I found her a towel. She dumped her handbag on the floor, vanished into the bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Dina on a bad one could stay in the shower all night, as long as the hot water doesn’t run out and she knows you’re outside the door. She says she feels better in water because it makes her mind go blank, which is crammed with so many kinds of Jung that I wouldn’t even know where to start. As soon as I heard the water running and her starting to sing to herself, I shut the living-room door and phoned Geri.

I hate making this call more than I hate almost anything in the world. Geri has three kids, ten and eleven and fifteen, a job doing the books for her best friend’s interior design company, and a husband she doesn’t see enough of. All those people need her. No one alive needs anything from me except Dina and Geri and my father, and what Geri needs most is for me not to make this phone call. I do everything in my power. It had been years since I had let her down.

“Mick! Hang on a sec for me, till I get this wash started—” Slam, click of buttons, mechanical hum. “Now. Is everything OK? Did you get my message?”

“Yeah, I got it. Geri—”

“Andrea! I saw that! You give it back to him right now or I’ll let him have your one, and you don’t want that, do you? No, you do not.”

“Geri. Listen to me. Dina’s losing it again. I have her over at my place, she’s taking a shower, but I’ve got stuff I have to do. Can I drop her down to you?”

“Oh, God …” I heard the breath leak out of her. Geri is our optimist: she still hopes, after twenty years of this, that every time will be the last, that one morning Dina will wake up cured. “Ah, God, the poor little thing. I’d love to take her, but not tonight. Maybe in a couple of days, if she’s still—”

“I can’t wait a couple of days, Geri. I’m on a big case, I’m going to be working eighteen-hour shifts for the foreseeable, and it’s not like I can bring her to work with me.”

“Oh, Mick, I can’t. Sheila’s got the stomach flu, that’s what I was telling you, she’s after giving it to her dad—the two of them were up all night getting sick, if it wasn’t one it was the other—and I’d say Colm and Andrea’ll come down with it any minute. I’ve been cleaning up sick and doing washing and boiling 7-Up all day, and it looks like I’ll be doing the same again tonight. I couldn’t manage Dina as well. I couldn’t.”

Dina’s episodes last anywhere between three days and two weeks. I keep some of my annual leave saved up just in case, and O’Kelly doesn’t ask, but that wasn’t going to work this time. I said, “What about Dad? Just for once. Couldn’t he … ?”