Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

Copyright © Cecelia Ahern 2014

Cecelia Ahern asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007501793

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007501786

Version: 2017-08-14

Dedication

For my friend Lucy Stack.

Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly …

Our greatest glory is not in never falling,

but in rising every time we fall.

Confucius

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Winter

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Spring

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Summer

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Autumn

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Winter

The season between autumn and spring, comprising in the Northern Hemisphere the coldest months of the year: December, January and February.

A period of inactivity or decay.

1

I was five years old when I learned that I was going to die.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I would not live for ever; why would it? The topic of my death hadn’t been mentioned in passing.

My knowledge of death was not tenuous; goldfish died, I’d learned that first-hand. They died if you didn’t feed them, and then they also died if you fed them too much. Dogs died when they ran in front of moving cars, mice died when they were tempted by chocolate HobNobs in the mousetrap in our cloakroom under the stairs, rabbits died when they escaped their hutches and fell prey to evil foxes. Discovering their deaths was not cause for any personal alarm; even as a five-year-old I knew that these were all furry animals who did foolish things, things that I had no intention of doing.

So it was a great disturbance to learn that death would find me too.

According to my source, if I was ‘lucky’ my death would occur in the very same way as my grandfather’s had. Old. Smelling of pipe smoke and farts, with balls of tissue stuck to the stubble over his top lip from blowing his nose. Black lines of dirt beneath the tips of his fingernails from gardening; eyes yellowing at the corners, reminding me of the marble from my uncle’s collection that my sister used to suck on and swallow, causing Dad to come running to wrap his arms around her stomach and squeeze till the marble popped back out again. Old. With brown trousers hiked up past his waist, stopping only for his flabby boob-like chest, revealing a soft paunch and balls that had been squished to one side of the seam of his trousers. Old. No, I did not want to die how my granddad had, but dying old, my source revealed, was the best-case scenario.

I learned of my impending death from my older cousin Kevin on the day of my granddad’s funeral as we sat on the grass at the end of his long garden with plastic cups of red lemonade in our hands and as far away as possible from our mourning parents, who looked like dung beetles on what was the hottest day of the year. The grass was covered in dandelions and daisies and was much longer than usual, Granddad’s illness having prevented him from perfecting the garden in his final weeks. I remember feeling sad for him, defensive, that of all the days to showcase his beautiful back garden to neighbours and friends, it was on a day when it wasn’t the perfection he aspired to. He wouldn’t have minded not being there – he didn’t like to talk much – but he would have at least cared about the grand presentation, and then vanished to listen to the praise somewhere, away from everyone, maybe upstairs with the window open. He would pretend he didn’t care, but he would, a contented smile on his face, to go with his grass-stained knees and black fingernails. Someone, an old lady with rosary beads tied tightly around her knuckles, said she felt his presence in the garden, but I didn’t. I was sure he wasn’t there. He would be so annoyed by the look of the place, he wouldn’t be able to bear it.

Grandma would puncture silences with things like, ‘His sunflowers are thriving, God rest his soul,’ and ‘He never got to see the petunias bloom.’ To which my smart-arsed cousin Kevin muttered, ‘Yeah, his dead body is fertiliser now.’

Everyone sniggered; everyone always laughed at what Kevin said because Kevin was cool, because Kevin was the eldest, five years older than me and at the grand old age of ten said mean and cruel things that none of the rest of us would dare say. Even if we didn’t think it was funny we knew to laugh because if we didn’t, he would quickly make us the object of his cruelty, which is what he did to me on that day. On that rare occasion, I didn’t think it was funny that Granddad’s dead body beneath the earth was helping his petunias grow, nor did I think it was cruel. I saw a kind of beauty in it. A lovely fullness and fairness to it. That is exactly what my granddad would have loved, now that his big thick sausage fingers could no longer contribute to the bloom in his long beautiful garden that was the centre of his universe.

It was my granddad’s love of gardening that led me to be named Jasmine. It was what he had brought my mother when he had visited her in hospital on my birth: a clutch of flowers he’d plucked from the wooden frame he’d nailed together and painted red that climbed the shaded back wall, wrapped in newspaper and brown string, the ink on the half-finished Irish Times cryptic crossword running from the rainwater left on the stems. It wasn’t the summer jasmine that we all know from expensive scented candles and fancy room vaporisers; I was a winter baby, and so winter jasmine with its small yellow star-like blooms was in abundance in his garden to help brighten up the dull grey winter. I don’t think Granddad had thought about the significance of it, and I don’t know if he’d been particularly honoured by the tribute my mother made by naming me after the flower he brought. I think he felt it was an odd name for a child, a name meant only for the natural things in his garden and never for a person. With a name like Adalbert, after a saint who was a missionary in Ireland, and with a middle name Mary, he wasn’t used to names that didn’t come from the Bible. The previous winter, he’d brought purple heather to my mother when my winter sister was born and Heather she had become. A simple gift when my sister was born, but it makes me wonder about his intentions on my naming. When I looked into it, I discovered the winter jasmine is a direct relative of winter-flowering heather, another provider of colour to winter gardens. I don’t know if it’s because of him and the way he was, but I’ve always hoped generally that silent people hold a magic and a knowledge that less contained people lack; that their not saying something means that more important thoughts are going on inside their head. Perhaps their seeming simplicity belies a hidden mosaic of fanciful thoughts, among them, Granddad Adalbert wanting me to be named Jasmine.

Back in the garden, Kevin misinterpreted my lack of laughter at his death joke as disapproval and there was nothing he disliked or feared more, so he turned his wild look in my direction and said, ‘You’re going to die too, Jasmine.’

Sitting in a circle of six, me the youngest in the group, with my sister a few feet away twirling by herself and enjoying getting dizzy and falling down, a daisy chain wrapped around my ankle, a lump so enormous at the back of my throat I wasn’t sure whether I had swallowed one of the giant bumble bees swarming around the flower buffet beside us, I tried to let the fact of my future demise sink in. The others had been shocked that he’d said it, but instead of jumping to my defence and denying this awful premonition-like announcement, they had fixed me with sad gazes and nodded. Yes, it’s true, they’d concurred in that one look. You are going to die, Jasmine.

In my long silence, Kevin elaborated for me, twisting the knife in further. I would not only die, but before that I would get a thing called a period every month for the rest of my life that would cause excruciating pain and agony. I then learned how babies were made, in quite an in-depth description that I found so vile I could barely look my parents in the eye for a week, and then to add salt to my already open wounds, I was told there was no Santa Claus.

You try to forget such things, but such things I couldn’t.

Why do I bring up that episode in my life? Well, it’s where I began. Where me, as I know me, as everybody else knows me, was formed. My life began at five years old. Knowing that I would die instilled something in me that I carry to this day: the awareness that, despite time being infinite, my time was limited, my time was running out. I realised that my hour and someone else’s hour are not equal. We cannot spend it the same way, we cannot think of it in the same way. Do with yours what you may, but don’t drag me into it; I have none to waste. If you want to do something, you have to do it now. If you want to say something, you have to say it now. And more importantly, you have to do it yourself. It’s your life, you’re the one who dies, you’re the one who loses it. It became my practice to move, to make things happen. I worked at a rhythm that often left me so breathless I could barely catch a moment to become at one with myself. I chased myself a lot, perhaps I rarely caught up; I was fast.

I took a lot home with me from our meeting on the grass that evening, and not just the daisies that dangled from my wrists and ankles and that were weaved into my hair as we followed the dispersing sunburnt grievers back into the house. I held a lot of fear in my heart then, but not long after that, in the only way a five-year-old could process it, the fear left me. I always thought of death as Granddad Adalbert Mary beneath the ground, still growing his garden even though he wasn’t here, and I felt hope.

You reap what you sow, even in death. And so I got about sowing.

2

I was terminated from employment, I was fired, six weeks before Christmas – which in my opinion is a highly undignified time to let somebody go. They’d hired a woman to fire me for them, one of these outside agencies trained in letting unwanted employees go properly, to avoid a scene, a lawsuit or their own embarrassment. She’d taken me out for lunch, somewhere quiet, let me order a Caesar salad and then just had a black coffee herself, and sat there watching me practically choke on my crouton while she informed me of my new employment situation. I suppose Larry knew that I wouldn’t take the news from him or anyone else, that I’d try to convince him to change his mind, that I’d slap him with a lawsuit or simply slap him. He’d tried to let me die with honour, only I didn’t feel much honour when I left. Being fired is public, I would have to tell people. And if I didn’t have to tell people it’s because they already knew. I felt embarrassed. I feel embarrassed.

I began my working life as an accountant. From the ripe young age of twenty-four I worked at Trent & Bogle, a large corporation where I stayed for a year, then had a sudden shift to Start It Up, where I provided financial advice and guidance to individuals wishing to start their own businesses. I’ve learned with most that there are always two stories to one event: the public story and the truth. The story I tell is that after eighteen months I left to start up my own business after becoming so inspired by those passing through my office I was overcome with the desire to turn my own ideas into a reality. The truth is that I became irritated by seeing people not doing it properly, my quest for efficiency always my driver, and so started my own business. It became so successful someone offered to buy it. So I sold it. Then I set up another business and again, I sold it. I quickly developed the next idea. The third time I didn’t even have long enough to develop the idea because somebody loved the concept, or hated that it would be a strong rival to theirs, and bought it straight away. This led me to a working relationship with Larry, the most recent start-up and the only job that I have ever been fired from. The business concept was not my initial idea but Larry’s, we developed the idea together, I was a co-founder and nurtured that baby like it had come from my own womb. I helped it grow. I watched it mature, develop beyond our wildest dreams, and then prepared for the moment when we would sell it. That didn’t happen. I got fired.

The business was called the Idea Factory; we helped organisations with their own big ideas. We were not a consultancy firm. We’d either take their ideas and make them better or create our own, develop them, implement them, see them through completely. The big idea might go from being Daily Fix, a newspaper for a local coffee shop with local stories, a publication that would support local businesses, writers, artists; or it might be a sex shop’s decision to sell ice cream – which, as my idea, was an enormous success, both personally and professionally. We didn’t struggle during the recession, we soared. Because if there was one thing that companies needed in order to keep going in the current climate, it was imagination. We sold our imagination, and I loved it.

As I analyse it now in my idle days I can see that my relationship with Larry had begun to break down some time ago. I was heading, perhaps blindly, towards the ‘sell the company’ route, as I had done three times already, while he was still planning on keeping it. A big problem, with hindsight. I think I pushed it too much, finding interested parties when I knew deep down that he wasn’t interested, and that put him under too much pressure. He believed ‘seeing it through’ meant continuing to grow it, whereas I believed seeing something through meant selling it and starting again with something else. I nurtured with a view to eventually saying goodbye, he nurtured to hold on. If you see the way he is with his teenage daughter and his wife, you’d know it’s his philosophy for pretty much everything. Hold on, don’t let go, it’s mine. Control must not be relinquished. Anyway.

I’m thirty-three years old and worked there for four years. I never had a sick day, a complaint, an accusation, never received a warning, never an inappropriate affair – at least none that resulted in a negative outcome for the company. I gave my job everything, notably all for my own benefit because I wanted to, but I expected the machine I was working for to give something back, to honour my honour. My previous belief that being fired wasn’t personal was based on never having been fired but having had to let go others. Now I understand that it is personal, because my job was my life. Friends and colleagues have been incredibly supportive in a way, which makes me think that if I ever get cancer, I want to treat it alone without anyone knowing. They make me feel like a victim. They look at me as if I’ll be the next person to hop on the plane to Australia to become the next overqualified person to work on a watermelon farm. Barely two months have passed, and already I’m questioning my validity. I have no purpose, nothing to contribute on a day-to-day basis. I feel as though I am just taking from the world. I know that this is short-term, that I can fulfil that role again, but this is currently how I feel. Mostly, it has been almost two months and I am bored. I’m a doer and I haven’t been doing much.

