Phyllis’s preparations for her daily appearance at the newsagent’s were as follows: the procedures of washing and dressing, the teasing of her fine mouse-brown hair into a respectable cloud, the careful application of powder and a rose-tinted lipstick, and the ingestion of two pieces of toast washed down with a cup of tea. The execution and conclusion of these matters took approximately forty-five minutes. Then, for fifteen minutes after Phyllis shut the front door, I would lie in a fitful haze, wallowing in solitude.

After that, I got up. To be honest, I had sort of lost my way since Big Jacky’s death. I had few bearings left. I’d studied English at Queen’s University after school, but dropped out before finishing the degree. I somehow couldn’t dissect the books in the style I thought my tutors wanted. My approach seemed in some obscure manner to be frustrating them, or so it felt to me. I began to lose heart – and anyway, by the time you had prodded and tugged everything out of a book it had often quietly died on you, like a patient left open for too long on an operating table.

Before Big Jacky died, I had spent much of my time helping him in the newsagent’s shop. People used to ask me questions about the university course and whether I was returning to it, but their curiosity had receded now. They had come to accept my apparent lack of ambition as a fact of life, something which relieved and depressed me. Now day ran into day in a kind of purposeless fog. My usefulness had fallen away since Phyllis took over the shop, although I still helped her shift heavy deliveries when she asked. There were a couple of other people who helped us out sometimes, and when she saw I wasn’t handling things too well in there without Big Jacky, Phyllis had quietly upped their hours.

Phyllis had changed since she first came to live with me; she was no longer the bowed plant she had seemed in Carrickfergus. The submissive droopiness, assumed as a protective mantle under the domineering shadow of Mary, had been cast off. She was swelling into a larger, more exuberant presence, in the house and in the shop.

Well, good for Phyllis. She was waxing. I was waning. I had anorexia of the soul. I got a bit of money from the dole: that did for my food, some of the bills, and the occasional drinks I spun out across my evenings in town. My books sustained me, but erratically. I would read the same one, again and again, for hours, and yet it seemed to lead me nowhere but in a large, loose circle, like some clapped-out oul donkey on a beach.