‘What’s my real angel called?’

‘Basil.’

‘Basil?’

‘Henry, then.’

‘Henry?’

‘How about Clive?’

‘He’s a boy angel?’

‘Oh no, they’re neutral.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘He smells of Turkish Delight and he’s pink.’

‘Pink?’

‘With green spots.’

‘You’re not taking this seriously.’

‘Sorry. What’s mine called?’

‘Penelope.’

‘Favourite food?’

‘Carrots and parsnips mashed together.’

‘Best bit about being a guardian angel?’

‘Helping people find the right dress and shoes for their Christmas party. What’s Clive’s best bit?’

‘Finding lost earrings.’

… And sometimes we couldn’t provide comfort for each other.

One bad morning, Anna got in beside me and we both lay on our backs, staring miserably at the ceiling. After some time she said, ‘I think we’re making each other worse.’

‘I think we are,’ I agreed.

‘I’ll go back to my own bed, will I?’

‘Ok.’

Unlike me, Anna occasionally left the house – if only in response to a request from Shane.

‘He says he wants “to talk”.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’

‘He really means he wants to have sex. That’s what’s happened the last three times. It gets my hopes up, then leaves me feeling even worse.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t sleep with him any more,’ I suggested.

‘Maybe,’ she said vaguely, unconvinced.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t even meet him.’

But the next time he rang and said he wanted to see her, she agreed. ‘Don’t worry,’ she promised me. ‘I’m not going to sleep with him.’

But as I went to bed that night she wasn’t back. Mind you, it was barely nine-fifteen and she’d only been gone half an hour.

Some unknown time that night, I woke into darkness. I wondered what had disturbed me – and then I heard it, a noise I remembered well from my teenage years: a scraping and scratching from the front door. One of my sisters – Anna in this case – was having trouble getting her key in the lock. It went on for so long that I was just about to get up and let her in when the door was finally pushed open, then I heard the reassuring crash as she bumped into and knocked over the hall table, followed, a few minutes later, by the disgusting smell of baked beans heating in a saucepan. Just like the old days, I thought dreamily, as I sank back into sleep. It’s yesterday once more…

Some time later I jumped awake again. The fire alarm was beeping in a fussy frenzy and Dad was hopping about the landing in a wild-eyed, pyjama’d panic. ‘How do I turn this shagging thing off?’ Grey smoke was swirling around the hall, the beans and saucepan were burnt to a crisp and Anna was slumped over the kitchen table, deep in sweet slumber.

We put her to bed, but sometime later she got in beside me, reeking so strongly of drink that if I’d been awake, I’d have passed out. As it was, her incendiary breath had the effect of smelling salts, and woke me up.

Later that same night, the whole house was once again woken – this time by an almighty thump; it sounded like a ceiling had fallen in. Closer investigation revealed that it was nothing quite so exciting. All that had happened was that Anna had tried to get into bed beside Helen, and Helen, who objected to sleeping with ‘a one-woman brewery’, had pushed her out on to the floor.

‘But at least I didn’t sleep with him,’ Anna said the following morning, as she inspected her bruises. ‘OK, I drank myself into a coma and nearly burnt the house down, but at least I didn’t sleep with him.’

‘It’s progress,’ I agreed.

At some stage during the second dreadful week, I needed something, but there were so few options open to me.

‘Go for a walk,’ Dad suggested. ‘Get some fresh air.’

I’ve never really understood the concept of Going for a Walk. And not even at my sportiest did I get the appeal of Going for a Walk in suburbia. But I was bad enough to give it a try.

‘Take a coat,’ he advised. ‘It might rain.’

‘It’s June.’

‘It’s Ireland.’

‘I haven’t got a coat.’ Well, I had, but it was in my house, Garv’s house, you know the one I mean. I was afraid to go there in case he’d moved the girl in. Perhaps that sounds like a wild overreaction, but my instinct was warning me that anything was possible.

‘Take mine.’ Dad’s anorak was red, nylon, awful, but I longed for affection and I couldn’t resist letting him help me into it.

Off I went. Nothing too ambitious. I walked a couple of hundred yards to the green and sat on a wall, watching some kids do whatever kids do on greens: surreptitious smoking; trading inaccurate information on sex; whatever. I felt horrible. The sky was mushroom grey and stagnant, even the bits that weren’t directly over me. After a while, when I didn’t feel any better, I decided I might as well go home again. It was bound to be time for some version of ‘Girlfrien’, you ain’t so all that.’ No point in missing it.

I was traipsing back down the hill when someone flickered across my vision and vaguely alerted me. I looked properly. It was a man about fifty yards away, lifting things out of a car boot. Oh my… God. Shay Delaney. Well, for a second I thought it was him, then it was clear that it wasn’t. There was just something about the man that reminded me slightly of Shay and even that was enough to unsteady me.

But as I continued, with a whoosh of dizziness I saw that it was him. Different, but still the same. The change was that he looked older and this gave me some pleasure, until it dawned on me that if he looked older, then so would I.

He was lifting stuff from the boot of a car and stacking it at the gate of his mother’s house. How could I not have instantly known it was him? He was outside his own house. Well, the house he’d lived in until he’d left to go away to college fifteen years ago. Fifteen years. How? I’m young now and I was grown-up then, there isn’t room for fifteen years. Dizzy again.