In the bedroom, a pile of clothes had been laid on the bed, neatly folded – skirts, ruby-red tights, jumpers with sequins on them.

‘I was cleaning out the wardrobe,’ said Rosa in the doorway, with a challenging expression. ‘I wanted to check that you did not want anything.’

A long, slow breath. ‘Mamma,’ Matty had said, in jeans and an oversized hooded top. Trying to sound kind. ‘You know I don’t.’

There had been a moment in which Rosa had just stared, as if trying to decide whether to accept or fight. Then she began to gather everything up, crumpling them in her arms. ‘It is a phase,’ she said, as she moved. ‘This is what I tell myself.’

‘It’s not,’ said Matty. ‘It’s just who I am.’

‘I don’t want you to be who you are,’ she had said, tearful and vicious at once.

Nor do I, Matty had thought, and opened a drawer, began shoving clothes into a bag.

‘What are you doing now? You have just got here.’

‘I’m going. Properly.’

‘Where? Where are you going?’

Anywhere but here.

Rosa was following Matty around the flat, to the bathroom, the kitchen. ‘You want me to be even more ashamed of you? Failing at school, leaving home? Leaving your mother?’

‘You left me a long time ago, Mamma,’ Matty had said, before shutting the front door.

***

North. Level with Dublin, the clouds lifted to leave a slab of colourless sky. No hills. The towns had blank new estates with prophetic signs in the driveways, and the older houses wore their pastel colours badly, streaked by decades of rain. Matty picked up a postcard and watched crows slot themselves into an ancient monastic tower. Bought bottles of beer to take back from pubs painted grey and darker grey. Mac’s. Old Pat’s. Lawrence’s Bar and Off-Licence. The ‘Ulysses bar’ had a shrine to James Joyce, tinsel round his neck. Trevor would have given his literature lecture to anyone within earshot, maybe tried to see whose pants he could get his cock into. In one pub, some teenage boys with banjos and electric guitars were singing country and rock ’n’ roll covers, never looking at the audience. Matty hovered at the bar, imagining Joe up there, acknowledging the crowd, doing the Johnny Cash snarl, trying and failing to get the low notes.

Nonsense. I’d have brought the bloody house down.

A night in a B & B in a smaller town, a proper breakfast to save having lunch later, without the carbs. Black pudding and white pudding. The woman who owned the place was constantly in and out, looking over. The other diners looking over.