‘Just leave it, Jonathan …’

Again that night I hardly slept. I developed this incessant buzzing sound in my head. It sounded like I had a broken strip light in there. More images came at me, and you can picture exactly what they were:

Ellie, descending.

And big Aodhan McAdam – ! – grinning.

The next morning I went to her room. Fuck it, I was going to be strong. There was going to be a conversation about Respect. For herself, for her home, for her parents. For duvets. I knocked, crisply, twice, and I pushed in the door, and I could feel that my forehead was taut with self-righteousness (or whatever), and I found her in a sobbing mess on the bed.

Suicidal!

Ellie’s tears nuke my innards.

‘Oh, babycakes!’ I wailed ‘What is it!’

I threw myself on the bed. So much for the Respect conversation. Aodhan, it turned out, had taken his oral gratification and skedaddled. It was so over.

She was inconsolable. We had the worst Saturday morning of all time in our house. Which is saying a great deal. She was between rage and tears and when she is upset she behaves appallingly, my angel. It started right off, at breakfast:

A sunny Saturday, heaven-sent, in peejays – it should have been perfection. Saoirse was sitting at the island counter, trembling, as she ate pinhead porridge with acai fruit and counted off the hours till she could start glugging back the ice-cold Pinot Grigio. I was scraping an anti-death spread the colour of Van Gogh’s sunflowers onto a piece of nine-grain artisanal toast. Ellie was vexing between flushes of crimson rage and sobbing fits and making a sound like a lung-diseased porpoise.

‘Oh please, Ell?’ I said. ‘It’s only been, like …’

‘Eleven weeks!’ she cried. ‘Eleven weeks of my fucking life I gave that dickwad!’

‘Look, baby, I know it doesn’t seem like it now? But you’ll get over this and it might work out for the best and …’

And maybe the blow-job rep will start to fade, I didn’t say.

‘What’s this?’ she said.

She held a box of muesli in her hand.

‘It’s a box of muesli,’ I said.

‘No it is not,’ she said.

Admittedly, it was an own-brand line from a mid-range supermarket – a rare anomaly.

‘Ah, Ellie, it’s fine, look, it’s actually quite tasty …’

She turned the box upside down and emptied the muesli onto the limestone flags that had cost peasants their dignity to hump over from County Clare.

‘This is not actual ceweal,’ she said. ‘This is, like, twibute ceweal?’

She began with her bare feet to slowly crush the muesli into the flagstones. Deliberately grinding up and down, with a steady rhythm to her step, like a French yokel mashing grapes, or a chick on a Stairmaster set to a high gradient.

‘I want him back,’ she said.

‘Ah, look, Ellie, I mean …’

‘I want Aodhan back.’

She came across the flags and caught me by the peejay lapels.