And finally, I peed. I told him a little about Father as I sat on the loo and someone else’s hair emerged from the shower hole. He had always known, he said, all my ranting on and on and on in my sleep, well, it had given him many clues over the years as to my busy mind, busy, like an insect, but he felt that if we put our love out there towards each other, we’d at least get some of it back, and I told him I didn’t purposely hold love back, but he knew that too, because he’d watched me for years, protecting myself, knocking all the things I loved, or should love the most, because then there’s no expectation, not really, and he knew this too, really we both knew that and I said I was sorry about all the people throughout our life that I met (I’d usually just fucked them, but I didn’t want to break us entirely apart). But that was the extent of it. I did want to tell him that builder guy from East Clare was the very last. That was the end. But I wasn’t going to go into specifics because that’s torture, giving someone specifics, a name, a face. Alex said he always knew, every time, but I didn’t press him on it. I wasn’t a masochist. And he said, of course it bothered him but also he sort of understood it. I asked him why he’d never left, and he said, he’d often thought about it, made plans, but that really it made him think of me as alive, like a grapefruit sliced open, and there was nothing better than thinking of someone alive, like the day I wrestled the Whooper swan, he said, and something about the boys and my father. I made it up off the loo without him having to help me, but collapsed into him. As he lifted me back to the chair, he said that it was his decision to stay, that was his responsibility, and that he had a fair grasp of the facts, and himself. But that he knew me most of all, and I suggested to him that if he came early tomorrow morning that I might shower alone and he might dry my hair and fix it, paint my nails again, now that we were sharing a bathroom space. He said he would. I thought a peppermint green would be nice and he thought fuchsia would be better (because he knew where the bottle was), but we settled on a glassy peach colour, because they sold it in the Hospital shop, and it would remind me of the walls and the floor and the scanner. I said it would probably be the last time that he painted my nails. And he said no, it wouldn’t, and that he would race me back to the bed.

And he did, abandoning me in my chair, and he won.

So in the glow of his victory, I begged and I told him I can’t be a prisoner. That is not who I am. And that a taxi driver can’t be paid in red lipstick and blobfish slippers, that I am, for all accounts, entirely poor. Which is ironic. But devastating. Alex didn’t commit one way or another. Stoic.