‘I got a call today. From a friend of my ex-husband’s.’

Quin’s sharp inhale was audible.

‘His…Luke, I mean, his mother has died. The funeral’s on Friday morning. I don’t know whether to go or not.’

‘Right.’ A pause. ‘Rach…’ Another pause.

Quin knew everything about me and Luke.

Well, nearly everything.

One of the great things about having met on a weekend where our very presence was an admission that we were struggling with life, was that, right from the start, Quin and I were admirably straight with each other. In our early days I’d felt okay to say to him, ‘I could never love another man the way I loved Luke.’

‘Ow!’ Quin had been visibly pained. ‘Radical honesty can go and fuck itself.’

But we’d been able to laugh about it.

For a moment the connection to New Mexico went loud and crackly. When I could hear Quin again, he was asking, ‘What’s your “inner voice” telling you?’

‘Nothing at the moment. But, like, would you mind if I went?’

‘If I did, that’s my stuff. Right?’

‘Haha.’

‘Sleep on it. See how you feel tomorrow. But’, he growled, ‘you’d better not fall for him again.’

‘I won’t.’

5

I turned out the light and hoped for sleep. But behind my eyelids, my eyes were wide open. I was cast back in time, to over twenty years ago, when Brigit and I were living in Manhattan.

There had been a gang of Irish lads we used to see around. All of them about six feet tall, with mad-long hair, tight, tight jeans and an abundance of neck and wrist accoutrements, they’d looked like they belonged in a hard-living rock band from the early seventies.

They drank Jack Daniel’s, which they called JD, were no strangers to leather waistcoats or a denim jacket worn over a bare chest and were always accessorized by skinny blonde girls in groupie chic.

Dying of embarrassment that they were Irish, terrified we’d be lumped in with them by the cool New York types whose approval we craved, Brigit and I had, oozing irony, named them the Real Men.

But when, inevitably, we got talking to them, they were actually lovely. It was a relief to talk to men who were funny and halfway normal.

Those were the days when Brigit and I were scouring New York City for boyfriends. I was hoping for someone chiselled, hot, well paid and worthy of respect. In fact, so great at generating respect that simply by being his girlfriend, I would also engender some.

What it came down to was, I was waiting for a saviour. But my saviour had been unaccountably delayed. So while I was killing time, I’d ended up having a passionate but messy sort of a thing with one of the Real Men—Luke Costello.