‘I promised Ash a fry-up and we’re out of hash browns.’

‘He can survive without them. We’re drowning in food.’

How little he knows his own children. He doesn’t know that they have eaten every single snack in the house, as well as both tins of Celebrations (although Claire had a hand in that). So they’re not drowning in food, and whilst he’s right – Ash can survive without hash browns – Claire has a long list of other items she needs to get. It’s a full-time job keeping up with the boys’ voracious appetites.

‘Stay,’ he urges, throwing an arm across her, but she shuffles out from under his hairy embrace, feeling another flush coming on. She’s spent the night veering between being as hot as the surface of the sun, and then, just as suddenly, being freezing cold. And all of that on top of the dreaded insomnia that got her in its grip again last night. She’s been hatching her shopping plan since before dawn and now she can’t bear to spend another second in bed.

But she still gives Pim a guilty smile and he groans again, putting his face in the pillow, knowing he’s lost. As she puts on her robe, she glances back at him in bed, his arm across her sweaty side of the bed. She knows what he’s probably thinking: that the boys are asleep. It’s the Christmas holidays and this is a rare chance for a lie-in. A rare chance to have sex.

It’s been months since they’ve done it, but she seems to have mislaid her libido. It’s not even to do with Pim; it’s just that all sexual feelings seem to have left her body. As in completely gone. Left the building. Even her dirtiest fantasies leave her cold and indifferent. And to think, she was once known as the randiest girl in Galway.

Listening to Ash’s bedroom door, then Felix’s, and hearing both of them snoring, she pads softly to the bathroom, noticing the loo seat is up, even though she’s told the boys and Pim about this a thousand times. She notices the damp patch on the lino. How do they all manage to miss the toilet pan?

She tries to assert herself in these matters, of course, and to stop them all treating her like she’s a domestic skivvy. Even Victorian scullery maids got time off occasionally, she often points out, but it’s relentless in this household. She knows she’s the one who needs to change it, but it’s hard. Yesterday, she asked Felix to clean the bathroom, but he took the cloth and spray she gave him to his room and forgot all about it. She got so sick of asking him to do it that, in the end, she landed up doing it herself.

As she mops up the floor with loo roll, she realises that she’s bleeding. It’s her first period in almost six months. It’s weird that she hasn’t had the usual warning signs, but then again, her cycle seems to be all over the place. She has a love-hate relationships with periods. Having spent the most part of a decade trying to get pregnant and failing, before IVF helped her get Felix, she wept every time one of them appeared. Then Ash came of his own accord, without warning. These days, she spends just as much time wondering what happened to her regular-as-clockwork periods. She wishes she could talk to a friend about what’s happening and how her erratic cycle and the hot flushes almost certainly herald the onset of her menopause. She thinks about broaching the subject with one of her sisters in Ireland, but having not seen them all year, she feels too estranged to have such a personal chat.