All of the things I dreamed of doing during my busy stressful days have been done. I completed most of them in the first month. I booked a holiday in the sun shortly before Christmas and now I am tanned and cold. I met with my friends, who are all new mothers on maternity leave and extended maternity leave and I-don’t-know-if-I-ever-want-to-go-back leave, for coffee at a time of day that I have never had coffee before out in public. It felt like bunking off school for the day, it was wonderful – the first few times. Then it became not so wonderful, and I focused my attention on those serving the coffee, cleaning the tables, stocking the paninis. Workers. All working. I have bonded with all my friends’ cute babies, though most of them lie on their colourful mats that squeak and rustle if you step on them by mistake, while the babies don’t do anything but lift their lardy legs up, grab their toes and roll over on to their sides and struggle to get back over again. It’s funny to watch the first ten times.

I have been asked to be godmother twice in seven weeks, as if that will help occupy the mind of the friend who’s not busy. Both requests were thoughtful and kind, and I was touched, but if I had been working I would not have been asked because I wouldn’t have visited them as much, or met their children, and everything eventually relates back to the fact that I have no work. I’m now the girl that friends call when they are at their wits’ end, with their hair like an oil slick on their head, reeking of body odour and baby vomit, when they say down the phone in a low hushed voice that gives me goosebumps that they are afraid of what they will do, so that I run to hold the baby while they have their ten-minute shower. I’ve learned that a ten-minute shower and the gift of going to the toilet without a ticking clock restores much more in new parents than personal hygiene.

I spontaneously call my sister, which I was never able to do before. This has confused her immensely and when I’m with her she constantly asks what time it is, as if I’ve upset her body clock. I Christmas-shopped with time to spare. I bought actual Christmas cards and posted them on time – all two hundred of them. I even took over my dad’s shopping list. I am ultra-efficient, always have been. Of course I can be idle – I love a two-week holiday, I love to lie on the beach and do nothing – but only when I say so, on my terms, when I know I have something waiting for me afterwards. When the holiday is over, I need a goal. I need an objective. I need a challenge. I need a purpose. I need to contribute. I need to do something.

I loved my job, but to make myself feel better about not being able to work there any more, I try to focus on what I won’t miss.

I worked mainly with men. Most of the men were cocks, some were amusing, a few were pleasant. I did not like to spend any hours outside of work with any of them, which might mean my next sentence doesn’t make sense, but it does. Of the team of ten, I slept with three. Of the three, I regret sleeping with two; the one I don’t regret sleeping with strongly regrets sleeping with me. This is unfortunate.

I will not miss people at work. People are what bother me most in life. It bothers me that so many lack common sense, that their opinions can be so biased and backward, so utterly frustrating, misguided, misinformed and dangerous that I can’t stand to listen to them. I’m not pointlessly prickly. I like non-PC jokes in controlled environments where it is appropriate and when it is obvious that the joke is at the expense of the ignorant who say such things. When a non-PC punchline is delivered by someone who genuinely believes it to be true, it is not funny, it is offensive. I don’t enjoy a good debate about what’s supposedly right and wrong; I would rather everyone just knew it, from the moment they’re born. A heel-prick test and a jab of cop-on.

Not having my job has made me face what I dislike most about the world, and about myself. In my job I could hide, I could be distracted. Without a job, I have to face things, think about things, question things, find a way to actually deal with things that I have been avoiding for a long time. This includes the neighbourhood that I moved into four years ago and had nothing to do with until now.

It also includes what happens at night: I’m not sure whether I somehow managed to ignore it before, whether it has escalated, or whether my idleness has led to me become fascinated, almost obsessed by it. But it is ten p.m. and it is a few hours away from my nightly distraction.

It is New Year’s Eve. For the first time ever, I am alone. I have chosen to do this for a few reasons: firstly, the weather is so awful I couldn’t bring myself to go out in it after almost being decapitated by the door when I’d opened it to collect my Thai takeaway from the brave man who had battled the elements to deliver my food. The prawn crackers had practically dissolved and he’d spilled my dumpling sauce in the bottom of the bag, but I didn’t have it in my heart to complain. His long forlorn look past my front door and into the safety and warmth of my house stopped me from mentioning the state of the delivery.

The wind outside howls with such force I wonder if it will lift the roof off. My next-door neighbour’s garden gate is banging constantly and I debate whether to go out and close it, but that would mean I’ll get blown around like the wheelie bins that are battering each other in the side passage. It is the stormiest weather this country – Ireland – has seen since whenever. It’s the same for the UK, and the US is being pounded too. It’s minus forty in Kansas, Niagara Falls has frozen, New York has been attacked by a frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex, there are mobile homes landing on clifftops in Kerry, previously sure-footed sheep on steep cliff faces are being challenged and defeated, lying beside washed-up seals on the shoreline. There are flood warnings, residents in coastal areas have been advised to stay indoors by miserable saturated news reporters with blue lips reporting live from beside the sea. The road that takes me most places that I need to go has been flooded for two days. At a time when I’ve wanted, needed to keep busy, Mother Nature is slowing me to a standstill. I know what she’s doing: she’s trying to make me think, and she’s winning. Hence all thoughts about myself now begin with Perhaps … because I’m having to think about myself in ways I never did before and I’m not sure if I’m right in my thinking about those things.

The bark of the dog across the road is barely audible above the wind, I think Dr Jameson has forgotten to take him in again. He’s getting a bit scatty, or else he’s had a falling out with the dog. I don’t know its name but it’s a Jack Russell. I find it running around my garden, sometimes it shits, it has on a few occasions run into my house and I’ve had to chase it around and deliver it back across the road to the right honourable gentleman. I call him the right honourable gentleman because he is a rather grand man in his seventies, retired GP, and for kicks and giggles was the president of every club going: chess, bridge, golf, cricket, and now our neighbourhood management company, which handles leaf-blowing, street-lamp bulb replacement, neighbourhood watch and the like. He is always well turned out, perfectly ironed trousers and shirts with little V-neck sweaters, polished shoes and tidy hair. He talks at me as if he’s directing his sentences over my head, lifted chin and head-on nostrils, like an amateur theatre actor, yet is never blatantly rude so gives me no reason to be rude back, but just distant. Distance is all I can give someone I can’t truly fathom. I didn’t know until one month ago that Dr Jameson even had a dog, but these days I seem to know too much about my neighbours. The more the dog barks over the wind, the more I worry if Dr Jameson has fallen over, or been blown away into somebody’s back garden like the trampolines that have been garden-hopping during the storms. I heard about a little girl waking up to find a swing set and slide in her back garden; she thought Santa had come again, but it turned out it had come from five houses down the road.

I can’t hear the party down the street, though I can see it. Mr and Mrs Murphy are having their usual family New Year shindig. It always begins and ends with traditional Irish songs and Mr Murphy plays the bodhrán and Mrs Murphy sings with such sadness it’s as though she’s sitting right in a field of dead rotten black potatoes. The rest of their guests join in as though they’re all rocking from side to side on a famine ship on stormy seas to the Americas. I’m not sad that the wind is lifting their sounds away in another direction, I can however hear a party that I can’t see, probably from a few streets away; a few words from those crazy enough to smoke outside are blown down my chimney, along with a distant rhythm of party music before it gets swiped away again; sounds and leaves circling in a violent frenzy on my doorstep.

I was invited to three parties, but couldn’t think of anything worse than party-hopping from one to the other, finding taxis on New Year’s Eve in this weather, feeling like this. Also the TV shows are supposed to be great on New Year’s Eve and, for the first time ever, I want to watch them. I wrap the cashmere blanket tighter around my body, take a sip of my red wine, feeling content with my decision to be alone, thinking that anybody out there, in that, is crazy. The wind roars again and I reach for the remote control to turn the volume up, but as soon as I do, every light in my house, including the television, goes off. I’m plunged into darkness and the house alarm beeps angrily.

A quick look outside my window shows me the entire street has lost electricity too. Unlike the others, I don’t bother with candles. It is further reason for me to feel my way to the stairs and climb into bed at barely ten o’clock. The irony that I am powerless is not lost on me. I watch the New Year’s Eve show on my iPad until the battery dies, then I listen to my iPod, which displays a threateningly low red battery that diminishes so quickly I can barely enjoy the songs. I turn then to my laptop, and when that dies I feel like crying.

I hear a car on the road and I know it’s action time.

I climb out of bed and pull open the curtains. The lights are out on the entire street, I see the flicker of candles from a few houses but mostly it is black, most of my neighbours are over seventy and are in bed. I’m confident that I can’t be seen because my house, too, is black; I can stand at the window with the curtains open and freely watch the spectacle that I know is about to take place.

I look outside. And I see you.

3

I am not a stalker but you make it difficult for me not to watch you. You are a circus act all of your own and I cannot help but be your audience. We live directly across the road from one another on this suburban cul de sac in Sutton, North Dublin, which was built in the seventies and was modelled on an American suburb. We have large front gardens, no hedging or shrubs to separate the pathway from our gardens, no gates, nothing to stop a person from walking straight up to our front windows. Our front gardens are larger than our back gardens and so the entire street has taken pride in maintaining the front, each one pruned, groomed, fed and watered within an inch of its natural life. Everybody on our street, bar the occupants of your house and mine, is retired. They spend endless hours in their gardens and, because they are outside, in the front, everybody knows about who comes and goes and at what time. Not me though. Or you. We are not gardeners and we are not retired. You are probably ten years older than me but we have lowered the age of the street by thirty years. You have three children, I’m not sure what ages they are but I guess one is a teenager and the other two are under ten.

You are not a good father; I never see you with them.

You have always lived opposite me, ever since I moved in, and you have always bothered me beyond belief, but going to work every day and all that came with that for me – distraction and knowing that there are more important things in the world – took me away from caring, from complaining and marching over there and punching your lights out.

I feel now like I’m living in a goldfish bowl and all I can see and hear from every window in my home is you. You, you, you. So at two thirty in the morning, which is a rather respectable time for you to return home, I find myself, elbows on the windowsill, chin resting on my hand, awaiting your next screw-up. I know this will be a good one because it’s New Year’s Eve and you are Matt Marshall, DJ on Ireland’s biggest radio station and, despite not wanting to, I heard your show tonight on my phone before that too died. It was as intrusive, disgusting, repulsive, unpalatable, foul, nasty and vomitous as the others have been. Your talk show Matt Marshall’s Mouthpiece which airs from eleven p.m. to one a.m. receives the highest number of listeners of any show on Irish radio. You have been at the helm of late-night talk shows for ten years. I didn’t know you lived on this street when I moved in, but when I heard your voice travel to me across the road one day, I knew instantly it was you. Everybody does when they hear you, and mostly they get excited but I was repulsed.

You are everything I do not like about people. Your views, your opinions, your discussions that do nothing to fix the problem you pretend you want to fix and instead stir up angry frenzies and mob-like behaviour. You provide a hub for hatred and racism and anger to be vented, but you present it as free speech. For those reasons I dislike you; for personal reasons, I despise you. I’ll go into them later.

You have driven home, as usual, going sixty kilometres per hour down our quiet retirement-home-like street. You bought your home from an aged couple who were downsizing, I bought mine from a widow who’d died – or at least from her children, cashing in. I did well, buying when houses were at their lowest, when people were taking what they could, before anything had risen again, and I am aiming to be mortgage free, an ambition I’ve had since I was five, wanting everything that’s mine to actually be mine and not at the mercy of others and their mistakes. Both of our homes looked like an episode of The Good Life and both of us had extensive work to do and had to fight with the management company who accused us of ruining the look of the place. We managed to compromise. Our houses look like The Good Life from the front; inside, we have extensively renovated. I, however, broke a rule with my front garden that I am still paying for. More on that later.

You drive dangerously close to your garage door as usual and you climb out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition, the radio blaring and the engine running. I’m not sure if you have forgotten or if you are not planning on staying. The car lights are on and are the only light on the street; it adds to the drama, almost as if the spotlight is on you. Despite the wind, which has died somewhat, every word of the Guns N’ Roses song is audible from the car. It’s ‘Paradise City’; 1988 must have been a good year for you. I was eight years old, you would have been eighteen, I bet you wore their T-shirts and had them on your school bag, I bet you engraved their names into school journals and went to The Grove and smoked and danced all night and shouted every word of their songs to the night sky. You must have felt free and happy then, because you play it a lot and always when you’re driving home.

