Madeleine threw herself down on the sofa beside her little sister, who was propped up against a pile of cushions, quietly watching the TV. Jessica slowly turned her wide-eyed gaze on Madeleine, fascinated by this performance. Then as though in a trance she slipped down off the sofa, trailing her blanket after her, and sidled closer to the TV.

‘Of course I’m jealous.’ She held Eric’s ankles between her thumb and middle finger and dusted his arse with talcum powder. ‘I’m six months pregnant and you get to go out and have fun while I’m here with two weans. You have it all ahead of you. And that’s why you can wait. You can wait until you’re sixteen – two more years.’

‘But Ciara and Tara go every week and they’re the same age as me. Tara’s mother won’t even let her get her ears pierced and she’s allowed to go to Glenties!’ And with that she was up again and stamping off down the hall.

Jessica tilted into her eyeline with a listless twirl, having clearly decided that far too much attention was being paid to Madeleine. She was singing softly, just letting out random notes and sounds as she danced.

‘Dolores!’ her husband roared.

Madeleine always went straight to her father when she didn’t get what she wanted.

‘Dolores!’ the shout came again.

She sighed and sat back on her heels. She stared down at her son as he chewed on his bottom lip and held out his arms to her, his little fists flashing open and closed. Dolores pulled a white vest over Eric’s head and then slid him into his sleep suit, pushing his feet down into the legs and poking his hands through the cuffs. When she snapped the buttons closed it formed the picture of a woolly sheep across his chest. She bent down and rubbed her nose against his. ‘Now you’re in your sheep suit,’ she said, ‘and you’re gonna be fast asheep in no time.’

‘Mammy – look the man,’ Jessica said, and Dolores looked over to the window where Jessica was chewing on the windowsill and peering out.

‘Jessica, love, if you’re that hungry, I think it’s time for your dinner.’

Her daughter removed her mouth from the sill, drawing a strand of saliva with her. ‘Look the man, Mammy.’ She was pointing at an empty sky where the light was draining away.

‘What man, love?’ Dolores began tossing objects into the baby bag.

‘Man up there,’ she said – three notes, one high, one low, one high. She jumped up and down and waved her bum around.

Dolores gathered Eric into her arms and groaned as she rose to her feet. She walked to the window and placed her hand on the back of her daughter’s head.

‘Man!’ her daughter said more energetically this time, pointing at the cottage, and Dolores looked out over the waterlogged grass of her front garden and up the hill to where a tall man stood. He had thick grey hair and glasses, and a long camel coat. His nose was hooked, like a crow. He was staring out over the wall with his hands behind his back. And he looked sad. He also looked distinguished. He wore a grey scarf, loosely tied. He obviously had something to do with Colette, and she thought that maybe now she had a fellow of her own she could leave hers alone.

Dolores moved Eric down to her hip out of the way of her bump and rested his bottom into the palm of her hand. She pressed the nail of her thumb into the cracked skin between her knuckles. If she could have gone back to that moment when Colette Crowley had shown up at her house, she would have shooed her from the door like a stray dog. She hadn’t thought for a second that that woman, who was at least ten years older than her and looked every day of it, would have been of interest to any man, especially her husband. She’d never met his other women, the ones who phoned the house and hung up, but she knew from the magazines he brought home what his tastes were. He bought cheap, amateur stuff, with strange eighties throwbacks – women with big perms and sweatbands, wearing leotards with no gusset. And his preference was for the palest and skinniest, the ones with the tiniest tits, and this had been some small comfort to her. ‘Look at that,’ he’d say to her while he fucked her from behind, the magazine laid out on the pillow in front of her face. And if she looked away, he pressed her face down into it. He said it helped him along.

