“Daddydaddydaddy!” Holly always has had beautiful timing: she launched herself off the swing and galloped over to us, knees going up in front, horse-style. She was rosy-cheeked and out of breath. “I just remembered, in case I forget again, can I have white boots? Ones that have fur round the edge and two zips and they’re all soft and they come up to here?”

“You’ve got shoes. Last time I counted, you had three thousand and twelve pairs of shoes.”

“Nooo, not like that! For a special thing.”

I said, “It depends. Why?” If Holly wants something that doesn’t involve either necessity or a major celebration, I make her explain her reasons; I want her learning the difference between need, want, and sort of fancy. I like the fact that, in spite of this, most of the time she asks me instead of Liv.

“Celia Bailey has them.”

“Who’s Celia again? Does she do the dance classes with you?”

Holly gave me a Duh look. “Celia Bailey. She’s famous.”

“Fair play to her. What for?”

The look got blanker. “She’s a celebrity.”

“I’m sure she is. She an actress?”

“No.”

“Singer?”

“No!” I was clearly getting dumber by the second. Jackie was watching this unfold with a little grin at the corners of her mouth.

“Astronaut? Pole-vaulter? Heroine of the French Resistance?”

“Daddy, stop! She’s on the telly!”

“So are astronauts and singers and people who can make animal noises with their armpits. What’s this lady for?”

Holly had her hands on her hips and was working up to a full-on huff. “Celia Bailey’s a model,” Jackie told me, deciding to put the pair of us out of our misery. “You know her; you do. Blondie one, went out with that fella who owns the nightclubs a couple of years back, and then when he cheated on her she found his e-mails to the bit on the side and sold them to the Star. Now she’s famous.”

I said, “Oh. Her.” Jackie was right, I did know her: a local bobblehead whose major life achievements were banging a trust-fund brat and regularly going on daytime TV to explain, with heartrending sincerity and pupils the size of pinheads, how she had won her battle with cocaine. This is what passes for a superstar in Ireland these days. “Holly, sweetie, that’s not a celebrity. That’s a slice of empty space in an undersized frock. What’s she ever done that was worth doing?”

Shrug.

“What’s she good at?”

Extravagant pissed-off shrug.

“Then what the hell is she for? Why would you want to be anything like her?”

Eye roll. “She’s pretty.”

“Good Jaysus,” I said, genuinely appalled. “Not one bit of that girl is the same color it started out, never mind the same shape. She doesn’t even look human.”