I see a light go on in Dr Jameson’s bedroom; it must be a torch because it is moving around, as though the person holding it is disorientated. The dog is barking like mad now and I wonder if he’ll let him in before some little girl wakes up in the morning to find Santa has left a dizzy Jack Russell in her back garden. I watch the torch moving around the rooms upstairs. Dr Jameson likes to be at the helm of things, apparently. I learned this from my next-door neighbour Mr Malone, who called to my door to let me know that the bin truck was coming and he’d noticed I’d forgotten to put out my bins. I sense Mr Malone and Dr Jameson are at loggerheads over who should be in charge of the management company. I had forgotten to put my bins out because not being at work means I often confuse my days, but him calling to my home to tell me annoyed me. Seven weeks on, it wouldn’t bother me. I find it helpful. Everything neighbourly and anything helpful bothered me then. I had no community spirit. It wasn’t because I turned my back on it, it was because I was too busy. I didn’t know it existed and I didn’t require it.

You try the handle of the front door and appear full of shock and dismay that it isn’t unlocked for you or some masked gunman to freely enter your home. You ring the doorbell. It never begins politely, it is always rude, offensive. The amount of times you ring, the length of time you ring it for, like the burst of a machine gun. Your wife never answers straight away. Neither do the children; I wonder if they sleep through it now because they’re so used to it, or if she’s in there with them, all huddled in one room while the children sob, telling them to ignore the scary sounds at the door. Either way, nobody comes. Then you bang on the door. You like the banging, you spend most nights doing this, relieving your tension and anger. You work your way around the entire house, knocking and banging on every window you can reach. You taunt your wife in a sing-song voice, ‘I know you’re in there,’ as if she is pretending that she isn’t. I don’t think she is pretending, I think she is making it quite clear. I wonder if she is asleep or wide awake and hoping you will go away. I guess the latter.

Then you pick up your yelling. I know she hates the yelling because that above all embarrasses her, perhaps because your voice is so distinctive – though we couldn’t ever think it was any other couple on the road behaving like this. I don’t know why you haven’t figured this out by now and just cut straight to the yelling. She remains resolute for the first time I’ve witnessed. You do a new thing. You go back to your car and start blowing the horn.

I see Dr Jameson’s torch moving from upstairs to a downstairs room and I hope he isn’t going to go outside to try to calm you down. You will no doubt do something drastic. Dr Jameson’s front door opens and I hold my hands to my face, wondering if I should run out and stop him, but I don’t want to get involved. I will watch and when it turns violent I will step in, though I have no idea what I will do. Dr Jameson doesn’t appear. The dog comes running around the house at top speed, almost falls over himself on the flooded soggy grass in the race to get inside. The dog runs inside and the door is slammed. I laugh in surprise.

You must hear the door slam and think that it’s your wife, because you stop honking the horn and Guns N’ Roses is all that can be heard again. I’m thankful for that. The honking was above all the most annoying thing you’ve done. Almost as if she was waiting for you to calm down before letting you in, the front door opens and your wife steps out in her dressing gown, looking frantic. I see the dark shadow of someone behind her. At first I think she has met somebody else and I seriously worry about what will happen, but then I realise it’s your eldest son. He looks older, protective, the man of the house. She tells him to stay inside and he does. I am glad. You don’t need to make this any worse than it already is. As soon as you see her you jump out of the car and start shouting at her for locking you out of the house. You always shout this at her. She tries to calm you as she makes her way to your still-open jeep door, then she takes the keys out, which kills the music, the engine and the lights. She shakes the keys in front of you, telling you that you have the house key on your set. She told you that. You knew that.

But I know, as does she, that your practicality belongs with your sobriety, and in its place is this desperate, wild man. You always believe that you’re locked out, that you have been deliberately locked out. That it is you against the world, or more that it is you against the house, and that you must get inside using any means necessary.

You go quiet for a moment as you take in the keys dangling in front of your face and then you stagger as you reach for her, pull her close and smother her with hugs and kisses. I can’t see your face, but I see hers. It is the picture of complication, inner silent torture. You laugh and ruffle your son’s head as you pass, as if the whole thing was a joke, and I detest you even more because you can’t say sorry. You never say sorry – not that I’ve witnessed, anyway. Just as you step into the house the electricity goes back on. You twist around and you see me, at the window, my bedroom lights on full, revealing me in all my sneaky glory.

You glare at me, then you bang the door closed, and with all that you’ve done tonight, you make me feel like the weird one.

4

One of the things I liked about the Christmas break just gone was that nobody was working, it put us all on the same level. Everyone was in holiday mode, I didn’t have to compare and contrast me from them, them from me. But now everybody is back at work, so I am back to feeling how I felt before the break.

Initially I felt shocked, my whole system felt shocked, and then I believe I went through a grieving process as I mourned for a life that I’d lost. I was angry, of course I was angry; I had considered Larry, my colleague, my firer, to be my friend. We went skiing together every New Year, I stayed in his Marbella holiday home with him and his family for a week every June. I was one of the few invited to the house for his daughter’s over-the-top debs gathering. I was one of the small inner circle. I had never considered that he could take this course of action; that, despite the often heated arguments, our relationship would come to this, that he would very simply have the balls to do this to me.

After the anger, I was in denial about it being a bad thing that had happened. I didn’t want losing my job to own me, to define me. I didn’t need my job, my job needed me – and too bad, it had lost me. And then Christmas came and I got lost in social events; dinners and parties and drunken festivities that made me feel warm and fuzzy and forgetful. Now it is January and I feel as bleak as the day outside, for I am overcome by a new feeling.

I feel worthless, as though a very important part of my self-esteem has been utterly diminished. I have been robbed of my routine, my schedule which once determined my every single waking and sleeping hour. Routine of any kind has been difficult to establish; there don’t seem to be any rules for me, while everybody else marches to the beat of their own important drum. I constantly feel hungry, metaphorically and literally. I am hungry for something to do, somewhere to go, but I’m also hungry for everything in my kitchen because it’s there, right beside me, every day and I have nothing better to do than eat it. I am bored. And as much as it pains me to say it, I am lonely. I can go an entire day without any socialisation, without a conversation with anyone. I wonder sometimes if I’m invisible. I feel like the old men and women who used to bother me by engaging in unnecessary chit-chat with the cashiers while I was stuck behind them, in a hurry, wanting to get on to the next place. When you don’t have a next place to go to, time slows down enormously. I feel myself noticing other people more, catching more eyes, or seeking out eye contact. I’m now ripe and ready for a conversation about anything with anyone; it would make my day if somebody would meet my eye, or if there was someone to talk to. But everyone is too busy, and that makes me feel invisible; and invisibility, contrary to what I believed before, lacks any sense of lightness and liberty. Instead it makes me feel heavy. And so I drag myself around, trying to convince myself that I don’t feel heavy, invisible, bored and worthless, and that I am free. I do not convince myself well.

Another of the bad things about being fired is that my father calls by, uninvited.

He is in the front garden with my half-sister Zara when I arrive home. Zara is three years old, my dad is sixty-three. He retired from his printing business three years ago after selling it for a very good price that allows him to live comfortably. As soon as Zara was born he became a hands-on husband and father while his new wife, Leilah, works as a yoga instructor in her own practice. It is lovely that Dad has had a second chance at love, and also lovely that he has been able to fully embrace fatherhood, properly, for the first time in his life. He fully embraced the nappy-changing, night feeds, weaning and anything else that raising a child threw at him. He glows every day with the pride he has for her, this remarkable little girl who has managed to do such incredible things all by herself. Grow, walk, talk. He marvels at her genius, tells long stories about what she has done that day, the funny things she has said, the clever picture she drew for one so young. As I said, it is lovely. Lovely. But he views it with a first-time joy, a beginner, someone who has never seen it happen before.

In the last few weeks it has made me think, because I’ve had time to, and I wonder where was his wonderment, his absolute shock and awe, when Heather and I were growing up? If it was ever there at all, it was hidden by the mask of inconvenience and complete bafflement. Sometimes when he points out something wonderful that Zara has done I want to scream at him that other children do that too, you know, children like Heather and I, and how incredible we must have been to have gotten there first over thirty years ago. But I don’t. That would make me bitter and twisted, and I am not, and it would create an energy around something where there is nothing. I tell myself it’s the idleness that leads to these frustrating thoughts.

I often wonder, if Mum was alive, how would she feel seeing Dad as the man he is now – loyal, retired, a dedicated father and husband. Sometimes I hear her on her forgiving, wise days being all philosophical and understanding about it and other days I hear the tired voice of an exhausted single mother that I grew up with, spitting venom over him and his insensitivities. Which of her voices I hear may depend on what mood I am in myself. Mum died from breast cancer when she was forty-four. Too young to die. I was nineteen. Too young to lose a mother. It was most difficult for her, of course, having to leave this world when she didn’t want to. She had things she wanted to see, things she wanted to do, things she had been putting off until I was finished school, an adult, so that she could begin her life. She wasn’t finished yet; in many ways, she hadn’t even started. She’d had her first baby at twenty-four, then me the accident at twenty-five, and she had raised her babies and done absolutely everything for us and it should have been time for her.

After she died, I lived on campus and Heather stayed in the care home she had moved into while Mum was undergoing treatment. Sometimes I wonder why I was so selfish and didn’t decide to care for Heather myself. I don’t think I even offered. I understand that it was necessary for me to begin my own life, but I don’t believe I even thought about it for a moment. It’s not selfish not to want to, but it was selfish not to think about it. I look back and realise I could have been more helpful to my mother at the time too. I feel like I let her go through it all alone. I could have been there more, accompanied her more, instead of asking her about things afterwards. But I was a teenager, my world was about me then, and I saw my aunt being there for my mum.

Heather is my Irish twin: older by one year. She treats me as though I am the baby sister by many more years. I love her for this. I know that I was an accident, because my mum had no intention of planning another child so soon after the birth of Heather. Mum was shocked, Dad was appalled; he could barely cope with a baby in the first place, let alone one with Down syndrome, and now there was a second child on the way. Heather scared him; he didn’t know how to deal with her. When I came along, he moved further away from the family, seeking out other women who had more time on their hands to adore him and agree with him.

Meanwhile my mum dealt with reality with such strength and assurance, though she would admit later that she did it with what she called ‘Bambi legs’. I never saw that in her, never saw a shake or tremble or wrong-step, she always made it seem as if she had it all under control. She joked, and apologised, that I raised myself. I always knew that Heather was more important, that Heather needed more attention; I never felt unloved, it was just the way it was. I loved Heather too, but I know that, when Mum left this world, the one person she did not want to leave behind was Heather. Heather needed Mum, Mum had plans for Heather, and so she left the world with a broken heart for the daughter she was leaving behind. I’m okay with that, I understand. My heart broke not just for me but for the two of them too.

Heather is not happy-go-lucky, as people with Down syndrome are stereotypically thought to be. She is an individual who has good days and bad, like us all, but her personality – which has nothing to do with Down syndrome – is upbeat. Her life is tied up in routine, she appreciates it as a way of feeling in control of her life, which is why when I show up at her home or when she’s at work, she gets confused and almost agitated. Heather needs routine, which is something that makes us even more similar and not at all different.

Zara is hopping from one cobblestone to the other and trying not to step on the cracks. She insists Dad does the same. He does. I know this about him now and yet, seeing him, his Christmas belly hanging over his trousers and bouncing up and down as he hops from stone to stone, I still can’t help but not know who this man is. He looks up as I pull in.

‘I didn’t know you’d be here,’ I say, lightly. Translation: You didn’t tell me, you must always tell me.

‘We were taking a drive along the coast, watching the waves – weren’t we, Zara?’ He scoops her up in his arms. ‘Tell Jasmine about the waves.’

He always gets Zara to say things for us; I’m sure most parents do, but it infuriates me. I would rather have a conversation with Zara that isn’t dictated by Dad. Hearing her tell me things is hearing it twice.

