‘Nineteen fifty-two,’ she said, ‘was the year we moved in.’

‘It’s time to move on.’

‘You could have two or three rooms of your own. We could make a nice little flat for you.’

‘I have a nice little house.’

‘I’m sure you don’t eat properly.’

‘Mother, I’m thirty-five.’

‘Yes, dear. I know.’

Maybe I am being unkind. There is always the possibility that she needs me more than I feel I need her. Maybe she is afraid, lonely, without a purpose in life, except for making jam. Should I bear this vulnerability in mind?

Nah!

I feel I want to run a thousand miles.

But I can’t run at this moment in time – or laugh, if it comes to that.

How many miles of gut is it that we have winding around inside us? Just imagine if it were to spill out here on the Killiney Hill Road.

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

So I won’t think about it.

I will walk slowly home and write a novel.

He didn’t buy a postcard on his way back to the hotel.

Let them sweat, he thought.

He was sweating; his forehead was damp and he could feel a slow trickle moving down past his right ear towards his chin. And yet he wasn’t warm. He should have brought his jacket.

How can I sweat and not be warm? That was the sort of silly question to which Caitlin would have known the answer. She had always known the answers to all his questions.

‘I am the fount of all wisdom. I like to spew. I like the feeling that I am a walking encyclopaedia, a Thesaurus, a shedder of light into dark corners.’

She had looked at him for a moment and grinned. Sunlight came through the window and shone through her disordered hair.

‘Or perhaps I am just a liar,’ she said. ‘We are all liars.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Oh, Caitlin. Caitlin.’

He unlocked the boot of the car and took out the dog’s bowl. Pansy wagged her tail and then sat down to wait. He filled the bowl with dog nuts and put it on the ground in front of her. She sniffed cautiously at it for a moment and then began to eat. He bent down and scratched her head and then went to the tap at the other end of the car park to fetch her some water.

I’ll give them a ring, he thought, that’s what I’ll do all right. He held his hand under the tap for a moment and then wiped his face. The water trickled over his chin and down his neck. And I’ll go and have several pints in a pub – I haven’t done that for a long time. Get a bit blotto … his father’s neatly old-fashioned word, that. Then he wondered if he could take Pansy with him. Maybe they didn’t let dogs into Dublin pubs. Maybe.

He put the bowl of water down beside the dog and leaned against the car. I am probably having a nervous breakdown, he thought. One bit of me wants to come out the other side and another bit wants me to stay like this for ever. Hurting. I’m afraid if I stop hurting that I will forget.