On the way to his uncle’s, Murt said that he was tired. Tired was a vague descriptor, and anything vague was treacherous, but Eileen didn’t want to push. Nugent’s house was a bungalow with a ­pebble-­dash job so pockmarked it looked as if the facade had taken heavy artillery fire. There were two cars in the drive. Murt did not invite her in. He said, ‘Thank you for the lift, Eileen.’

‘Take her handy and I’ll give you a buzz soon,’ she said.

Eileen replayed their interaction on the drive home. She had to be careful. There was the danger, after one of his bad periods, of reading meaning into Murt’s every blink and syllable. She had arranged to work only even­ings this week behind Naughton’s bar, so that she could get over to Murt in the mornings or early afternoons, which would at least oblige him to be up at a reasonable hour. Not that she wanted to impose structure on him. But she wanted to be there if structure was what he needed.

They’d met when the girls Eileen hung out with fell in with the boys Murt hung out with. Murt was the morose but funny one of the group, and played the hypochondriac, anxious, ­would-­be depressive so well and so pitilessly that Eileen was surprised to find out that he actually was all of those things. When they were sixteen, he confessed to a crush on her. She told him that she wanted to stay friends. A few weeks later, he went into the hospital for the first time. Eileen blamed herself, until he eventually wrote a gruellingly detailed email assuring her that she had nothing to do with it, or not more than anything else. She would not have believed him without that qualification. This latest stint was Murt’s fourth hospitalisation. He’d tried to tell her once what it was like. He said it was as if everything were always turning endlessly over, turning into something else, inside him, and Eileen’s understanding was that it simply never stopped.

The next time Eileen arrived at Nugent’s, there were again two cars in the drive. A pug dog was padding around the lawn. Its jowled puss and weepy eyes tracked Eileen as she got out of her car. It kept watching as she walked around the bonnet to retrieve a carton of doughnuts from the passenger side. The dog belonged to Sara Duane, Jamie’s beoir, which meant that Jamie, Murt’s big brother, must be there too. The front door was closed but not locked, a gesture of etiquette still resolutely practised among certain of the older generation and which meant: whoever is there, come on through. As Eileen went down the hall, she could hear the scattering cold points of a young man’s laughter, Jamie’s laughter.