungs for a ten count, then slowly releasing all that trapped air through my mouth and nose … and repeating this around twelve times.

‘I’m not fucking going home!’

Jackie was still screaming as I returned to the car, not feeling in any way calm after all that deep breathing … but with the chest pain under control. Back in the driver’s seat, I stared out through the cracked windshield.

‘I think we should get out of here – in case they break through the police line and come looking for us again,’ I said, glancing at Elise through the rearview mirror. She nodded. Jackie yelled at Elise: