And yet… I was relieved that I didn’t have a child to bring up. What I really wished was that I’d never had to make the decision to begin with. And of course it was my fault, I should have kept my legs closed in the first place, but life isn’t like that – even then I knew it – and it’s easy to be wise after the fact. Occasionally, anti-abortionists paraded through the streets of Dublin, campaigning to make abortion in Ireland more illegal than it already was, carrying rosary beads and waving placards with pictures of unborn foetuses. I had to look away. But when I listened to them condemning abortion so vehemently, I wanted to ask if any of them had ever been in my situation. I would’ve bet money that they hadn’t. And that if they had, their commitment to high-minded principle might have wavered.

What bothered me most were the men – men protesting against abortion! Men! What did they know, what could they ever know, of the terror I’d felt. They couldn’t get pregnant. But I never voiced any of it at home, because I didn’t want to draw attention to the issue. And – at least when I was there –Claire never said anything either.

At the end of September, Shay went to London to do his degree in Media Studies. That had always been his plan, because Irish universities didn’t offer such imaginative courses.

‘This changes nothing,’ he promised me, as we said goodbye at the ferry port. ‘I’ll write lots and see you at Christmas.’

But he never wrote. I’d had a premonition this might happen – I’d already started having dreams about trying to catch him even before he’d left – but when it did, I refused to believe it. I watched the post every day and after seven wretched weeks I took my pride in my hands, visited his mother and gave her a letter to give to him. ‘Maybe I’ve been sending them to the wrong address,’ I said. But she checked and the address I had was the right one.

‘Have you heard from him?’ I asked, and flinched when she said, in surprise, that of course she had, that he was getting on great.

I regrouped my hopes and instead hung everything on him coming home at Christmas. From the twentieth of December onwards I was a ball of adrenalin, waiting for the phone or the doorbell to ring. But when they didn’t I began walking past his house, up the hill, down the hill, shaking with cold and nerves, desperate for a sighting of him. When I saw Fee, one of his sisters, emerge, I nabbed her and in a high, wobbly pretence of unconcern said, ‘What day is Shay coming?’

Looking confused, she broke the news. He wasn’t coming, he’d got a holiday job. ‘I thought you’d know,’ she said.

‘Oh, I thought there was still a chance he might get here for a couple of days.’ My humiliation had me stuttering.

Easter, I thought, he’ll come home at Easter. But he didn’t. Or for the summer. I waited for him long after most people would have given up hope.

In the meantime I’d got a job, where I’d made a new friend, Donna. Like my other friends, Sinead and Emily, she went out a lot, on the hunt for men and good times. I used to tag along and, with them urging me on, if some decentish bloke asked me out I’d say yes; nothing much came of any of them. There was someone called Colm who gave me an engraved lighter for my birthday, even though I didn’t smoke. Then, for about six weeks, I saw a DSS worker who kept coming across his dole claimants working in the pubs he took me to; he ditched me when I wouldn’t sleep with him. After him was a cuteish one called Anton, even though he wasn’t foreign. I towered a good three inches over him and he kept wanting us to go for walks. I actually went to bed with him – probably, I later suspected, because I found it so embarrassing to be upright with him.

But no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t get worked up about any of them.

The current of life was trying to drag me forward, but I resisted. I preferred the past, not yet convinced that that’s what it was – the past. And I would never have believed when I’d said goodbye to Shay at the ferry port that it would be fifteen years before I saw him again.

44

I drove from the Mondrian back to Emily’s. Roars of laughter and a smell of burning were coming from the Goatee Boys’ back garden. Ignoring it all, I let myself into the mercifully empty house, and made straight for the couch. I didn’t even turn on the lights, I just lay in the dark, feeling flattened, soulless, lost to myself.

As time passed after Shay’s departure for London, occasional news reached me of him: he was spending the summer working in Cape Cod; he’d graduated; he’d got a job in Seattle. At some stage I understood that it was over, that he wasn’t coming back to me. I tried my best with the other men I met, but I couldn’t move forward. Then one night when I was twenty-one I bumped into Garv in a pub in town. It had been more than three years since I’d seen him. Like Shay, he’d gone away to college – Edinburgh for him. Now he was back, working in Dublin, and as we swapped autobiographical details, I felt so guilty about the way I’d treated him that I could barely look his way. Mid-small-talk I blurted out a shamefaced apology and, to my relief, he began to laugh. ‘It’s all right, Maggie, take it easy. It was a lifetime ago.’ And he looked so cute that for the first time in a long, long time, I got a feeling.

It was a great surprise to find myself going out with him again, the boyfriend I’d had when I was seventeen, my first-ever boyfriend. I was wildly entertained by the novelty of it, as indeed was everyone else. But then it stopped being funny the day I lifted a snail off his windscreen and threw it at a passing car of nuns – because I realized I’d fallen in love with him.

I loved him so much – he was such a good man. Though he didn’t have Shay’s quicksilver charm, he enchanted me nevertheless. And I thought he was gorgeous. Again he didn’t have Shay’s full-on hunkiness, but he had subtler good looks that had worked their way under my skin, so that whenever I looked at him I got a rush. His eyes, his silky hair, his height, his big hands, the way he smelt of ironed cotton – I was mad about him. Above all, we were mates – I could tell him anything. He even got chapter and verse on myself and Shay and was nothing other than entirely sympathetic. Not even a flicker of judgement came from him.

‘I’m not a murderer who’s going to burn in hell, am I?’ I asked anxiously.

‘Of course you’re not, but no one’s saying it was an easy decision.’