The following week Murt moved back in with his mother and a fortnight after that Jamie and Sara got the ­go-­ahead to move in with Sara’s folks. The Duanes despised Jamie but for the sake of the baby they assented to having him under their roof. At Nugent’s behest, Jamie left his car in his uncle’s care. Nugent pleaded a convincing case: there was plenty of parking space and he would be happy to keep the tank topped up and take it for the occasional spin. Nugent’s own car was an unsalvageable relic, the tyres flat, gummed to the ground. It was Jamie’s car Nugent used. He tried a week after Jamie and Sara left, on a Sunday evening, guiding the car into the ­cobweb-­raftered garage at the back of his house and running a length of amputated garden hose from the exhaust pipe in through the driver’s window. He drank heavily beforehand and swallowed a dozen sleeping pills. Once he had the engine on, he tried to cover up the gap in the driver’s window with masking tape, but peeling away the required length of tape proved too difficult, what mobility he still possessed baffled by the pills and the booze and the carbon monoxide swilling around his head: eventually he passed out, but he vomited the pills in his sleep and the garage was not an airtight enough structure to accommodate a sufficient ­build-­up of gas. It was Murt who found him. He was dropping in a spare plate of roast dinner from his mother’s and just said he knew, coming through the unlocked front door of the house, some charge to the untidy emptiness within: a clear bag of defrosted chicken thighs puddling in the sink, a cup with a cracked handle lying in a cold splat of tea on the floor, the door out to the back ajar.

‘The garage door was down. Do you remember if the garage door is ever usually down? I don’t know, but maybe that was it. Subliminally, maybe it was like I registered that. I went out and realised I could hear an engine. I got the door up and he was within, in the car. He looked inhuman. Face on him like ­week-­old cat shit.’

Murt telling this to Eileen the Friday after he found Nugent, Nugent stabilised in the ICU in Galway, breathing on his own but still very frail, waking only briefly and not communicating when he did, the doctors as yet dicey on the prospective degree of brain damage, organ damage, everything. Eileen and Murt were in Staunton’s, Eileen on Sprite, Murt on Guinness. Eileen had the day off. Murt had enrolled in an evening writing class held in the secondary school, and had a session later.

‘Jamie’s awful cut up about the car.’

‘You would be,’ Eileen said.

‘I think he feels duped.’

‘How’s Sara?’