Evie looked at Danny. With a shock that was almost illicit, Danny saw a dark stain gleaming inside her mouth. It looked like blood, an injury. Evie bared her teeth and spat something precisely out. She noticed Danny looking.

‘I’m after biting the top off that fucking pencil,’ she said.

‘Why on earth are you eating a pencil?’ Matty said.

‘Only I saw Shauna’s car isn’t out there,’ Danny said.

‘Then I guess she’s gone,’ Evie said, dabbing her lip and tasting her finger. To her father she said, ‘I’m going to do the shop tomorrow. I’m getting the list down now so I won’t forget anything when I’m wandering through Dunnes hungover at ten in the morning.’

‘That’s very organised of you,’ Matty said.

Danny noticed now that little Beth Anne was in one of those onesie pyjama suits, while Evie was done up to go out, ­make-­up and tan, skinny white jeans and heels. Evie lived a little outside of Ballina, in the parish of Corroy. So she had dropped over to leave Beth Anne with the grandparents for the night.

‘Mind yourselves now, everybody,’ Matty said, tugging an oven glove on to his hand. He opened the oven and transferred with a resonant metal clonk a pan laden with a joint of furiously sizzling roast beef on to the stove top.

‘Smells unreal,’ Danny said.

‘You’re welcome to join us.’

‘I’­ll – I’ll see what Shauna wants to do.’

‘Actually I believe it was Marie took Shauna’s car this afternoon.’

‘Why did Mammy take Shauna’s car?’ Evie asked.

‘Because Mammy’s car is in the shop,’ Matty said.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘The mysteries of combustion I leave to the experts,’ Matty said, nicking a sliver of meat off the joint and tasting it. ‘That’s the stuff.’

Beth Anne, docile on her mother’s lap, was playing with a book. It was a book for babbies; the pages weren’t made of paper but thick solid plastic, and the gimmick with the book was that it played recordings of nursery rhymes as you turned the pages. Beth Anne was slapping and pawing at it, disinterestedly clattering the hard pages back and forth, so that each burst of song was interrupted by the next.

Baa baa ­bla—­Hickory ­dick—­Row row row Twinkle ­twink—

Matty and Evie seemed immune to the noise.

‘You’d think she was doing it on purpose,’ Danny said.

‘To antagonise you,’ Evie said. ‘And sure maybe she is.’