My sister and I are sitting on top of a powdery sand dune looking out over the picturesque blue seas of Brittas Bay the morning after my resignation. Despite my kick-ass attitude and big display of ‘I don’t care’ the night before, I’m not so confident now with the realization that, for the first time since I graduated, I’m actually jobless.

Jack left for work in the hospital just after six this morning, leaving me plenty of time to roll around our big bed feeling lost and alone in my thoughts. To be honest I’m terrified of what the future holds. I’ll never get another teaching job in Dublin once news travels of how I pissed off Miss Jean Brady and told her to shove her shit-hole job where the sun doesn’t shine. She has friends in high places, or so they say.

‘She’s like the Simon Cowell of teaching, and I’m screwed, Em.’

My ever so supportive sister Emily can’t stop laughing. ‘Do you know how many people would murder their mother for a job at Holy Trinity School, and you tell the principal to shove it?’ she says, with a loud cackle. ‘I bet if you did a survey of teaching graduates and asked them their dream job on the east coast of Ireland, you’d be sure that Holy Trinity would be right up there. But fair play to you, Charlotte, you left in style! She sounds like a right old wagon though so you did the right thing. It’s just so typically you!’

I really wish she would stop laughing. It was a little bit funny last night when Jack and I were fantasizing about a voodoo doll version of Miss Jean Brady, but now, in the cold light of day with a long summer ahead and teaching jobs in Dublin being like hen’s teeth, it’s not really a laughing matter at all.

‘I wonder would St Patrick’s have me back,’ I say in a daydream, staring out at the sea. ‘I think I’m in shock. Do I look pale? I really do think I’ve got post-traumatic stress from all this.’

Emily pretends to roll around in the sand now, slapping her hands off her bare legs and then kicking her ankles up in the air. She looks like a baby elephant being tickled but I daren’t say that out loud.