The woman looks up. “Yeah.” She grins. “That’s right. She’s certainly growing into the Barnacle bit. Crusty and clinging. Here, cutie.” She reaches down with her sleeve and swipes at her daughter’s nose. “My partner’s writing about Joyce,” she says. “I’m Dea.” The woman looks up, smiling. “So, what happens next?”

Lissa

HER HEAD HURTS AND HER TONGUE FEELS SWOLLEN. THE PINT glass beside her bed is empty—she must have woken up and drunk it all at some point during the night. She didn’t eat after rehearsal, instead going straight to the pub with the other actors. She was three glasses of wine in before realizing how hungry she was. By then the pub kitchen was closed, so she had two bags of chips for dinner.

From her bed she can see through the window, out to where rain falls dully onto the saturated garden. There must have been a strong wind as the trees have lost many of their leaves. At least the park on the other side of the wall is quiet—you can usually hear the chatter from early on a Saturday, but today the weather has obviously kept the crowds at bay.

She hauls herself out of bed, pulls on her old bathrobe, and shuffles to the kitchen, filling the glass from the tap and drinking it straight down. She rummages in the cupboard for ibuprofen but finds only an empty bottle. A further search turns up a couple of painkillers that she swallows gratefully. The fridge yields a chunk of cheddar, badly wrapped and hard, and a bit of butter, knife-gouged and jam-stained. She takes the cheese and nibbles on it, staring out at the rain.

When Declan used to visit, it would make him mad, this habit of hers, of not replacing things, not using things up properly, or putting lids back on empty jars. Once, during the last stint of his living here, she came home from work to find five almost-empty Marmite jars piled up on the little kitchen table with a note beside them: See what I mean?

It was a strange thing about Declan—how he came across as so easygoing when you met him, loose-limbed and wolf-grinned, happy to throw back several pints of Guinness in the pub with you, to sit up polishing off a line of cocaine, but it was always somehow that she was the messy one—always she that drank more than him, and didn’t remember the night before. He would be up and out and running around the park, even on a few hours’ sleep. He liked discipline, Declan did. He liked a clean kitchen. He liked a hairless vagina. He had a streak of cruelty that cut through the craic and kept you in your place. She thinks of Michael, that conversation on the first day of rehearsal—If I could have anyone’s career, it would be his.