‘He fights with me and breaks my stuff and kicks me off the sofa—’

‘And have you told your father?’

‘Yeah – but he’s not there all day and there’s nothing he can really do about it anyway because Barry doesn’t listen to him. And he smashed a window out at the school.’

‘What?’

‘He smashed a window, in the science classroom, during break. He said it wasn’t him but the school think it was. Because he’d accused the science teacher of bullying him.’

‘And what did your father do?’

‘He told Barry he wasn’t allowed out for two weeks but Barry just heads off with his friends every afternoon and he doesn’t listen to Sheila either.’

‘Oh, Barry,’ she said, and reminded herself to phone the school again. Master O’Connor had made her feel like a nuisance last time she’d called, like Barry’s truancy was none of her business. ‘But Sheila, does she stick up for you when Barry’s acting the mick?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Mrs Diver – is she good to you? Do you like her?’ She had promised herself that she would not ask questions about Ann Diver.

‘Yeah – she’s all right. She buys me sweets and stuff. But sometimes . . .’

‘Sometimes what, pet?’

‘She’s always telling me what to do. She tells me to stop watching so much TV and to brush my teeth and she makes me go to bed at half nine and you used to let me go at ten.’

‘And does she stay over in the house much?’

‘Not much – maybe once a week.’

Ann Diver, in her bed, beside her husband. Ann Diver, who was so nice and holy and good. She had Shaun going to mass again, which had been something he did only at Christmas and Easter. Did they even have sex or were they bound in some kind of chaste and sacred union? On the rare occasion when it happened, Shaun enjoyed sex, was connected to her and his own body during the act in a way you’d never have guessed from his usual awkward demeanour. Still, it was hard to imagine anyone getting enthused about having sex with Ann Diver.

The tide was coming in fast and they were being forced back off the sand and onto the shelf of stone that shored up the coastal wall.

‘Carl,’ she said, ‘I suppose the real reason I wanted to speak to you was because I need you to know that when I went away that time, it was never my intention to be away from you for so long. I wanted you to come to Dublin and live with me, and—’

‘That man?’

‘Carl – that man is not a part of my life anymore and he is not going to be. That’s all over.’

Carl had picked up a long stick. There was a pool of water in a dip in the rocks. He began to poke at a pile of ink-black seaweed, lifting it on the end of the stick and lowering it into the water.

‘Carl – are you listening to me? I just want you to know that none of it is your fault.’

‘You said that before, that time when you came home and left again.’ He was pointing the stick at her. ‘And Daddy says that too. So it must be your fault or else why am I not allowed to see you?’

‘This is what I’m trying to say to you – mammies and daddies fight and go through problems and sometimes they are complicated and they can’t be fixed that easily, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s to blame.’

‘But why can’t you just come home and be in the house? It’s where you live. You can’t just be kicked out of your own house.’

It hurt to hear her son speak this injustice so plainly. ‘Carl – I made the decision to leave. But I didn’t make the decision to leave you. Just know that if it was up to me, I would be back home with you in a minute and that I spend every waking moment thinking about you. And remember – the only men in my life now are you and Barry and Ronan.’

‘But not Daddy?’

‘Carl,’ she said, lowering herself onto one knee. She felt the fabric of her jeans grow damp against the rock. ‘We don’t have long left and I don’t want to spend that time getting at you but I just wanted to say one more thing . . . The school told me that you’ve been fighting.’

His head bowed and he puffed out his cheeks and two perfectly round tears trembled on his lashes and spilled down his face.

‘And what have we always said about anger?’ she asked.

His mouth opened and closed a couple of times. He was trying to get the words out but his breath was catching on the sobs rising in his throat. ‘That – it’s – a . . .’

‘That it’s just another way of showing we’re hurt, and I know you’re hurt, pet. I know you’re angry and you’re hurt and you have every right to be but you mustn’t take it out on the people around you,’ she said. ‘Do you know what I do when I’m angry? It’s a new thing I’ve learned.’

He raised his head and looked at her.

