‘Saoirse, we need to talk about what’s going on back there?’

Wrong, I know, you’re supposed to leave these things be. But I couldn’t … I couldn’t not bring it up. It was poisoning me.

Saoirse and I were in the front den. We keep the bigger TV in there, and the coffee table we commissioned from the Artisans-with-Aids programme, and a retro ’fifties couch in a burnt-orange shade that our shapes have settled into – unpleasantly, it makes it look like we have arses the size of boulders – and stacks upon stacks of DVDs climb the walls, just about every box set yet issued.

‘I suppose you know,’ I said, ‘that they’re, well … you know.’

‘Don’t,’ Saiorse said.

I sighed and left the den. The way it worked, Ellie had the use of the sitting room down back of the ground floor; no teenager wants to sit with her parents. She’d had a decorater in – it was got up in like a purple-and-black scheme – and she had a really fabulous Eames couch we’d got at auction for her sixteenth, and I went down there to check on Aodhan and herself. The shade was down, and they were watching some hip-hop crap on satellite, and they were under a duvet. This was a summer evening.

‘Yo, Popiscle,’ Ellie said.

‘Hey,’ Aodhan McAdam said, and leered at me.

I unleashed the coldest look I could summon and tried to say something and felt like I had a mouthful of marbles. I went back to the front den. I settled into the massive arse shape on my side of the couch.

‘Do you realise,’ I said, ‘that they’re under a duvet back there?’

‘Mmm-hmm?’

Saoirse was watching a Wire episode with crew commentary and was nose deep in a bucket-sized glass of Pinot Grigio. She drank it ice-cold – I could see the splinters of frozen crystals in there.

‘I mean what the fuck are they doing under a duvet? It’s July!’

She turned to me, and smiled benignly.

‘I think we can pwesume,’ she said, ‘that she’s jackin’ him off.’

‘Lovely,’ I said.

‘Ellie’s seventeen,’ she said. ‘The fuck do you think she’s doing?’

‘That fucking little McAdam bastard …’

‘Not so little,’ Saoirse said. ‘And actually he’s kinda hot?’

You’re supposed to just deal. But my brain would not stop whirring. I lay there that night in bed, and I was under siege. Random images came at me which I will not describe. I was nauseous. I knew it was a natural thing. I knew there was no stopping it. And as the morning surfaced on the bay, I tried to accept it. But I got out of the bed and I felt like I’d fought a war. I thought, maybe it’s better that he’s a rugby type rather than one of the sniper types. At least maybe he’s healthier.

That evening, after work, as I took my walk along the prom, with the cold sea oblivious, I saw them: the rugby boys. They hang out by a particular strip of green down there, sitting around the rain shelter, or tossing a ball about, and chortling all the time, chortling, with their big shiteater grins and testosterone. They all have the floppy hair, the polo shirts in soft pastels, the Canterbury track pants, the mid-Atlantic twangs. Aodhan McAdam was among them, and he saw me, and grinned, and he made a pair of pistols with his fingers and fired them at me.