‘I was thinking about Alice,’ he said.

A shake of the head this time and Karen frowned to signify her failure to recognise the name.

‘She was the wee girl I knew in school. The one who lost her mum before she came to us.’

‘She took her period and you…’

‘Thought of you,’ Tony said, then immediately apologised as Karen blushed.

‘I remember her now. What of her?’

‘I wonder where she is.’

‘She’d be grown up with kids of her own, now,’ Karen said. ‘She was what? Eleven then? She’d be in her forties now then.’

‘I want to imagine her happy.’

‘I don’t… I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘Camus said we have to imagine Sisyphus happy, pushing his boulder up a slope the top of which he can never reach. Even though his situation could never leave him happy, we must imagine that he found some way to deal with it, to reconcile himself with his lot. Like Prometheus did.’

‘You were always too literary for me,’ Karen said.

‘That’s not true,’ Tony smiled. ‘I learned so much from you. Do you remember you made me a mixtape for my birthday?’

Karen smiled. ‘That sounds like something I’d have done. Cheap and nasty.’

‘That was the first time I heard of Tom Waits. “Martha” was on there.’

‘It’s a great song.’

‘It’s a sad song.’

Karen, as if uncomfortable with the melancholic tone of the conversation, turned and looked out at Barr on the phone. ‘Then we must imagine the singer happy,’ she said.

‘Even if he is still in love with Martha?’

‘Even so. I think of you every time I hear “Wonderful Life”.’

Tony laughed. ‘Now that’s another great song.’

‘We saw him a while back, touring. Black. Before he died, obviously.’

We saw him. She had shared that song, a new memory of that song, with someone else, and in so doing had changed it.

‘We saw Tom Waits the last time he was in Ireland,’ Tony said.

It wasn’t entirely true. Ann hadn’t wanted to go, couldn’t stand his voice. Tony had gone himself and stood at the front, alone, lost in the music.

He’d listened to ‘Martha’ in the car on the way down, on repeat, and was again in Karen’s bed, his head on her breast, the scent of her in his hair and skin, the taste of her in his mouth. He thought of her every time he heard the song, though did not tell her that now; ‘Martha’ had been playing that last night they had been together. Nor did he tell her that he still had the mixtape, saved in a box in his bedroom, even though he no longer had a tape recorder on which to play it. That she had been there, a presence in his room, all the time he’d been married.

‘That must have been special.’