‘They were huge waves, weren’t they? Tell Jasmine how huge they were.’

She nods. Big eyes. Holds her arms out to show what would be a disappointingly small wave, but an enormous stretch for her.

‘And weren’t they crashing up against the rocks? Tell Jasmine.’

She nods again. ‘They were crashing against the rocks.’

‘And the waves were splashing over on to the coast road in Malahide,’ he says, again in his childish voice, and I wish he would just tell me the story directly instead of relaying it like this.

‘Wow,’ I say, smiling at Zara and reaching out to her. She immediately comes to me and wraps her skinny long legs around my body and clings to me tightly. I do not have anything against Zara. Zara is lovely. No – Zara is beautiful. She is perfect in every way and I adore her. It is not Zara’s fault. It is not anybody’s fault, because nothing has happened and it is merely the annoyance of my dad making a habit of dropping by since I’ve been at home that is beginning to create something that is not there. I know this. I tell my rational self this.

‘How’s my spaghetti legs?’ I ask her, letting us into the house. ‘I haven’t seen you for an entire year!’ While I’m talking, I glance at your house. I do that a lot lately, I can’t seem to help it. It’s become a habit now, some ridiculous OCD thing where I can’t get into my car without looking across the road, or I can’t close my front door without looking, or sometimes when I pass a front window, I stop and watch. I know I need to stop. Nothing ever happens during the day time, not with you, at least; you barely surface, it’s just your wife coming and going with the kids all day. Occasionally I might see you pull a curtain open and go out to your car, but that’s it. I don’t know what I’m expecting to see.

‘Did you tell your dad that we made cupcakes together last week?’ I ask Zara.

She nods again and I realise that I’m doing exactly what Dad does. It must be frustrating for her, but I can’t seem to stop.

Dad and I talk to each other through Zara. We say things to her that we should be saying to one another, so I tell her that my electricity went off on New Year’s Eve, that I met Billy Gallagher in the supermarket and he has retired, and various other things that she doesn’t need to know. Zara pays attention for a while, but then we confuse her, and she runs off.

‘Your friend is in trouble again,’ Dad says when we’re sitting at the table with a cup of tea and biscuits left over from my enormous drawer of Christmas goodies that I’m consistently working my way through, and we watch Zara tip over the box of toys that I keep for her. The noise of Lego hitting floorboards takes away his next sentence.

‘What friend?’ I ask, worried.

Dad nods in the direction of the front window that faces your house. ‘Your man – what’s his name?’

‘Matt Marshall? He’s not a friend of mine,’ I say, disgusted. All talk always turns to you.

‘Well, your neighbour then,’ Dad says, and we both watch Zara again.

It’s only the silence dragging on for too long that causes me to ask, because I don’t know what else to say: ‘Why, what did he do?’

‘Who?’ Dad says, snapping out of his trance.

‘Matt Marshall,’ I say through gritted teeth, hating having to ask about you once, never mind twice.

‘Oh, him.’ As if it was an hour ago that he first raised it. ‘His New Year’s Eve show got complaints.’

‘He always gets complaints.’

‘Well, more than usual, I suppose. It’s all over the papers.’

We are silent again as I think about your show. I hate your show, I never listen. Or rather, I never used to listen but lately I’ve been listening to see if what you talk about has any direct link to the state you return home in, because you’re not trashed every single night of the week. About three or four nights a week. Anyway, so far there seems to be no direct correlation.

‘Well, he tried to ring in the New Year by getting a woman to—’

‘I know, I know,’ I say, interrupting him, not wanting to hear my dad say the word orgasm.

‘Well, I thought you said you hadn’t heard it,’ he says, all defensive.

‘I heard about it,’ I mumble, and I climb down on all fours to help Zara with her Lego. I pretend our tower is a dinosaur. I use it to eat her fingers, her toes, then I crash it into the second tower with a great big roar. She’s happy with that for a moment and goes back to playing by herself.

To recap on your New Year’s Eve show, you and your team felt it would be hilarious to ring in the New Year with the sound of a woman’s orgasm. A charming treat for your listeners, a thank you in fact, for their support. Then you had a quiz to guess the sound of a fake orgasm from a real orgasm, and then a full discussion about men who fake orgasms during sex. It wasn’t offensive, not to me, not in comparison to the filth you’ve spoken about in other shows, and I hadn’t been aware of men who faked orgasms so it was slightly informative, if not disturbing, maybe even personally enlightening – with regard to the man I didn’t regret in the office, who regretted me, possibly – though the douche-bags you had on the show to tell their side of their story did little to educate. I sound as if I’m defending you. I’m not. It just wasn’t the worst show. For once the issue is not you and your lack of charm but the right to hear the sound of a woman climax without it being considered offensive.

‘How is he in trouble?’ I ask moments later.

‘Who’s that?’ Dad asks and I count to three in my head.

‘Matt Marshall.’

‘Oh. They’ve fired him. Or suspended him. I’m not sure which. I’d say he’s out of there. Been there long enough anyway. Let somebody younger have a chance.’

‘He’s only forty-two,’ I say. It sounds like a defence of you, but I don’t mean it personally. I’m thirty-three and I need to find a new job, I’m concerned about age right now, particularly the attitude towards age in the workplace, that’s all. I think of you suspended and I immediately feel delight. I’ve always disliked you, have always wanted your show off the air, but then I feel bad and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because of your children and your nice wife, who I’ve taken to waving at in the morning.

‘Turns out it was a real woman in the studio,’ Dad says, looking a bit uncomfortable.

‘Well, it hardly sounded like a man.’

‘No, she was really … you know,’ he looks at me and I’ve no idea what he is implying.

We are quiet.

‘She was really pleasuring herself. Live in the studio,’ Dad says.

My stomach turns, both because I’ve just had that conversation with my dad and also because I can see you orchestrating that in your studio, the countdown to twelve o’clock, the team all guffawing over a woman, like idiots.

I once again loathe you.

I lift Zara into her car seat and plant a kiss on her button nose.

‘So I could talk to Ted, if you like,’ Dad says suddenly, as though continuing a conversation that I don’t remember having.

I frown. ‘Who’s Ted?’

‘Ted Clifford,’ he shrugs like it’s no big deal.

Anger rises within me so quickly I have to fight the urge to lose it right there. And I’d come so close. Dad sold his company to Ted Clifford. He could have sold it for three times the amount in the good times, he likes to tell everybody, but it is not the good times now and so he settled on a reasonably good sum of money that will ensure month-long holidays in the summer with Leilah and Zara, dinners out four times a week. I don’t know if he paid off his mortgage, and this annoys me. It would have been the first thing I’d have done. I’m not sure how me and Heather have come out of this, but I’m not bothered, though I might sound it. I’m financially okay right now, I’m more concerned about Heather. She needs security. As soon as I made enough money, I bought the apartment she was renting. She moved out of residential care five years ago, a big deal for her, a big deal for anybody. She lives with a friend, under the caring eye of her support assistant, and they are getting along perfectly well together, though it doesn’t stop me from worrying about her every second of every day. I got the apartment at a good price; most people were trying to get rid of their negative equity, that second property where it was suddenly a struggle to meet the payments. It was something I expected Dad to do when he retired, instead of buying the apartment in Spain. He thought she was fine in the care home, but I knew that it was a dream for her to have her own place so I took control. Again, I’m not angry, it’s just that things like this come to me now and I can’t help but ponder them … I need distraction.

‘No,’ I say abruptly. ‘Thanks.’ End of.

He looks at me as if he wants to say more. To stop him, I continue: ‘I don’t need you to get me a job.’

My pride. Easily damaged. I hate help. I need to do things all by myself, all of the time. His offer makes me feel weak, makes me think that he thinks I’m weak. It has too many connotations.

‘Just saying. It’d be an easy foot in the door. Ted would help you out any day.’

‘I don’t need help.’

‘You need a job.’ He chuckles. He looks at me as though he is amused, but I know that this is the precursor to his anger. That laugh is what happens when he’s annoyed; I’m not sure whether it is supposed to wind up the person he is annoyed at – which is what happens now and has always happened to me – or if it is his way of covering up his anger. Either way, I recognise the sign.

‘Okay, Jasmine, do it your way, as usual.’ He holds his hands up dramatically in the air, in defence, keys dangling from his fingers. He gets into the car and drives off.

He says it like it’s a bad thing: do it your way. Isn’t that a good thing for anyone to do? When would I ever, have I ever, wanted to do it his way? If I wanted help, he would be the last person I would go to. And then it occurs to me again that there seems to be an issue, when there really never has been an issue, and it startles me. I realise I’m standing out in the cold, glaring down the street at where the car has long since disappeared. I quickly look across the street to your house and I think I’ve seen a slight movement in an upstairs curtain, but I’ve probably imagined it.

Later, in bed, I’m unable to sleep. I feel as though my head is overheating from thinking too much, like my laptop when it’s been used for too many hours. I am angry. I am having half-finished conversations with my dad, with my job, with the man who stole my space in the car park that morning, with the watermelon that I dropped carrying from the car to the house which burst all over the ground and stained my suede boots. I am ranting to them all, I am setting everything right, I am cursing at them, I am informing them all of their shortfalls. Only it doesn’t help, it is just making me feel worse.

I sit up, frustrated and dehydrated.

Rita the Reiki woman I’d seen earlier that day told me this would happen. She’d told me to drink lots of water after our unusual session that I feel didn’t alter me at all, and instead I had a bottle of wine before bed. I’d never been to Reiki before and I probably won’t go again but my aunt had given me a voucher for Christmas. My aunt is into all kinds of alternative therapy; she and my mum used to do that kind of thing when Mum was sick. Maybe that’s why I don’t believe in it now, because it didn’t work, Mum died. But then the medicine didn’t work for her either, and I still take that. Maybe I will go back. I made the appointment when everybody went back to work, something to do, something to keep myself busy, something to put in my new yellow Smythson diary with my initials in gold on the bottom right corner which would usually be filled already with appointments and meetings and now is a sad depiction of my current life: christening times, coffee meetings and birthday celebrations. At the Reiki session I’d sat in a small white room that was filled with incense and made me feel so sleepy I wondered if I was being drugged. Rita was a tiny woman, bird-like, in her sixties, but she twisted her legs into a position on the armchair that showed her agility. She was soft-faced, almost out of focus, and I’m not sure if it was the incense smoke that blurred her, but I couldn’t quite see her edges. Her eyes were sharp though, the way they took me in and held on to every word that I said so that it made me take note of my own voice and I could hear how clipped and contained I sounded. Anyway, apart from a nice chat with a supportive woman, and a relaxing twenty-minute lie-down in a nicely scented womb-like room, I didn’t feel in any way altered.

She’d given me one piece of advice though for my busy head. I’d immediately disregarded it as soon as I’d left, but now I am barely able to formulate a single thought for long enough to be able to see it through, to process it, to get rid of it, so I take her advice. I remove my socks and pad around the carpet for a while, hoping I’ll feel ‘rooted’ to stop my head from drifting again into ranty angry territory. I step on something sharp – the end of a clothes hanger – and curse as I inspect my foot. I cradle my foot in my hands. I’m not sure how rooted is supposed to feel, but this can’t be it.

She’d suggested walking barefoot, preferably on grass, but if not, generally barefoot as much as possible as soon as I returned to the house, The scientific theory behind the health benefits to walking barefoot, is that the Earth is negatively charged, so when you ground, you’re connecting your body to a negatively charged supply of energy. And since the Earth has a greater negative charge than your body, you end up absorbing electrons from it. The grounding effect has an anti-inflammatory effect on your body. I don’t know about all that but I need to clear my head and as I’m trying to cut down on the headache tablets, I may as well try barefoot.

