Now he’s moved out I’m still doing that stuff for our daughter. She’s ten now, and from the moment when she suddenly unspooled from Eve like a long, wild hare, I had only one prayer: that I be allowed the grace to live long enough to see her grow up and then to die before her. She clutched at my heart so fiercely I didn’t think I could survive a world without her in it. That’s my secret. It hurts to know or say it.

Her name is Elsie. She looks like a younger version of Eve but with my eyes, blue with black lashes. They’re better on her, more optimistic. Children mash the pair of you up to make some newly minted thing of their own.

It strikes me as odd that somehow my accent wasn’t coded in her genes: her short London vowels can still knock me back. It’s as if a wee Eliza Doolittle had crept in, pinched my eyes and tricked me into cooking her dinner. Sometimes she tries to copy my voice, concentrating on getting the words right, but it comes out as a dragging parody – ‘get yewer coat ohan’ – like someone at home from Ballymisery who can barely count the cows and thinks that Belfast is the big smoke.

Now Raymond’s moved out she lives a bit like an only child, drifting around the house with lined notebooks she writes in but won’t let us see. Her best subject is English. Maybe she’ll go to university one day and see it through this time, the way her da didn’t. When she writes she sits very close to her pet hamster, darting glances through the cage at his stuffed golden cheeks. I sometimes wonder what travels through his tiny brain: a series of urgent requirements, impulses and images, like flashcards on a projector. That’s not so bad. I know some people who can scoot through an entire life like that.

When I pick him up I can feel his ticker beating frantic time against my finger, his bulging black eyeballs as shiny as caviar. He only has a handful of years, a slim bunch of days to throw into the air before the lights go out, and yet he spends so much of it just racing round in circles on his wheel. Maybe that’s what God thinks of us, whatever shape God is in these days.

I keep company with the past, but I only stop and talk to it now and then. Until recently there hasn’t been time. Between running the café and the demands of home, Elsie’s early years felt a bit like being trapped inside the spin cycle of a washing machine. If there was a moment’s pause, it was all you could do to catch your breath.