The time-running-out bubble erupted on her screen – sixty seconds remaining – and she thought about it but did not insert another coin. She let the seconds come down

5, 4, 3, 2, 1

and each beat brought her deeper inside. She was upstairs in the lobby annexe. The shadows breathed. She picked up her stuff and came down the stairs three at a time and out through the lobby at blizzard pace. She crossed the car park to Apache Pizza and gorged on a four-cheese twelve-inch for its lovely seeping saturates. She was eating enough for half a rugby team and thin as a stick. Her brain was moving so fast she was losing weight. She left Apache Pizza and got in the car and gunned it for the holiday home, where she was staying, alone, on her ‘year out’.

‘What in Jesus’ name are you going to do out there, Sara?’ her father had said. ‘It’s going into winter, girl.’

‘Just some art stuff,’ she said.

Don’t cut, his eyes said.

‘Just give me the keys and the alarm code,’ she said. ‘Please?’

She had completed her Leaving Certificate in June. The results came in the second week of August. She had enough points for Medicine. She had enough points for Veterinary. She had enough points to build a rocket and fly it to the moon. She hadn’t slept right in months. Her skin was flawless but for the scarring on the insides of the wrists, but for the scarring on the insides of the thighs, but for the scarred remains of the smiley she had carved one night on the inside of the left ankle.

‘We all have delicate complexions,’ her mother had said.

We! As though a clan, or tribe, or family. The town as she pelted through had the feel of the season’s quick changing, a summer killed off, a winter to come. If she floored it, she would be in time for a 1940s British stiff-upper-lip movie of the kind they showed on UK Memories channel in the early evening. Stories about war widows and valour and the last embers of hope. Ladies who had been left even more elegant and poised by the ravages of war, ladies who had been left ‘ve-hy much ah-lone, aksherly’.

She said it aloud as she drove:

‘Ve-hy much ah-lone.’

As though with marbles in her mouth:

‘Ve-hy … mach … hah-lone.’

Her brain was moving so fast it was out the other side of town already and looking back. She saw herself drive. She felt like she was filmed every minute of the day. The car was a low-slung, old-school Saab in a deep wine colour. Her father was a radical architect who had reinterrogated the concept of walls. She got back to the house he had designed for family summers. It was all glass and angles and odd little nooks situated to give the eeriest, the most austere possible views across the dour bog landscape.