I look outside. There is no grass in my garden. That was the terrible, unspeakable thing I did when I moved in four years ago. I wasn’t a fan of gardens, I was twenty-nine years old, I was busy, I was barely at home, I was never home long enough to notice my garden. To avoid the effort involved in its upkeep, I had the relatively nice garden that was there when I bought the place dug up and replaced it with maintainable cobble-locking. It looked impressive, it cost a fortune, it horrified the neighbours. I put some nice black pots outside my front door with plants that stayed green all year round, pruned into clever modern twisted shapes. I cared a little bit about how it affected my new neighbours, but I was never home to discuss it with them at length, and I reasoned with myself that it would save me paying a gardener – because I wasn’t about to do it myself; I wouldn’t know where to start. There is still grass on the pathway outside of my house, which is maintained by my neighbour, Mr Malone, who did this without asking me. I think he sees it as his because he was here first, and anyway, what do I know about grass? I am a grass-defector.

I’d thought that buying my own house at the age of twenty-nine – a semi-detached, four-bedroom family home – was quite a mature and grounding thing to do. Who knew that when I dug up the garden I was losing the very thing that could have kept me grounded.

I check your house and your jeep isn’t there and all the lights are out. I never need to worry about anybody else’s house. I never seem to care. I put on a tracksuit and go downstairs barefoot. Feeling like a sleuth, I run on tiptoe across the cold paving down my driveway and straight to the grass that lines the path. I check the grass for dog poo. I check for slugs and snails. Then I pull up the ends of my tracksuit bottoms and I allow my feet to squelch into the wet grass. It is cold but it’s soft. I chuckle to myself as I walk up and down, surveying the street at midnight.

For the first time since I’ve moved in, I feel guilty for what I’ve done to my garden. I look at the houses and see how mine is dark and grey amidst the colour. Not that there is much colour in the gardens in January, but at least the bushes, the trees, the grass, break the grey concrete of the paths, the brown and grey of my paving.

I’m not sure if going barefoot in the grass is helping anything other than the onslaught of pneumonia, but at least the cool air has soothed my hot, over-wired head and freed up some space. This is unusual behaviour for me. Not the walking on grass at midnight, but the lack of control. Sure, I’ve had stressful days at the office where I’ve needed to regroup, but this is different. I feel different. I’m thinking too much, focusing on areas that didn’t require thinking about before.

Often, when I’m searching for something, the only way I can find anything is to acknowledge out loud what it is, because I can’t see it unless I fully register and envision in my mind what it is I’m looking for. For example, rooting around in my oversized handbags for my keys, I say either in my head or aloud, ‘Keys, keys, keys.’ I do the same in my house: I wander from room to room, saying or muttering, ‘Red lipstick, pen, phone bill …’ or whatever it is I’m looking for. As soon as I do that, I find the thing quicker. I don’t know the reason for this, but I know that it makes sense, that it’s true, that Deepak Chopra would be able to explain in a more sophisticated, informed, philosophical manner, but I feel that when I tell myself what it is I’m looking for, then I fully know what it is that I must find. Order given: dutiful body and mind respond.

Sometimes the very thing I am looking for is staring me straight in the face, but I can’t see it. This happens to me a lot. It happened this morning when I was looking for my coat in my wardrobe. It was right in front of me, but because I didn’t say, ‘Black coat with the leather sleeves,’ it didn’t appear to me. I was just idly searching, eyes running over clothes and not finding anything.

I think – in fact, I have come to know – that I have applied this thinking on a larger scale, I’ve applied it to my life. I tell myself what I want, what I am looking for, I envision it so that it’s easier to find, and then I find it. It has worked for me all my life.

So now I find myself in a place where all that I’ve envisioned and worked hard for has been taken away, it is not mine any more. First thing I do is try to get it all back again, make it mine again, straight away, immediately; and if that’s not possible – which it usually isn’t, because I’m a realist, not a voodoo practitioner – then I must find something else to look for, something else to achieve. I’m obviously talking about my job here. I know I will get back to work eventually, but I have been put on hold. I have been stalled, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I’m on what is called ‘gardening leave’. It has nothing to do with gardening, thankfully, or I’d have a very long year power-hosing and weeding between the cracks of my cobble-locked garden. Gardening leave is the practice whereby an employee who has left their job or who has been terminated is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll. It’s often used to prevent employees from taking with them up-to-date and perhaps sensitive information when they leave their current employer, especially when they are leaving to join a competitor. I wasn’t leaving to join a competitor, as I’ve already explained, however Larry felt certain that I would work with a company we were in relative competition with, a company I had tried to schmooze to buy ours. He was right. I would have worked with them. They called me the day after I was fired to offer me a job. When I told them about the gardening leave they said they couldn’t possibly wait that long – twelve months gardening leave!! – and so they went off to find somebody else. Not only has the length of my gardening leave chased away other employers, I have absolutely nothing to do while I wait. It feels like a prison sentence. Twelve months gardening leave. It is a sentence. I feel as if I’m gathering dust on some shelf while the world is moving on around me and I can’t do anything to stop it or join in. I don’t want my mind to start growing moss; I’ll need to continuously power-hose it, to keep it fresh.

Blades of wet grass stick to my feet, working their way up my ankles as I walk back and forth on the patch of grass. So what happens when I’m put on hold for an entire year and there’s nothing I can do about it? What do I do?

I pad up and down on the wet grass, my feet starting to feel cold but my mind buzzing with a new idea. A new project. A goal. An objective. Something to do. I must right a wrong. I will uproot the very ground I walk on, which will be easy because I feel as if I have been uprooted already.

I will give the neighbourhood a gift. I will bring back the garden.

5

‘He’s beautiful,’ I whisper, looking at the tiny baby in my friend Bianca’s arms.

‘I know,’ she smiles, gazing at him adoringly.

‘Is it amazing?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, it’s … amazing.’ She looks away, her smile a bit wobbly, her eyes sunken into the back of her head from two nights’ lack of sleep. ‘Hey, have you started a new job yet?’

‘No, I can’t – you know, the gardening leave thing.’

‘Oh yeah,’ she says, then winces and goes quiet for a moment. I don’t dare interrupt her thoughts. ‘You’ll find something,’ she says, giving me a sympathetic smile.

I have grown to hate that smile on people. I am in the Rotunda Hospital, once again finding myself visiting somebody as they do something else. It has occurred to me lately that most of my visits have been this way. Calling into a friend at work, dropping by one of my sister’s classes to watch, seeing my dad while he is busy with Zara, chatting to friends while they are watching their children swimming or dancing, or at a playground. Every time I see people lately it is me interrupting their life, them busy with something – distracted heads that have one eye on me and another on their job – while beside them or across from them I am still, patiently waiting for them to finish what they’re doing to answer me. I am the still person in every scene of my life and I have started to see myself from afar each time it happens, like I’m outside of myself, watching myself be still and silent while the others move around, tend to their work, their children. Since realising this, I have tried not to meet anyone during the day when they are in the middle of something and I am not. I have tried to make appointments for nights out, dinners, drinks – times when I know we can be on even ground, face to face, one on one. But it is difficult, everybody is so busy, some can’t get a babysitter, we can’t seem to synchronise a night out that suits everybody, and so we struggle to arrange anything. It took me weeks to organise a dinner party in my house this weekend. Then I will be busy, and they can be still. In the meantime, here I am in the hospital, sitting at the bedside of one of my dearest friends who has just had her first baby, and while I am happy for her, of course I am, and was secretly delighted about the nine months maternity leave so that I could have company for the remainder of the year, I know the reality is that I will not see her very much, or if I do, she will be busy and I will be still, I will sit opposite her or beside her and wait for her to be ready, holding half her attention.

‘We were thinking, me and Tristan …’ Bianca breaks into my thoughts.

My body turns rigid as I sense what’s coming.

‘He’s not here, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me asking you …’

I feel dread but I fix my face into what I hope is the perfect look of interest.

‘Would you be his godmother?’

Ta-da. Third one in two months, it has to be a world record. ‘Oh, Bianca. I’d love to,’ I smile. ‘Thank you, that’s such an honour …’

She smiles back at me, delighted by her request, one of the most special moments in her life, while inside I feel like a charity case. It’s as if they’ve all made a pact to ask me to be godmother in order to give me something to do. And what will I do? Go to the church and stand by their side while they hold the baby, while the priest pours water, while everybody does something and I stand idly by.

‘Did you hear about your friend’s son?’

‘What friend?’

‘Matt Marshall,’ Bianca says.

‘He is not my friend,’ I say, annoyed. Then, deciding it’s best not to argue with a woman who has just given birth, I ask, ‘What did his son do?’

‘He put a video up on YouTube telling the world how much he hates his dad. Mortifying, isn’t it? Imagine talking about a family member like that.’

The baby in Bianca’s arms lets out a scream.

‘This little fucker keeps biting my nipple,’ she hisses, and I’m immediately silenced as her mood swings again and darkness descends in the hospital room.

She moves her three-day-old son into a different position, holding him like a rugby ball, her enormous breast bigger than his head and looking like it’s smothering him. The baby sucks and is silenced again.

It is almost a beautiful moment, apart from the fact that when I look at her she has tears streaming down her face.

The door opens and her pale husband Tristan ducks his head in. He sees his firstborn and his face softens, then he looks up and sees his wife and his face tightens. He swallows.

‘Hi, Jasmine,’ he steps inside and greets me.

‘Congratulations, Daddy,’ I say gently. ‘He’s beautiful.’

‘He’s got a mouthful of fangs, is what he has,’ Bianca says, wincing again.

The baby screams as he’s pulled away from her chapped red raw nipple.

‘Seriously, Tristan, this is … I can’t …’ Her face crumples.

I leave them to it.

I tell myself while driving that I am not interested in watching your son on YouTube. I tell myself I won’t stoop to your level, that I have far more important things to do than think about you and absorb myself in your world, but all I actually have to do that day is shop for dinner. Shopping for one person doesn’t depress me as it does some of my other single friends; I am happy to be alone and everybody needs to eat, but it has come to this. Eating. Eating was something I had to squeeze into my busy day because I had to, to stay alive. Now it is something to string out, make an afternoon of. The last few days I have made elaborate meals for myself. Yesterday I spent fifty-five minutes in Eason’s browsing the shelves for recipe books, spent sixty minutes buying the ingredients, which took me two and a half hours to prepare and cook, and then I ate it in twenty minutes. That was my entire day yesterday. It was enjoyable but the novelty has worn off many of the things I was looking forward to doing in my ‘time off’.

When I pull into the supermarket car park, the day surprisingly bright and sunny for the first time in weeks though it is still cold, I take my phone out of my bag and go straight to YouTube. I type in Matt Marshall and immediately ‘Matt Marshall’s son’ pops up as an option. I select it. Posted late last night, it already has thirty thousand views – which is impressive.

Though I have never seen your son close up, the image of him is immediately familiar to me. It is what I see most days as he leaves for school, head hidden under a hood, his face downward, earphones on his head, red hair peeking out from under his hood as he walks from the house to the bus stop. I have been his neighbour for four years and it occurs to me I don’t even know his name, but the comments beneath the video tell me that it is Fionn.

Way to go, Fionn!

My dad is a loser 2, know how u feel!

Your dad shud be locked up 4 da shit dat he says.

I am a registered psychologist and I am concerned by your outburst, please contact me, I can help.

I’m a big fan of your dad, he helped my son when he was being bullied in school, he helped shed light on bullying laws in Ireland.

May the angels heal your inner anger.

Your dad’s a loser and you’re a fag.

A small slice of the supportive comments the viewing public have made.

Fionn is fifteen years old and from his uniform each morning I can tell he attends Belvedere, a costly private school in Dublin. Though I haven’t watched it yet, I already know that they will not like this. Here on the screen I can see he has brown eyes, his cheeks and nose are lightly freckled. He is looking down at the webcam, his laptop at an angle to take him all in so that the lights on the ceiling are blaring in the camera. His nostrils are wide and flaring with anger. There is music in the background, I guess he is at a party, I’m guessing he is drunk. His pupils are dilated, though perhaps the anger is causing that. What ensues is a four-minute rant about how he would officially like to separate himself from his loser dad, you, who he believes is not a real dad. He says that you are an embarrassment, a waster, his mum is the only person who keeps things going, you have no talent. And on it goes, a well-spoken boy, attempting to be harder than he is in a badly constructed attack on you, outlining why he believes you should be fired and never rehired. It is a rather embarrassing rant that makes me cringe and watch from behind my hands. The music in the background gets louder, as do male voices. He takes a quick look behind him and then the video is over.