‘I go down to the beach and I scream. I roar at the top of my lungs. Will we try it?’ And before he could answer she grabbed his wrists and threw back her head and strained her mouth open so wide it pained her cheeks and she let out a shout that came from the very depths of her stomach and drew every breath from her. She rocked a little, unsteadied, emptied by the effort of it. But she was laughing too, taken over by a breathless gaiety. And when she looked at Carl again, she could see the confusion in his eyes and he began to let out a moaning sound, low and fearful. She tried to catch the pitch of it, to match it with her screams, and Carl’s cries grew louder, bolder, until the two of them were roaring with abandon and she had to grip his wrists tighter to hold their bodies in place. And the wind was such that it swallowed the noise, wrapped it up and carried it away, so all she felt was a dull ache in her ears, a low hum in her bones. Their shouts imploded into laughter and she held his body tight against her and closed her eyes. And when she opened them again, she saw two figures on the steps to the coastal wall so bundled up in coats and hats and scarves that it took her a few moments to recognise who it was standing there staring at them. She watched as Izzy slid her arm over Niall’s shoulder and drew him against her.

Chapter 11

As Collete pulled up, the bottles gave one last triumphant rattle in the boot of the car. She sat there in darkness watching the place where she now lived – it looked so makeshift, so temporary. A sense of emptiness emanated from it, like it had been abandoned long ago and all that was left was the shell of a dwelling, its dead eyes gazing back at her. ‘Fucking fool,’ she said out loud.

She walked around to the boot, lifted out two plastic bags. The handles, stretched thin by the weight of the bottles, scored deep furrows in her fingers. She managed to unlock the door and set the bags down beside the counter, turning on the little light over the cooker. She pulled a bottle from one of the bags and drove a corkscrew into the neck, watching the foil splinter.

She should eat, she told herself, and then she should sleep. She was exhausted. She had barely slept the past few nights anticipating this meeting with her son. And she had not been prepared for the shock of Carl’s anger. It was there in his eyes, leaping out at her. She had tried to soften it with explanations that sounded hollow even as she’d spoken them. This project of easing his pain had been nothing more than an attempt to comfort herself, and she’d failed at that. She felt none of the peace she’d imagined. She’d simply been desperate for him – that was it. She had wanted so desperately to see him that she had convinced herself of the rightness of the act. And now the emptiness she felt was so vast, she would do anything to fill it. She thought of Michael Breslin, the pounding of her heart as she’d answered the door, him stinking of drink, his great gut straining over his belt. Bashful, he was, retreating before she’d even dismissed him. But tonight she would not have sent him away. She would have taken him in and placed a drink in his hand and gladly spent the night fending off his advances if it meant that she didn’t have to be alone.

She downed her wine, refilled the glass, and took a seat at the table. A notebook lay open in front of her with words written down the length of the page in pencil, like a shopping list. Titles, for poems she might one day write. She had begun to set lower and lower expectations for herself. Each morning she climbed back into bed with a mug of tea, sweet enough and strong enough to strip the hangover from her. By midday she was at the table, but it was so difficult to put down even a word that sometimes a single line could be enough for her to call it a day. Often, when her concentration failed her, she found herself walking to the kitchen window. She watched for any sign of the Mullens. She seldom saw Donal and Dolores together, but sometimes they headed off in the car with the kids. Dolores would sit in the passenger seat while Donal placed the children in the back and fastened their seat belts, circled the car closing the doors. He often kicked the tyres. The whole performance was so absurdly proprietorial, but what she saw was a man concerned with the safe conveyance of his family.

It was new to her, this feeling of being unsafe. In all the years she’d lain beside Shaun she’d never thought of the fact of his presence as any kind of protection. Then John had lain beside her. Now she imagined into that empty space the body of one of these men, and newly conjured was the figure of the man next door. But it was more than protection she was summoning. She had so little else to compare it with, but the sex with John she could have best described as serviceable, just another regret heaped upon the affair. Donal Mullen was a different prospect altogether, and she could not deny the pure fact of his attractiveness, how brutally uncomplicated he appeared. That first time he had shown up at the cottage, the deliberate ease with which he’d moved around the space – it was all she could do to occupy herself with that letter, the temptation to lay her eyes upon him was so strong.

He could either be a snow day, an escape from the routines and rituals that now comprised her life, or the cold shock that would wake her up. She was prepared to suffer either eventuality. And whenever she walked to the window and saw Donal emerging from the house, she counted one, two, three – and every time, he looked up at the cottage.

In the afternoons she walked the beach, and did her best to tamp down her fears over her dwindling finances, staving off the day when she would have to go to Shaun, cap in hand, and ask for more money. There were so few hours of daylight that it was dark by half four and however early darkness fell that always seemed like an acceptable time for a drink. She prepared herself a meagre supper and listened to the radio. She could just about manage to read a few pages of a novel. She could only read poetry that was new and unfamiliar to her. The collections that had offered her solace in the past could now undo her with a single line. She no longer needed Elizabeth Bishop to remind her that the art of losing is a skill so easily acquired. And then she meted out the medication she’d stolen from her mother, bit off half of one of the bitter blue tablets. She drank until her thoughts could no longer rise up against the tide of her exhaustion, and she was dragged down into sleep.

