I figured it must be an engineering thing.

But by the end of it we were up to a hundred and twenty coming into a bad bend. We got around it all right. I felt the blood going cold in my face. I nearly fainted. I was convinced he was trying to commit suicide.

Then another time my mam sent him to pick me up from Holly’s house one night and he had a bottle of vodka and he wanted me to drink. I said no, vodka is ew. So he started swigging it instead. Like driving me home at midnight on a wet night. When we got home I said, Tony, I will never get into a car with you again and if Mam sends you tell her I won’t go with you, because if you come and collect me I’ll fucking walk home, get it? I slammed the door. The light came on in my parents’ bedroom and when I was going upstairs my dad came out. What’s up, Suzy? Did I hear you two fighting? Just ask Tony, I said. But he didn’t. He went back to bed. My father never does anything like that. If something needs to be faced, Mam faces it, but she will be ballistic before she even starts, so Dad doesn’t tell her stuff.

So it was Tony who first spoke to the English guy and found out his name was Tom Bowles.

He was meant to be a writer but I googled him and there is no writer called Tom Bowles. At least there is a newspaper reporter from America who got fired for clapping at Daytona. I don’t know what Daytona is. I know I could google it, but seriously, life is too short. Then there is someone called Tom Parker Bowles who is a relative of the Queen of England and came out in support of gay marriage. Bollocks to the anti-gay marriage rabble, he said. I didn’t know that’s how you spelled bollocks, it’s not in the Fallons Spelling Book. Anyway, as Holly said, you can be in favour of gay marriage and still be a useless parasite, c’est la vie, baby. Sometimes Holly says, C’est la vie, baby, and I always think it’s something from a film but not one I’ve ever seen. So if this Tom Bowles was a writer and he was rich enough to buy Ballyshane for like Monopoly Money, what did he write? Google knows everything. Of course he might just be a crap writer that even Google never heard of but who won the EuroMillions lottery. My brother met him in some pub in town, he said. But I say that is crap because whatever pub my brother goes to, a rich English writer named Tom Bowles is not going to be there.

I said, Describe him.