Despite the way I feel about you, this does not fill me with any kind of happiness or entertainment. I feel bad for watching it, I feel bad for you, for all of you.

I do a quick shop, feeling glum as I hurry down the aisles. Sometimes I forget why I feel that way, I just have this feeling that something bad has happened to me and affected my life. Then I remember why I feel down and I try to shake it off, because it has nothing to do with me. Trouble is, even though I know it’s silly of me, I can’t help feeling connected to what happened.

I keep the dinner simple – aubergine parmigiana – and I finish the last glass of the bottle of red wine from the night before. I settle down to ponder your problem as if it is mine. What should we do about Fionn, Matt? There is no action in your house. Your wife’s car is gone, and you are all out. Nothing.

Dr Jameson’s bedroom light goes out. I have no solutions, Matt.

I have fallen asleep on the couch for the first time in my life and at some hour I wake up, very confused as to where I am; the only light in the room is the flickering, muted TV. I jump up and kick my plate and cutlery to the floor, smashing my wine glass. I’m fully alert now, heart pounding, and I realise what has woken me. It is the familiar sound of your jeep speeding down the street. Avoiding the broken glass at my feet, I go to the window to see you driving erratically, swerving into your driveway coming dangerously close to your garage door as usual. However this time you don’t brake and you crash directly into the white door. The garage door shudders and vibrates, the noise echoing loudly off the sleeping houses. I can picture Dr Jameson waking with a start, fumbling to remove his eye mask. On cue, Dr Jameson’s bedroom light goes on.

The garage door stays standing, the house doesn’t topple on to your car. Unfortunate really. Nothing happens for a while. ‘Paradise City’ is still playing, blaring. I can see you, unmoving in the driver’s seat. I wonder if you’re okay, if the airbag has exploded and knocked you out. I think of calling an ambulance for you, but I don’t know if it’s needed and it could be seen as wasting emergency services’ time. Though I very much do not want to leave the safe haven of my home, I know I can’t just leave you there.

You slept in the car last night, not even bothering with your usual routine of banging at the doors and windows of the house, but somewhere between me falling asleep and waking up, you’d managed to get inside the house. I wonder if your son let you in. I wonder if it had become too much for him and he’d disobeyed his mum’s orders to ignore you and instead answered the door and confronted you. Already fired up from the video he’d made, he told you what he thought of you. I’d like to have seen that. I know that’s weird.

Tonight you are worse than usual. I suspected this would be the case. I’m sure you know about the YouTube posting. I listened to the radio to see if was true about your suspension and there was another DJ filling in for you and the team. You and the team have all been suspended for your naughty New Year’s Eve antics and I see you have used your time not to spend a rare midweek evening at home with your family or to ponder your actions, but by drinking the night away. It was odd not to hear your voice on air; you’ve become synonymous with that time of night in most people’s homes, cars, workplaces, vans and lorries on long overnight drives. Learning of your suspension makes me surprisingly not as happy as I’d imagined, but then I come to the conclusion that it might be a good thing. It might make you think about all the lowly things you have said and discussed on your show, and how that has affected people and how you can improve yourself and thereby improve the lives of so many that you have such influence over. It makes me think of the one that makes me hate you, the entire reason for this anger I feel towards you.

Sixteen years ago, on another station at another hour, you hosted a discussion about Down syndrome. It was about many aspects of Down syndrome, and some of it was informative, thanks to the angry but firm woman who called in from Down Syndrome Ireland to explain the realities. Unfortunately she was deemed too calm and patient for your show and you quickly hung up on her. The others were uneducated, obnoxious ignoramuses who were given far too much airtime. Much of the discussion was about CVS, Chorionic Villus Sampling, and amniocentesis, also referred to as amniotic fluid test or AFT, which is a medical procedure used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and foetal infections. The most common reason to carry out such a test is to determine whether a baby has certain genetic disorders or a chromosomal abnormality such as Down syndrome. Women who choose to have this test are primarily those at increased risk for genetic and chromosomal problems, in part because the test is invasive and carries a small risk of miscarriage. I can see why you wanted to have this conversation; it is worth having the conversation, it could help women make the decision, if dealt with in a mature and honest way – but not in your way, not in the way your show handles things, trying to stir up controversy and drama. Instead of handling it in a mature, honest way you invited lunatics on to show the worst side and voice their uninformed opinions of Down syndrome. For example, an eejit anonymous man who had just discovered his girlfriend was having a baby with Down syndrome and what rights did he have about stopping this?

I was seventeen years old, at a party with a guy I had fancied for ages. Everyone was drunk, someone’s parents had gone away, and instead of listening to music it had been cool to listen to Matt Marshall. I didn’t mind you then; in fact I thought you were cool, because it was cool to hear the kinds of things you were discussing back when we were still trying to find our own voice. But the conversation made me feel ill, the conversation drifted from the speakers and continued into our room at the party and I had to listen to my friends, who should have known better, and to people I didn’t know, and the guy that I fancied, giving their opinions on the matter. Nobody wanted a child with Down syndrome. One person said they’d prefer one to a baby with AIDS. I was sickened by what I heard. I had a beautiful sister asleep at home, with a mother who was undergoing treatment for cancer who was more distraught about leaving my sister than leaving anything else in her life, and I couldn’t quite take what I was hearing.

I just got up and walked out. The guards picked me up along the coast road. I wasn’t falling around the place, but I was quite emotional and the alcohol only made me worse so they brought me to the station for my own safety, and a warning.

Mum was sick, she needed her rest. I couldn’t call my aunt after what had happened over the past few weeks in her house between me and her son Kevin, nor could I go back to stay in her house after the event, so they called Dad. He’d been out on a date with a new girlfriend, and they collected me in a taxi, him in his tuxedo and her in her ballgown, and they brought me back to his apartment. They’d both been throwing eyes at each other and giggling in the cab; I could tell they were finding the entire thing so much fun. As soon as we got to the apartment they went straight out again, which was a blessing.

So I stand at the window now and watch your unmoving body in your jeep, not caring whether you see me watching or not because I’m worried. Just as I’m thinking about going outside to assist you, the jeep door opens and you fall out. Head first, your back facing out as if you’ve been leaning it against the door. You slide down slowly and your head hits the ground. Your foot is tangled in the seat belt on the leather seat. You don’t move. I look around for my coat and then I hear you laughing. You struggle to untangle your foot from the seat belt, your laugh dying down as you become irritated and need to concentrate on freeing yourself as the blood rushes to your head.

You finally free yourself to begin your shouting/doorbell-ringing/banging act, but there is no response from the house. You honk the horn a few times. I’m surprised none of the neighbours tell you to be quiet; perhaps they’re asleep and they can’t hear. Perhaps they’re afraid, perhaps they watch you as I do, though I don’t think so. The Murphys go to bed early, the Malones never seem to be disturbed by you and the Lennons beside me are so timid I think they would be afraid to confront you. It is only Dr Jameson and I who seem to be disturbed by you. Your house is completely still and I only notice now that your wife’s car is not parked on the street as it usually is. The curtains are not drawn on any of the windows. The house appears empty.

You disappear around the back of the house and then I hear you before I see you. You reappear pulling a six-seater wooden table across the grass. The legs of the table destroy the grass, digging up the soil, leaving deep tracks as though you’ve been ploughing. You heave the table from the grass and on to the concrete. The wood drags across the ground, across the driveway behind the car, making an awful screeching sound which goes on for almost a minute. Sixty seconds of screeching and I see the Murphys’ lights go on down the street. Once you have dragged the wooden table on to the grass in the front garden, you disappear into the back garden again and take three trips to carry the six matching chairs. On the last trip you return with the sun umbrella and struggle to position it in the centre hole. You fire it across the garden with frustration and as it flies through the air, it opens like a parachute, takes flight and then lands, open, in a tree. Out of breath, you retrieve a carrier bag from the jeep. I recognise it as being from the local off-licence. You empty the bag, line up the cans on the table and then you sit down. You put your boots up on the wooden table, making yourself at home, and settle down as though you couldn’t be more comfortable and you couldn’t be more at home. You invade my head with your voice and now you are an eyesore, right in front of my house.

I watch you for a while but I eventually lose interest because you’re not doing anything other than drinking and blowing smoke rings into the still night sky.

I watch you watching the stars, which are so clear tonight that Jupiter can be seen next to the moon, and I wonder what you’re thinking about. What to do about Fionn. What to do about your job. Are we not so different after all?

6

It is 8.30 a.m. and I am standing in the garden with a builder named Johnny, a large red-cheeked man who acts like he detests me. Nobody is saying anything; he and his colleague, Eddie, leaning on the jackhammer, are just looking at me. Johnny peers over at you in the front garden, asleep in your garden chair with your boots up on the table, and then back at me.

‘So what do you want us to do? Wait until he wakes up?’

‘No! I—’

‘Well, that’s what you said.’

It is exactly what I said.

‘That’s not what I said,’ I say, firmly. ‘Isn’t eight thirty too early to start making so much noise? I thought the official start time for building works was nine a.m.’

He looks around. ‘Most people are at work.’

‘Not on this street,’ I reply. ‘No one works on this street.’ Not any more.

It is an unusual thing to say, but it is entirely true. He looks at me, confused, then back at the guy with the jackhammer like I’m crazy.

‘Look, love, you said you needed this done immediately. I have two days to finish this job and then I’m on to something else, so I either start now or—’

‘Fine, fine. Start now.’

‘I’ll be back at six to take a look.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Another job. Eddie can handle it.’

Without a word, Eddie, who looks about seventeen, puts on his headphones. I hurry inside. I stand at the window in the TV room that faces your garden and I watch you at the table, head back, in a peaceful sleep after your drunken stupor. You have a blanket draped over you. I wonder if your wife did this or if you got it from the car during the night after you woke up, freezing. Common sense ought to have told you to stay in the car and put the heater on, but you’re not one for listening to sense.

Something most definitely seems off this morning. Aside from the fact you are sleeping in the middle of your destroyed garden on lopsided, badly placed garden furniture for everybody to see, your house would usually be busy at this hour. The kids are back at school, your wife should be coming and going as she drops them off and goes about her errands, but there’s nothing happening this morning. There have been no signs of life from the house, the curtains are exactly as they were yesterday morning. Your wife’s car is gone. The umbrella is still stuck in the tree. There are no visible signs of your family at home.

Suddenly the jackhammer starts up and even from inside the house the noise is so loud that I feel the vibrations in my chest. I think for the first time that I should have alerted the neighbours to the disruption that will be occurring over the next few days as they dig up my perfectly fine paving to make way for some grass. They would have done that for me, I’m sure.

You leap up from the chair, arms and legs flying everywhere, and look around as if you’ve come under attack. It takes you a moment to assess where you are, what’s happening, what you have done. And then you take in the builder in my garden. You immediately charge over to my house. My heart pounds and I don’t know exactly why. We have never spoken before, not so much as a hello or a wave in passing. Apart from when you caught me watching you from my bedroom window on New Year’s Eve, you have never even acknowledged my existence, nor I yours, because I detest you and everything you stand for, because you couldn’t understand how any mother, even a dying mother, could be sad about leaving her child with Down syndrome in the world without her. I relive the comments I heard you and your callers say on that night that I fell in hate with you and by the time you reach my garden I am ready for the fight.

I can see you shouting at Eddie. Eddie cannot possibly hear you over the noise and the headphones, but he can see the man standing in front of him, mouth opening and closing angrily, hand on one hip, the other arm pointing to a house, demanding to be heard. Eddie ignores you and continues digging up my expensive paving. I make my way to the hall and I pace before the door, waiting for you to call. I jump when the doorbell rings. Just once. Nothing rude about it at all. A single push, a bright briiing, nothing at all like the routine with your wife.

I open the door and you and I are face to face for the first time ever. This is for my sister, this is for you, Heather, this is for my mother, for the unfairness in her having to leave the daughter she never wanted to leave. I say this to myself over and over, opening and closing my hands, ready to fight.

