The policewoman’s shirt was untucked, her eyes heavily ringed, her shoulders drooped; all those crime-free hours spent at pedestrian crossings, waiting in cars, weighing on her, transforming her waistline. The woman thought she looked ridiculous. When the policewoman placed a hand over hers and declared it a domestic situation, her dislike didn’t alleviate. There was no decency in the movement, only the desire to dominate.

‘We can’t throw you in jail,’ she said, with a tight, mean smile, ‘just for being a silly girl.’

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Not enough room?’

The policewoman scowled at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired.’

On the way back, her mother pulled the car into a quiet stretch of motorway so she could cry freely, tears vandalising her face, emotion she didn’t know she had left in her. Her mother let her cry, even allowed her to veer into self-pity, before she asked was she upset because the police didn’t think she could rob a car. They laughed despite themselves, a dark hollow-sized trench hiding inside it, surprised they were still capable of making the sound.

The second time his wife reported a made-up crime, he went alone. He explained that after the birth of their son, his wife had developed postnatal depression, then just depression, the regular kind. So she can be difficult sometimes, the police said.

When he came home to the house they were now renting together outside Dublin – in an estate of identical houses so alike that she often arrived at the wrong door – the back of his work shirt was soaked, and he was shaken in his own unshakeable way. In the middle of the night, he woke up, his breath sour, and told her he didn’t like the word difficult, had never liked it. They didn’t smile then, they wouldn’t dare, but there were still whispered jokes between them, in trouble with the law, like two teenagers on the lam.

The third time the police got involved in their lives, they went together. A teacher had discovered bruising on the boy’s body, still and silent purple lakes, signs of abuse. After an investigation that moved slow, then fast, everything being worked out in rooms that didn’t include them, the boy’s mother was declared unfit and he was sent to live with them permanently. ‘By who?’ the woman wanted to ask, ‘declared an unfit mother by who?’ They had a few interactions with the same policewoman from her first encounter, the police seemingly attached to them now. She sometimes looked at the woman like she forgave her. This makes it easier for you. You must be happy now.