Then summer thickened and there was a heatwave. We garden, and we have a terrific deck – done out with all this Tunisian shit we bought off the lepers in Zarzis – overlooking the back lawn. During the heatwave, Aodhan and Ellie took over the deck space. I watched from the kitchen – I was deveining some king prawns while Saoirse expertly pestled a coriander-seed-and-lime-zest marinade. Ellie lay face down on the lounger, in a string bikini, and he sat on the lounger’s edge, and with his big sausagey fingers he untied the top of the bikini, and pushed the straps gently back. Then he shook the lotion bottle, rubbed a squirt of it onto his palms, and began to massage it in, super-slow, like some fucking porno set-up. Through the open window I heard her throaty little moans, and I saw the way she turned to him, adoringly, and he bent down and whispered to her, and she squealed.

‘Next thing,’ I said to Saoirse, ‘they’re actually going to have it off in front of us.’

‘What is she, a nun?’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said.

I flung the prawns into the Belfast sink and I stormed out of the house. I bought cigarettes for the first time in six months and lit one right there on the forecourt of the Topaz. I smoked, and I took off along the prom. I passed the rugby boys’ rain shelter, and it was deserted, and I saw that there was an amount of graffiti scrawled around the back wall of the shelter. I went to have a closer look.

Nicknames, stuff about schools-rugby rivals, so-and-so loves such-and-such, or so-and-so loves???, but then, prominently, this:

ELLIE P THE BLO-JOB QUEEN

B-L-O! And P! That they had used my surname’s initial for emphasis, the P of my dead father’s Prendergast! I went and power-walked the length of the pier and back three times. A glorious summer evening, and busy on the pier, with friends and neighbours all about – but I just ignored them all; I pelted up and down, with my arms swinging, and I ground my teeth, and I cried a little (a lot), and I smoked the pack.

I could see the neighbours thinking:

Is he not great again?

Later, in the den:

Aodhan had gone home, and I could hear the thunk, shlank, whumpf of her music from upstairs, and Saoirse had gone into her keeping-an-eye-on-me mode; she was all concerned and hand-holdy now.

‘I think we can pwesume, hon,’ she said, ‘that he didn’t, like, white it himself?’

‘A gentleman!’ I said. ‘But even so he’s been mouthing off, hasn’t he? And it doesn’t bother you at all that she’s …’

I couldn’t finish it.

‘She’s seventeen, Jonathan.’

‘I say we front her.’

‘This is nuts. And say what? That she shouldn’t be giving blow jobs?’

‘Please, Saoirse …’

‘I was giving blow jobs at seventeen.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘As you well know.’

‘But I wasn’t mouthing off about it, was I? I was keeping it to myself!’