‘Yes?’ I say, and already it’s confrontational.

You seem taken aback by my tone.

‘Good morning,’ you say patronisingly, as if to tell me, that’s how to begin a conversation, as if you know the tiniest, minutest thing about polite conversation. You hold out your hand. ‘I’m Matt, I live across the road.’

This is very difficult for me. I am not a rude person, but I look at your hand and back at your unshaven face, your bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol emanating from every pore, your mouth that I dislike so much because of the words that come out of it, and I move my hands to the back pockets of my jeans. My heart drums maniacally as I do this. For you, Heather, for you, Mum.

You look at me, incredulous. You take your hand back, shove it into your coat pocket.

‘Have I missed something? It’s eight thirty a.m. and you’re digging up the ground! Is there something we should all know about? Some oil reserves, perhaps, that we can all share?’

You are still drunk, I can tell. Despite your feet being planted firmly on the ground, your body is moving in a circular motion like Michael Jackson’s leaning dance move.

‘If it’s disturbing you so much, maybe you’d find it easier to camp in your back garden for the next few days.’

You look at me like I’m the biggest, craziest bitch and then you walk away.

There are many things that I could have said. Many many ways I could have conveyed my disappointment in the way you discussed Down syndrome. A letter. An invitation to coffee, perhaps. An adult conversation. Instead I said that, on our first meeting. I am immediately sorry, not because I may have hurt you, but because I think I may have wasted an opportunity to actually do something important in the right way. And then it occurs to me for the first time that you probably don’t even remember that particular show. You have done so many, they probably mean nothing to you. I’m just an obnoxious neighbour who didn’t tell you about her building works.

I watch you cross the road to your house. Eddie is still ignoring the world and digging up the ground, the sound of it drumming in my head. You walk up and down the front and back of your house, staring in the windows, trying to figure out how to get in. You stagger a little, still drunk. Then you go to the table and I think you’re going to sit down but instead you pick up a garden chair and carry it to the front door. You swing it back with all your might and then slam it once, twice, three times against the window beside your front door, smashing the glass. None of this can be heard over the sound of the drill. You turn your body sideways, your stocky build making it difficult for you to slide in through the narrow space you’ve created, but eventually you gain entry to your house.

Despite the fact I have witnessed you do this, you once again have made me feel like the irrational one.

7

Eddie works solidly for two hours, then disappears for three hours. During this time the machine is sitting in my front garden, which now resembles the scene of an earthquake. He has wreaked mayhem and I hate looking at it, but I can’t help it because I am watching out the window, not for you – I know you won’t surface for hours – but for Eddie who wandered off down the road still wearing his hard hat and never came back. I call Johnny, who doesn’t answer and his phone has no messaging service. This is not a good sign. He was recommended to me by the landscaper I’ve hired for my garden, which is also not a good sign.

My mobile rings and it’s a private number so I don’t answer. My aunt Jennifer has told me, drunkenly on Christmas Day, that my cousin Kevin is coming home in the New Year and wants to get in touch. This is the New Year and I have been fielding my calls like the CIA. Kevin left Ireland when he was twenty-two, at first travelling the world, and then eventually settling in Australia, though I don’t think Kevin ever settled. He went off to find himself after a flurry of family drama and never came back, not even for Christmas, birthdays or my mum’s funeral. This is the same Kevin who told me I’d die when I was five – and who told me he was in love with me when I was seventeen.

My aunt was away with my mum for the weekend on one of their retreats to help Mum and, as I always did then, I was sleeping over in their house. My uncle Billy was watching TV and Kevin and I were sitting in the back garden on the swing set, spilling our hearts out to one another. I was telling him about Mum being sick, and he was listening. He was doing a really good job of listening. And then he told me his secret: that he’d just discovered he was adopted. He said he felt betrayed, after all this time, but it suddenly made sense to him, all the feelings he’d been having. About me. He was in love with me. Next thing I knew, he was on me, hands everywhere, hot breath and slippery tongue in my mouth. Whenever I thought about him after that I’d wash my mouth out for as long as I could. He may not have been my cousin in blood, but he was my cousin. We’d played Lord of the Flies in the trees at the back of his garden, we’d tied his brother Michael up and roasted him on the spit, we’d played dress-up and put on shows standing on windowsills. We’d done family things together. Every memory of him I had was tied up in him being my cousin. I felt disgusted by him.

We didn’t speak after that. I never told my aunt, but I knew that she knew. I assumed my mum had told her, but she never discussed it with me. After that first year she went from being nervously apologetic about what had happened to being irritated by me. I think she felt that my forgiving him would be the one thing that would bring him back to her. He hadn’t left the country at that stage, but Kevin had never wanted to be a part of anything or anyone, not least his family, he’d always been troubled, he’d always been unsure of himself and everyone around him. I’d had enough to deal with at that time; his issues were too much for me. Maybe that’s cruel, but at seventeen there was no understanding of his problems; he was my gross adopted cousin with problems who’d kissed me, and I wanted him the hell away from me. But now he is back and one of these days I will have to face him. I don’t have an issue with him any more, I no longer have the need to wash my mouth out when I think of him. Nevertheless, even though I have nothing of importance to do, I can think of better ways to spend my days than engaging in an awkward conversation with a cousin who tried to French kiss me on a garden swing sixteen years ago.

It is while I’m watching out the window and waiting for Eddie to return that the house phone rings. Nobody has the number apart from Dad and Heather, and it is usually only Heather who calls, so I answer it.

‘Could I speak with Jasmine Butler, please?’

I pause, trying to place the voice. I don’t think it’s Kevin. I’m imagining he would have an Australian accent now, but maybe not. Either way, I don’t think it’s him. Aunt Jennifer would have to be incredibly cruel to give him the number. There’s an accent that I can’t quite place hiding behind a Dublin accent, somewhere outside of Dublin but inside Ireland. A gentle country lilt.

‘Who is speaking?’

‘Am I speaking to Jasmine Butler?’ he asks.

I smile and try to hide my amusement. ‘Could you tell me who’s speaking, please? I’m Ms Butler’s housekeeper.’

‘Ah, I’m sorry,’ he says, perfectly happy and charming. ‘And what is your name?’

Who is this? He called me and now he is trying to take control, but not in a rude way, he is utterly polite and has a lovely tone. I can’t place the accent. Not Dublin. Not Northern. Not Southern either. Midlands? No. Charming, though. Probably a salesman. And now I have to think of a name and get him off the phone. I look at the hall table beside me and see the pen beside the charging base for the phone.

‘Pen,’ I say, and try not to laugh. ‘Pen-ny. Penelope, but people call me Penny.’

‘And sometimes Pen?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’ I smile.

‘Can I get your surname?’

‘Is this for a survey or something?’

‘Oh no, just in case I call you again and Ms Butler isn’t home. On the off chance that that happens.’

I laugh again at his sarcasm. ‘Ah.’ I look down at the table and see the notepad beside the pen. I roll my eyes. ‘Pad.’ I cough to conceal my laugh. ‘Paddington.’

‘Okay, Penelope Paddington,’ he repeats, and I’m sure he knows. If he has any sense, he knows. ‘Do you know when Ms Butler will be home?’

‘I couldn’t say.’ I sit down on the arm of the couch, still looking outside, and I see Dr Jameson at the front door of your house. ‘She comes and goes. With work.’ Dr Jameson is looking in through the broken glass. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s a private matter,’ he says politely, warmly. ‘I’d prefer to discuss it with her herself.’

‘Does she know you?’ I ask.

‘Not yet,’ he says, ‘But maybe you could tell her I called.’

‘Of course.’ I pick up the pen and paper to take his details.

‘I’ll try her on her mobile,’ he says.

‘You have her mobile?’

‘And her work number, but I called the office and she’s unavailable.’

That stops me. Somebody who knows me well enough to have all three numbers yet has no idea that I was fired. I am flummoxed.

‘Thanks, Penelope, you’ve been a great help. Have a good day.’ He hangs up and I’m left listening to the dial tone, confused.

‘Jasmine,’ I call to myself in a sing-song tone. ‘An absolute weirdo just called looking for you.’

Dr Jameson is walking across the road to me.

‘Hello, Dr Jameson,’ I greet him, seeing the white envelope in his hand and wondering what on earth the street is planning now and how much I need to contribute.

‘Hello, Jasmine.’

He is dressed perfectly as usual in a shirt and V-neck sweater, trousers with the perfect crease down the middle, polished shoes. He is smaller than me, and at five foot eight I feel like an exotic, unnatural creature beside him. My hair is bright red, fire-engine red, or booster scarlet power as L’Oréal calls it. Naturally I’m brown-haired, but neither me nor the rest of the world has seen that since I was fifteen, the only traces of it now are my eyebrows, as my scalp is increasingly sprouting grey hairs rather than brown. The red, I’m told, makes my eye colour stand out even more than usual; they’re a shade of turquoise that I’m used to most people commenting on. My eyes and my hair are the first things anybody ever sees of me. Whether I’m at work or at a party, I always, absolutely always go out with my ultra-jet-black eyeliner. I’m all eyes and hair. And boobs. They too are rather large, but I do nothing unnatural to accentuate them, they stick out and up all by themselves, clever things.

‘I’m sorry about the noise this morning,’ I say, genuinely meaning it. ‘I should have warned you in advance.’

‘Not at all …’ He waves his hand dismissively, as though in a rush to say something else. ‘I was across the way, looking for our friend, but it seems he’s otherwise detained,’ he says, as if our friend – meaning you – is out in the back garden making animal balloons for a group of kids and not passed out on the bathroom floor in a pool of his own vomit. Just guessing.

‘Amy gave this to me for Mr Marshall – we can call him Matt, can’t we?’ The way he looks at me conspiratorially makes me think that he knows I’ve been watching, a lot. But he can’t know that, unless he’s watching me, and I know that’s not true because I watch him.

‘Who’s Amy?’

‘Matt’s wife.’

‘Ah. Yes. Of course.’ Like I’d known but had forgotten. I had not known.

‘I think it’s rather urgent that he receives this’ – he waves the white envelope – ‘but he’s not responding. I would leave it in the, er … open window, but I couldn’t be sure that he’d get it. Besides there’s a copy which I’d like to give to you.’ He holds out an envelope to me.

‘A copy of what?’

‘The house key. Amy cut two extra keys for the neighbours – she thought it might come in handy,’ he says, in a surprised way, when we both know it is the most obvious and sensible thing we’ve ever heard. ‘I don’t think she’s there, or that she’ll be there for a while,’ he says, his eyes piercing into mine.

Ah. Understood.

I move my hands away from the key and envelope that he’s thrusting at me.

‘I think it’s best if you keep these, Dr Jameson. I’m not the right person to mind them.’

‘Why so?’

‘You know my life, I’m coming and going all the time. I’m so busy. Work and … you know, things. I think it would be better to leave them with somebody who is here more.’

‘Ah. I was under the impression that you … well, that you are home more often these days.’

Stung. ‘Well, yes, but I still think it’s better that you keep them.’ I am standing my ground.

‘I have a key already, but I’m going away for a fortnight. My nephew has asked me to go on holiday with his family. This is the first time,’ his face lights up. ‘Rather polite of them, though I’m sure he had to be convinced of it by Stella. Lovely lady. And I do appreciate it. Spain,’ he says, eyes twinkling. ‘Anyway …’ his face darkens, ‘I’ll have to find a home for these.’ He looks extremely bothered by this.

As guilty as it makes me feel, I can’t do this. I can’t take somebody’s key into my home. A perfect stranger. It’s weird. I don’t want to be involved. I want to keep to myself. I know I watch you, but … I can’t do this. I won’t be moved, despite his worried, befuddled face. If I had a job, I wouldn’t be in this suburban mess right now, having to care about other people’s issues that they ought to be keeping to themselves.

‘Maybe you could give them to Mr and Mrs Malone.’ I have no idea of their names. I’ve lived next door to them for four years and I still don’t know, even though they send me a Christmas card every year with both their names on.

