Ben did not see Danny much for the rest of that weekend. Danny spent most of his time at Shauna’s, though he did promise to drop Ben to the train station on the Sunday evening. By the time Danny and Ben hit the road they were running a little late because lunch at the Vaughans had run over. The route into town, as it always did, took them past the spot where JJ and Ben had had their accident all those years ago. The spot was completely unremarkable, an anonymous stretch of road with a verge, a ditch, nothing but listing telegraph poles and fields of grazing sheep in the distance. Ben had been four. He could not remember anything about the crash. What he does know is that JJ had been working on the production line of the bakery factory over in Foxford at the time and he still found it funny, and completely in keeping with their father’s character, that despite being seriously and permanently maimed in a car crash in which his firstborn son was even more grievously injured, JJ subsequently took up selling cars for a living, and did it with sufficient success to end up buying a majority stake in a dealership. But that was how their father was, pragmatic to the point of annihilation. Things and feelings that were no longer of use he dispensed with, and that’s what the past was. A thing that was no longer of use.

Ben was like his father in that regard. He remembers Danny asking him about his shaven head back in the summer, wanting to know why he had chopped all his curls off. Ben hadn’t told anyone in his family, but it was over a woman. The woman had left him. She had loved his hair and so, once she was gone, he had decided the hair had to go too. Nobody in the family had known about her while Ben was seeing her. He had liked keeping the relationship for himself. While Ben still viscerally equated Ballina with home, the place he could always come back to if, as had happened to his little brother, everything fell apart, his actual life was now in Dublin. Even after the woman had left him, that life had not fallen apart. He had not let it.

They entered the town limits. Lawns and their houses, commercial properties, estate greens, ­turn-­offs, car parks and petrol stations slid by Ben’s window in the same configuration they always did. Danny was going on about his plans for later. He was taking Shauna to the cinema, which meant Shauna was not heading back to Dublin until the morning.

‘Looks like it’s rosy enough with you and Shauna, anyway,’ Ben said.

Danny gave Ben a dubious look.

‘No?’

Danny shrugged.