The parents were oddly faceless to me. They trusted me with their child, when they probably shouldn’t have. He ran around the house naked, shrieking, exposing his nubby penis, and I did little or nothing to stop him. I often hid in the hope that my disappearance and dramatic reappearance would calm him. Or I closed my eyes and wished that when I re-opened them he would simply be gone. This worked once, and when it did, my body shut down. I ran through the house, wearing new shorts that felt grim and foolish, shouting his name. Eventually I found him outside, playing happily in the patch of land they called the green.

That night, on the drive home, mistaking my terror for sensitivity, the Australian complimented me on my silences. He said most people didn’t know when to be quiet. I agreed and I huddled closer to the car door. I couldn’t tell him I had magicked away a child, that I was evil, that my legs looked squat in shorts. Passing under the eerie streetlights, on the blank roads, we looked like a photograph from an instructional pamphlet warning about the dangers of strange men. Or the dangers of babysitters. Or the greatest pamphlet never written: a warning of the romantic danger of being left alone in a car with someone you’re attracted to.

A willing silence working in my favour, he said, ‘Genevieve wants me to marry her.’

I suspected that she had followed him here with that in mind. I often found her looking disagreeably at the notice board in the supermarket, picking up signs for gardening jobs or part-time secretarial work, and putting them down again.

‘People like to do that,’ I said, as if I had already dismissed marriage as an option for myself.

‘Should I?’ he smiled the useless, halting smile of the perennially uncertain. He looked at me, urgent, as if it was a decision we could reach together.

‘You should do whatever you want,’ I told him.

I had been measured for a bra recently and my breasts were actually largish. We were probably going to start going to discos soon. I owned several skirts. I would be fine.

Genevieve’s problem was she came to Ireland looking for her boyfriend, the one she met at home, but he was gone. He had changed. ‘Big deal,’ I said to my mother. We all had stuff going on. ‘Big deal,’ my mother promised. ‘Until it happens to you.’

Genevieve hung around the main house, snacking, exchanging tips for lined eyes with my mother. Her presence only confirmed what I’d always known about my mother – she would have been a different sort of woman if my father and I had let her. My father and I had something definite in common that didn’t even need to be mentioned, and we excluded her. In that hot, rotting kitchen, the flies conspiring above our heads, my mother talked to Genevieve about her life as though it was still a work in progress. She spoke condescendingly of the people in the town, as though they were characters in a book she had picked up and quickly put down, bored. It was unnerving. One more week with Genevieve and I think my mother would have lost all inhibitions, and said: ‘You know what? I hate this dump and every last person living in it.’ There were several things I couldn’t bear to hear and that was top of the list.