‘Well, that’s an idea,’ he says uncertainly, and I know why he is uncertain. He doesn’t want to bring them trouble. When you are locked out of your house in your angry drunken state it should not fall upon Mr and Mr Malone, who are in their seventies, to deal with your problems. The same can be said of the Murphys and the Lennons. He’s right, I know this, but I just can’t. ‘Are you sure you won’t?’ he asks one more time.

‘Positive,’ I say firmly, shaking my head. I will not get drawn into this.

‘I understand.’ He nods, lips pursed, and takes the envelope back into his two hands. He fixes me with a look and I know that he has witnessed the same nightly scene that I have. ‘I do understand.’

He bids me farewell and I have to break into a run to prevent him stepping into the road as an ambulance comes racing along at full speed. We both automatically look across to your house, thinking something must have happened, but the ambulance stops outside the Malones’ house and the paramedics rush to the door.

‘Oh, goodness,’ he says. I have never known anyone to say as many crikeys, fiddlesticks, goodnesses, goshes, and okey-dokeys as Dr Jameson.

Standing beside him, I watch as Mrs Malone is carried out on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her face, and loaded into the back of the ambulance. A grey-faced Mr Malone follows behind them. He looks shell-shocked. It breaks my heart right there and then. I hope it wasn’t my fault. I hope it wasn’t the drill in my garden that gave her a heart attack as it had almost given you one.

‘Vincent,’ he says, seeing Dr Jameson. ‘Marjorie.’ I assume this is his wife and feel terrible for never knowing her name. Poor Marjorie. I hope that she is okay.

‘I’ll take care of her, Jimmy,’ Dr Jameson says. ‘Twice a day? Food in the cupboard?’

‘Yes,’ Mr Malone says breathlessly as he is helped into the back of the ambulance.

No. Not the wife.

The doors close and the ambulance speeds off, leaving the street as empty as it was, as if nothing has happened at all, the siren quietening as it drives further away.

‘Dear, dear,’ my neighbour says, seeming shaken too. ‘Goodness gracious.’

‘Are you okay, Dr Jameson?’

‘Vincent, please – I haven’t practised for ten years now,’ he says absent-mindedly. ‘I’d better go feed the cat. Who will feed it while I’m gone? Perhaps I shouldn’t go. First this’ – he looks at the envelope and key in his hand – ‘now the Malones. Yes, perhaps I’m needed here.’

I feel nothing but guilt and dread, and a slight grudge that the universe has conspired against me. It would be rude of me to suggest another neighbour at this point, though it is what I want to do. Two no’s in one day would not make me look good.

‘I’ll feed the cat while you’re away,’ I say. ‘As long as you show me where everything is.’

‘Rightso.’ He nods, still shaken.

‘How do we get in?’ I look at their empty house, perfect with its garden gnomes, its little signs for leprechauns crossing, and fairy doors stuck on to a tree for their grandchildren, slab stones leading all around the garden to explore behind trees and under weeping willows. The blinds are from the eighties, beiges and salmon pinks, all scrunched up like puffballs at the top of the windows, chintzy china on the windowsills and a table near the window filled with photographs. It is like a dollhouse stuck in a time warp, lovingly decorated and cared for.

‘I have their key,’ he says.

Of course he does. It seems everybody has everybody’s keys on this street apart from mine. He looks down at the envelope in his hands, your single key inside it, as though it’s the first time he’s seen it. I notice his hands are shaking.

‘Vincent, I’ll take that,’ I say gently, placing a hand over his as I take it from him.

And so that is how I end up with the letter from your wife to you and a spare key to your house.

Just so you know, I never wanted them from the start.

8

Eddie returns and does another two hours’ work. I know this because I am in the middle of forking cat food into Marjorie’s bowl when she leaps out of her skin with fright at the sound of the drill and she disappears. I think about searching for her but I don’t want to wander around the rooms and intrude, and she’s a cat, she’ll be fine. Eddie is hard at work when Johnny returns to inspect the job and it’s as if he never left at all. He listens to my complaint about Eddie without blinking, or without commenting, inspects the work, declares that they’re on schedule and they leave in a battered red van half an hour early because they have another job. They don’t go far, they reverse directly into your driveway and hop out. I’m aware that I’ve turned into a curtain twitcher but I can’t help it, I’m intrigued. Johnny measures the broken window panel beside the front door, then they take a wooden board from the back of the van, and I can’t see them but I can hear them sawing from behind the open doors. It’s only five thirty and it’s pitch-black outside. They are working in relative darkness, lit only by the porch light, and there is a faint glow coming from the back of the house, the kitchen. You must be awake now.

They spend ten minutes securing the wooden board to your window, then they hop into the red van and drive off. My garden is nowhere close to being complete.

I have your letter in my hand. Dr Jameson has made me promise that I will hand it to you directly. He and I must know that you’ve received it so he can tell Amy. I’ve left the key to your house on my kitchen counter, it looks alien there but I can’t think of where to put it. The key seems to stick out, almost throbbing on the table; wherever I sit or stand my eye is drawn to it. It feels wrong, having something of yours in my home. I look down and turn over the letter. I guess your wife, Amy, has left you, finally, and has entrusted her neighbours to make certain her words, her reasoning – I’m sure she would have taken a long time, painstakingly labouring over the letter – will reach you. I feel that I owe it to her to see that you get this letter. I should enjoy giving it to you, but I don’t and I’m glad about that. I’m not numb to human emotions the way you are.

I put on my coat and pick up the envelope. My mobile rings, a number I don’t recognise. Thinking it is the peculiar salesman, I answer it.

‘Hi, Jasmine, it’s Kevin.’

As my heart sinks into my stomach I watch as you leave the house, get into your car and drive away while I listen to the cousin who tried to kiss me tell me he’s home.

I can’t sleep. Not just because I’ve arranged to meet with my cousin Kevin in a few days – out, not in my home so I can leave him when I want to – but because I’m trying to run through all the possible scenarios that could happen later when you return. Me giving you your key, your letter, me opening your door, you attacking me in your drunken state, throwing a chair at me, shouting at me, who knows. I did not want to take this on, but neighbourly duty made me feel obliged.

I’m wide awake when you drive home. ‘Paradise City’ is blaring again. You brake before you hit the garage door, you take the keys from the ignition, you stumble to the door, trip over your feet a few times while you concentrate on the keys jingling in your hands. It takes you a while, but you get the key in the door. You stumble inside and close the door. The hall light goes on. The landing light goes on. The hall light goes off. Your bedroom light goes on. Five minutes later your bedroom light goes off.

Suddenly my bedroom is eerily quiet and I realise I’ve been holding my breath. I lie down, feeling confused.

I am disappointed.

At the weekend I have my dinner party. There are eight of us. These are close friends of mine. Bianca is not here, she is at home with her newborn son, but Tristan has come out. He is asleep in the armchair by the fire before we even sit down to our starters. We leave him there and begin without him.

Most of the conversation revolves around their new children. I like this, it’s a distraction. I learn a lot about colic and I put on a concerned face when they discuss sleep deprivation; then they move on to weaning, discussing appropriate vegetables and fruits. A daddy has to google whether kiwi fruit is an acceptable first fruit. I get a thirty-minute earful from Caroline about her sex life with her new boyfriend since separating from her dirt-bag husband. I also like this, it’s a distraction. It’s real life, it’s things that I want to hear about. Then attention turns to me and my job, and though they are my friends and I adore them and they are gentle, I can’t bring myself to talk about it honestly. I tell them I am enjoying the break and join in with them about how great it is to be paid to kick around at home. They laugh as I try to make them jealous with exaggerated stories of lie-ins and book-reading and the mere luxury of time that I have to myself to do whatever I please. However it feels unnatural and I’m uncomfortable, like I’m playing a part, because I don’t believe a word of what I’m saying. I am never more grateful to hear the sound of your jeep. I hope that you are more trashed than usual.

I haven’t told my friends about your recent drunken late-night antics. I don’t know why this is. It is perfect fodder. They would love to hear all about it, and what makes it juicier is that you’re famous. But I can’t bring myself to tell anyone. It’s as if it’s my secret. I’ve chosen to protect you and I don’t know why. Perhaps I take your behaviour and your situation too seriously to make a joke about it at a dinner party. You have children, a wife who has just left you. I loathe you, everybody who knows me properly knows that, and nothing about you makes me want to laugh at you. I pull the curtains so that they can’t see you.

I hear you banging, but everybody continues talking, this time a debate about who should get their tubes tied and who should get the snip, and they don’t notice your noise. They think I’m joking when I say that I would like the snip, but I haven’t been concentrating.

Suddenly everything is quiet outside. I can’t concentrate and start to feel agitated, nervous that they will hear you, that the boys will want to go outside and see you, jeer at you or help you, and ruin my private thing that I have with you. I know this is odd. This is all that I have and only I can truly understand what goes on with you at night. I don’t want to have to explain.

I clear away the dessert plates; my friends are talking and laughing, the atmosphere is great and Tristan is still asleep in the armchair, baking by the open fire. Caroline helps me and we spend another few minutes in the kitchen while she fills me in on the things she and her new boyfriend have been doing. I should be shocked by what I hear, she wants me to be shocked, but I can’t concentrate, I keep thinking of you outside. And the key is beside me on the counter, still throbbing. When Caroline nips out to go to the toilet, I make my escape; grabbing the letter and your key, I pull on my coat and slip outside without anybody noticing.

As I cross the road I can see you sitting at the table. It is 11 p.m. Early for you to return home. You are eating from a McDonald’s bag. You watch me cross the road and I feel self-conscious. I wrap my arms around my body, pretending to feel colder than I do with the alcohol keeping me warm. I stop at the table.

‘Hi,’ I say.

You look at me, bleary-eyed. I’ve never seen you sober, up close. I’ve never seen you drunk up close either; you were in between when we met the other morning so I’m not sure exactly what state you’re in, but you’re sitting outside eating a McDonald’s at eleven o’clock at night in three-degree weather, the smell of alcohol heavy in the air, so you can’t be fully compos mentis.

‘Hi,’ you say.

It’s a positive start.

‘Dr Jameson asked me to give this to you.’ I hold out the envelope.

You take it, look at it and put it down on the table.

‘Dr J’s away?’

‘He said his nephew invited him to Spain.’

‘Did he?’ You light up. ‘About time.’

This surprises me. I didn’t know that you and Dr Jameson were close. Not that your response hints at closeness, but it hints at some kind of relationship.

‘You know Dr J’s wife died fifteen years ago, they had no kids, his brother and his wife both passed away, the only family he has is that nephew and he never visits or invites Dr J to anything,’ you say, clearly annoyed about this. Then you burp. ‘Excuse me.’

‘Oh,’ is all I know to say.

You look at me.

‘You live across the road?’

I’m confused. I can’t tell whether you are pretending we have never met or if you genuinely don’t remember. I try to figure you out.

‘You do. In number three, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I finally say.

‘I’m Matt.’ You hold out your hand.

I’m not sure if it’s a new beginning; it could be staged, in which case you will pull your hand away and stick out your tongue as soon as I reach out to you. Whatever your motive, if you’ve forgotten my rudeness from a few days ago, this is a fresh chance for me to do what I should have done.

‘Jasmine,’ I say, and reach out to take your hand.

It’s not so much like shaking hands with the devil as I thought. Your hand is ice-cold, your skin rough like it’s chapped from the winter chill.

‘He also gave me a copy of the key to your house. Your wife made copies for him and me.’ I hold it out to you.

You look at it warily.

‘I don’t have to keep the key if you don’t want me to.’

‘Why wouldn’t I want you to?’

‘I don’t know. You don’t know me. Anyway, here. You can let yourself in and keep the key if you want.’

You look at the key. ‘It’s probably better if you keep it.’

You carry on looking at me and I start to feel uncomfortable. I’m not sure what to do; you clearly have no intention of moving, so I go to your front door and open it.

‘Are you having a party?’ you ask, looking across at the parked cars.

‘Just dinner.’

I feel bad then. You’re eating from a McDonald’s bag; am I supposed to invite you in? No, we’re strangers, and you have been the enemy since I was a teenager, I can’t invite you in.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.