But Colette Crowley was as unlike Dolores as it was possible to be. She was another species altogether. And she wouldn’t look at dirty magazines while you fucked her. Or maybe she would, because Dolores had thought a lot about this – you never did know. When that woman showed up on her doorstep in her ugly woollen skirt and her roll-neck jumper and her big mop of black hair with the greys showing – and that fucking saddlebag – she’d thought nothing of her. And then as soon as she told her mother and her sisters that they were renting the cottage to Colette Crowley they started making jokes. ‘Oh, she’s a fine one to have living next door to you – lock up your husbands – she’s man-mad that one.’ Her mother also told her Colette had lost a child. Cot death, she said it was. Dolores had gone cold when she heard that, would not have wished it on anyone, but there was the feeling too that this woman up in the cottage was cursed and Dolores had invited her in. And she’d had nothing but trouble since.

And after her mother and her sisters told her these things it was like every time she saw Colette she noticed something new about her. Her blue eyes were flecked with light, like glass shattered into a thousand tiny pieces. Her skin was pale and tired, but so smooth and even and white, like it would cool your hands just to touch them there. And those long, fine teeth, so clean and neat and evenly spaced in her mouth. She came to the house a lot these days, looking for something – Donal, Dolores guessed. And one day shortly before Christmas she had come looking for a spare key for the cottage. She had locked herself out after a walk on the beach, or at least that’s what she said. And when Dolores handed Colette the keys, she noticed how long her fingers were. Elegant, that’s what Colette was. She could see now too, because she had reason to pay closer attention, that beneath the layers of wool were rounded curves and length of bone and pleasure to be had.

It was that visit that first made her think something was wrong. Colette was distracted, looking over her shoulder. She didn’t seem to be at all concerned that she was locked out of her house. She was a little unsteady too and Dolores thought she might have had drink taken. She had that kind of purpose about her, like she’d fixed on an idea and now didn’t quite know how to put it into action. Dolores felt that if she hadn’t been standing there, Colette would have just barrelled through the door. She noticed too, with some satisfaction, that Colette had gained weight. And watching Colette clamber back up the hill to the cottage, she thought of all the times herself and Donal had gone up there to have sex in the afternoon. He’d start agitating for it and he didn’t care if the kids were around. But she did. If she got the youngest two down for a sleep and Madeleine was at home, she’d sneak off up to the cottage with him.

At first, when he’d stopped wanting sex from her, she’d been relieved. She thought it might have been him being considerate for once because she was pregnant again. And maybe it was him being considerate. He had to get it somewhere, that’s the way he’d look at it, and wasn’t it better for him to be off with some other woman than bothering her while she was six months gone? It took a while for the two ideas to marry in her head, that the woman in the cottage was the woman he was sleeping with. But then she came down to the house on Christmas Eve and started shouting at Shaun on the phone. Dolores had watched them from the living room, had heard the cruel way Donal dismissed her from the house. And she said it to herself there and then: they’re fucking.

It started that some nights he just got out of the bed and left the house and came back an hour later. Sometimes he showered and sometimes he didn’t, but either way he was letting her know that he was going to behave however he wanted and he dared her to do something about it. And she knew that even if he led her by the hand up to the cottage and made her stand by the bed while he fucked Colette Crowley, just like every time before he’d tell her it was all in her head – that she was always like this when she was pregnant, that she was nothing but a harpy. Go and cry to your mother and father, he’d say to her. And while she knew Donal down to his bones, she did not know what kind of woman could let a married man into her bed for an hour at a time and send him back to his wife, and then look that woman in the eye the next day and ask her for a spare key, or a cup of sugar, or a word with her husband about the electrics. But of course, Donal’s disregard for her meant that Colette knew that Dolores knew. And she must think that Dolores was the stupidest, weakest, most useless woman that ever there was.

Dolores looked down at her hands and saw that her daughter’s head was dusted with flakes of skin, the windowsill powdered in it.

‘Man gone, Mammy,’ Jessica said.

