It hurts, sitting here in the audience when I should be part of the play. This is not the way it should be. Why am I the one getting punished? Why have I no one to dance with? I wish I was someone else. Someone with friends who didn’t destroy my life. Someone who had people to go partying with. To plan my wedding with. My head throbs. I need to be that someone, just for a moment, just to ease this boiling anger churning in my stomach. Turning away from the source of my pain, I consider the man standing beside me.

‘Do you want to fuck?’ I look at Craig who has just put a vodka in front of me. He’s about to swallow from his own beer bottle and almost chokes.

‘What… what did you say?’ Craig thinks he heard me wrong because of the loud music. I lean up towards his ear.

‘Do you want to fuck?’

He’s nodding and shaking and presumably thinking, well, that didn’t cost much. ‘Erm…’

‘We’ll have to do it outside. There’s a laneway a few blocks down the road with good shelter.’

If he’s wondering how I know this, he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t care that I’ve been down that laneway before.

Chapter Twenty-Four

If I hadn’t shagged Craig, I would have made the last bus home. Now I have to get a taxi. Howth is a good twenty-five euros from Harcourt Street. But he was worth it. For ten whole minutes someone wanted me.

Craig didn’t know what to do when we had finished. He pulled his jeans up and politely asked me if I wanted to go back in for a drink. Such a mannerly boy.

I told him it was okay. That he should go back to his mates. I was heading home. Craig didn’t offer to put me in a taxi or even wait until one arrived. This one was on me. He jumped up the steps of the club to the entrance door and disappeared in behind the bouncers.

It took almost fifteen minutes before I got a taxi. I had to walk down the road to a crossroads. There were so many people hanging around, jumping in and out of taxis, having fun. As far as I could tell, I was the only person on their own.

When the taxi pulls up outside my parents’ house I see the curtain moving in the front bedroom where my father and mother sleep. They can rest peacefully now. Faye is home.

I never thought I’d end up living back here, what with all the money I was going to make and the rich man I was going to marry. But here I am, for now, not forever.