She closed the notebook and pushed it across the table. It knocked into the envelopes she’d leant against the vase. They fell forward, one sliding across the oilcloth, delivered to her. She turned her eyes away from it. The weak light above the cooker barely made it to the corners of the room, crept far enough only to give an impression of things, and for a moment she felt as though her entire known world was held within the scope of that light. She’d had so much, had been offered everything. Shaun had said, keep that apartment in Dublin, go there as much as you want. He hadn’t even suggested she get rid of John. Keep your marriage, keep your family, keep your home. Everything. You’re not listening to me, you’re not listening to me – that was what she had said over and over, that night she had driven back to Donegal to tell Shaun she was leaving him and he had carefully responded with a diluted version of the future she proposed. It was like he had anticipated the conversation, had been preparing for her withdrawal from his life for some time. And she realised now how thoroughly she had been understood.

More than that – she had married a man who had offered her the financial means and freedom to conduct her life, her career, exactly as she wished, and who had looked on with humble adoration. How many women could say the same – they had been adored by their husband? For her part, when it came to leaving him, she’d told him she wanted nothing. She had been magnanimous – and wasn’t that a cheap trick? No wonder he’d hardened against her so fully when the time came, no wonder he had turned to wholesome, simple Ann. And how like every other man he’d behaved, as soon as he believed something belonging to him was threatened – that was a great disappointment to her. She didn’t know if she could forgive him for that.

When she’d phoned from Dublin and told him she wanted Carl to stay with her for the summer, he saw that it was her intention to have him come and live there. He’d stopped paying the rent on the apartment, and two days later a van driven by one of the men from the factory arrived from Donegal with forty-seven cardboard boxes containing everything she owned. Standing in that cramped apartment, towers of boxes surrounding her, she’d picked up the phone and called Shaun at his office.

‘You never forgave me,’ she’d said.

‘You never forgave yourself,’ he’d said.

Seventeen years since she’d gone to give her son Patrick his morning feed and found him cold and stiff in his cot. She had collapsed entirely, had needed her mother to move up from Dublin to help with Ronan, who was still only a toddler at the time. Shaun had returned to work a week after the funeral. She had wanted to die and was lit by rage that he seemed capable of living. She drank herself to sleep every night. And then she found out she was pregnant with Barry and she began to see a way to survive. It baffled her that at a time when she had no interest in living, she wanted to bring a child into the world, and yet it was the only thing that made sense to her. And over the years she had watched Shaun kiss and cuddle each of their sons, read them bedtime stories, had taken great pleasure in seeing whichever of the boys needed most help at the time, sitting at the dining room table, with Shaun offering instruction on their homework. Shaun did not frequent pubs, did not play golf like so many other men in the town. He enjoyed the company of his children. He was a busy man but what little time he had, he spent with them. Yet she’d continued to underestimate his love for their sons, and having lost one already, she’d thought he was just going to give Carl up because she’d asked him to.

She’d calculated everything so carefully. In many respects remaining in Dublin had made a great deal of sense. She’d spent her entire adult life in a cultural backwater where opportunities to advance her career were limited. She could get more teaching work if she stayed in Dublin. If she returned to Donegal, very soon she’d find herself alone in that house with Shaun, and with little practical purpose as a mother. Ronan was already at Trinity, Barry already at boarding school in Dublin, and in a year’s time Carl would be joining him. But when she’d told John that Shaun had stopped paying the rent, that they’d need to find a bigger place so that Carl could come and stay with them, he was all talk then of his responsibilities to his wife and his daughter and his unpaid mortgage.

‘Fucking fool,’ she said again, to test her voice, to hear its sound. The cottage was the place where she had started to converse with herself aloud. She had said things before of course, sung songs and cursed when she stubbed her toe. But in this house she had begun to say fully formed sentences out loud. It felt like tempting fate. That is the kind of thing a mad person would do was one of the things she said sometimes. Once she had spoken this, she felt like she had breached some boundary, and she began to say things when she was out walking on the beach, testing how close she could get to another body before she would make herself stop. And what would be the end of that?