But the man had not gone, he had just turned his back on them and was peering in the window of the cottage, his two hands blinkering his eyes so he could get a good look. Then he withdrew an envelope from the pocket of his coat and put it through the letterbox. He tied his scarf, tossed the ends over his shoulders, and walked off in the direction of the beach. He might have been heading for a walk with Colette, she thought. Colette was always walking. She walked the beach every day, at least once. And she could often be seen walking in and out of the town, even though it was three miles there and back and she had a car. You wouldn’t know where you’d see Colette, and sometimes when Dolores spotted her walking with such purpose in some unlikely place, at some hairpin bend in the road, she’d ask herself where the fuck she was going.

Dolores pulled Eric up on her hip and walked down the hall to the kitchen. Donal was sitting at the table eating a fry, mopping up egg yolk with a slice of white bread. He was staring at a football match on the television.

‘Here, Dolores,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the screen, ‘we need to start letting her go to that disco or we’ll never hear the end of it.’

‘It’s turning into a knocking shop up there,’ she said.

‘Ah, for God’s sake – there’s only a load of kids at it.’

‘I’m not on about the disco, I’m on about the cottage.’

‘What’s the problem, now?’

He sat back from the table. He held his hands in the air and looked around him. She picked up a dishcloth from the sideboard and threw it to him.

‘Her! Every time you look up there, there’s a different fella hanging around.’

He wiped his hands on the cloth. He stared at her, turning the food over in his mouth. ‘Who?’ he asked. The way he shot the word at her was like she’d accused him of something.

‘Who do you think? Colette.’

‘No. Who’s up there?’

‘How the fuck should I know? I just looked now and there was some tall fellow in a long coat, moping about, dropping off a letter for her.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I told you – tall, grey hair, glasses, long coat, kind of posh-looking—’

Donal shot up from his chair and marched out of the kitchen.

‘Will you calm down,’ Dolores said, following him along the hallway. ‘He’s not there anymore.’

She watched him standing at the window, staring up at the cottage. ‘And who else have you seen going up there?’

‘Apparently she had Michael Breslin in one night.’

He offered her a pitying smile. ‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’

‘Anyway, that’s not the point. I want her gone out of that house. Have you seen the sign she’s nailed to the front of it? A little sign that says “Inn-is-free”. What the fuck’s that about? That’s structural damage to my property. I want her gone.’

‘It says “In-nish-free”, you fucking imbecile. It’s from a poem.’

‘Oh, and when did you get so fond of poetry, Donal – ha? Get rid of her.’

‘We need that money.’

‘I know what you need,’ she said.

And for just a moment her husband looked like a little boy, as fear and confusion and panic passed across his face like shadows, and disappeared. She’d meant that what he needed was some woman to lie beneath him every night. But what he’d understood was that he needed a good beating from her father. Like the time early on in their marriage when Donal had pushed her and she fell and caught the corner of her eye on the mantelpiece. And when her father had seen the V-shaped cut near her temple she hadn’t even needed to explain anything. He’d simply waited with her in silence until Donal got home from work and as soon as he’d stepped out of his van her father had escorted him into the living room and shut the door. She’d heard Donal roar. He’d needed three days off work after that until his ribs healed. And he’d never touched her again.

He’d found other ways to punish her. He’d tell her she was too fat, then too thin, and when her sisters showed up at the house, he’d make a point of mentioning how well they were looking since they’d lost weight, or gained weight, or whatever shape they happened to be in at that time. On the rare occasion when they went to a pub or restaurant, he liked to pick out some fair stranger and whisper her virtues into Dolores’s ear. He’d say the house was filthy, disgusting, mangy with dirt, and as soon as she’d got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the floor, he’d cross it in his dirty work boots. He let her know that she was stupid, that she knew nothing, about life or the world. And all the while she held tight to the threat of her father but was unable to do anything with it because Donal was so careful in his behaviours. And so far she’d kept quiet about his affairs. But if she told her father that Donal was keeping a woman in the cottage, he’d kill him this time.