She waved her Take a Break mag at me.

‘Here, loveen. I’m going to sleep now. Wud ya like Michaela ta sit with ya this evening?’ she offered, gently.

I wanted to say yes. But, really, it was Margaret Rose’s life I was after. I could manage a philandering husband and a pregnant daughter, in fact, I’d welcome it, and not the handsome man who smiled at me and kept coming back for more. Not the decent man that I was about to abandon and who would soon be alone in the world with three sons. I needed someone neutral, or entirely disinterested in me, to pour myself out to, to tell them how sometimes I felt a kind of loneliness with such a force that I needed to lie down, or vomit or take myself into the sea.

I would have told Michaela that night, if she’d sat with me, about the Night of Peach Schnapps. I was about her age then, perhaps a little younger, and I’d like to tell her that once I had looked like her (a little) and how many times I, too, went off into the midnight air in only hot pants (OK, jeans) and a skinny slink of a top (OK, T-shirts and big jumpers) while boys gawped at me, and oh, how I loved it but pretended not to even notice. (OK, I would keep this bit to myself.)

I would tell her that Magpie swooped in and destroyed all my good memories, that it ruined my entire fucking life, that it inked itself all over everything. Magpie had so quickly surpassed Night of Peach Schnapps as the most bursting-out fuck of a day in my life, swooping in with its beady eye, wings all outstretched, and just landed in to destroy me, uninvited. I would say it was a fuck of a rude bird and that every thought that fleeted through my head since Magpie, felt either wrong or very wrong.

Wrong for thinking about flippant things, very wrong for not thinking at all.

On Night of Peach Schnapps, it was coming to the end of summer. Darkness arrived earlier, the stretch in the evening evaporating. It was dark by the time I headed out to a disco at the back of Dwyer’s Hotel, in the next town over. East Galway. From the minute we’d left our coats in the cloakroom and stood around a tall sticky table, I spotted a guy, fair curls, long flat arse, goofy, flat mushroom freckles on his lips that the club lights illuminated. He had good teeth, even from a distance.

I had chosen him because a) he stared at me all night as I pretended not to notice, b) he was wearing a colourful woollen friendship bracelet which I considered to be a safety signal (I couldn’t envisage a guy with a rainbow friendship bracelet as rapey – though I have since displaced all theories on correctly identifying rapists), and c) I was slightly taller, OK, I was about a foot taller, and this was important at this juncture.