Geri left the silence there. When I was a kid Dad was straight-backed and lean, given to clean, square-edged statements with no wiggle room: Women may fancy a drinking man, but they’ll never respect him. There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend. Always pay a debt before it’s due and you’ll never go hungry. He could fix anything, grow anything, cook and clean and iron like a professional when he had to. Mum dying blew him right out of the water. He still lives in the house in Terenure where we grew up. Geri and I take turns calling down to him at the weekends, to clean the bathroom, put seven balanced meals in the freezer and check that the TV and the phone are still working. The kitchen wallpaper is the acid-trip orange swirl that Mum picked out in the seventies; in my room, my schoolbooks are dog-eared and cobwebbed on the bookshelf Dad made for me. Go into the sitting room and ask him a question: after a few seconds he’ll turn from the telly, blink at you, say, “Son. Good to see you,” and go back to watching Australian soap operas with the sound turned down. Occasionally, when he gets restless, he extracts himself from the sofa and shuffles around the back garden a few times, in his slippers.

I said, “Geri, please. It’s only for the night. She’ll sleep all day tomorrow, and I’m hoping I’ll have work sorted out by tomorrow evening. Please.”

“I would if I could, Mick. It’s not that I’m too busy, you know I wouldn’t mind that …” The background noise had faded: she had moved away from the kids, for privacy. I pictured her in their dining room strewn with bright jumpers and homework, tugging a strand of blond out of its careful weekly set. We both knew I wouldn’t have suggested our father unless I was desperate. “But you know how she goes if you don’t stay with her every minute, and I’ve Sheila and Phil to look after … What would I do if one of them started getting sick in the middle of the night? Just leave them to clean up their own mess? Or leave her and have her start carrying on, wake the house?”

I let my shoulders slump back against the wall and ran a hand over my face. My apartment felt airless, stuffed with the reek of whatever fake-lemon chemicals the cleaner uses. “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

“Mick. If we can’t cope … Maybe we should think about somewhere that can.”

“No,” I said. It came out sharp enough that I flinched, but Dina’s singing didn’t pause. “I can cope. It’ll be fine.”

“Will you be all right? Can you get someone to sub for you?”

“That’s not how it works. I’ll figure something out.”

“Oh, Mick, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. As soon as they’re a bit better—”

“It’s OK. Tell them both I was asking for them, and you try not to catch whatever they’ve got. We’ll talk soon.”