As everyone stood up to applaud the director, Dad remained sitting, staring straight ahead.

‘It’s not actually completed, is it? This isn’t the actual thing people will pay money for into the cinema?’ He was almost pleading. ‘Maybe they’ve shown us the out-takes, the funnies that turn up on It’ll Be Alright on the Night?’

‘Where’s the drink?’ Helen demanded.

‘I’ve to go to the loo, I’ll investigate.’ As I excuse-me-excuse-me’d through the audience out into the lobby, I over-heard someone describing the movie as ‘very European’.

‘Brave,’ someone else said. ‘Challenging,’ yet another person said. I filed the phrases away, they’d come in very handy the next time I wanted a euphemism for ‘pile of shite’.

‘Maggie, Maggie!’ Lara, luminous in a copper-coloured, floor-length, beaded sheath and big Barbarella hair, was beckoning me over. ‘Thank you for coming. What did you think?’

‘Yeah, great. Interesting, really interesting. Very European.’

‘You think? You hated it!’ She laughed with delight.

‘No, I… oh OK, it wasn’t really me. I’m more of a chick-flick kind of girl.’

‘That’s OK.’ Then she noticed. ‘Hey, great nails. You went to Nail Heaven? Who did you?’

‘Mona.’

‘Mona? Wow.’

‘Why “wow”?’

‘One of the greats but she’s kinda in semi-retirement. Only does the special cases. I better go talk to some journalists, but I’ll catch you later.’

She shimmied away and I felt happy – at least things were OK with Lara. I still wanted to keep her away from my parents, but there was no residue of awkwardness from our brief dalliance.

After I came out of the ladies’, I found the glittering room where the hooley was being held, full of glinting trays of champagne and tables bearing finger food. I took a glass of champagne and made my way through the tanned, glam throng to Emily, who was standing in a little knot with Anna, Kirsty, Troy and – surprise, surprise – Helen.

‘Weren’t those old velvet seats like totally grungy?’ Kirsty said.

‘I loved them, it’s a great theatre,’ Emily said and we all made noises of agreement.

‘Eeuw!’ Kirsty exclaimed, in elaborate disgust. ‘You’re gross! Don’t you think of all the butts that have been in them before you…’

I tuned out, and not just because I hated her; there was something weird going on with the food. The quantities were disappearing fast – each time I turned away from it, then looked again, it had diminished even further – but try as I might, I couldn’t see anyone actually putting any of it in their mouths. No one was visibly eating – except for my Dad, who was leaning against one of the tables, going for it – but he wasn’t eating it all. And turning around very fast gave me no clues, just got me a couple of funny looks. It was as if people were eating using something like the Vulcan mind-meld.

‘So howja like the movie, Short Stuff?’ Troy asked Helen, looking at her from under meaningfully lowered eyelids.

Christ, he already had a nickname for her! I almost felt sorry for Kirsty.

But was I jealous? I wondered anxiously. I so didn’t want to be, I’d been doing well on the emotions front and didn’t want a setback. So I had a good rummage through my feelings, and all I could find was a mild interest in what might happen. Perhaps I should have been protective of Helen, but I was sure she could take care of herself. I reckoned Troy was the one who’d want to watch out.

My pride in how well I was coping took a bit of a knock, though, when I saw who my mother had engaged in intense conversation – none other than Shay Delaney. That hadn’t taken her long. He was leaning his dark-blond head down to her level and his tawny eyes were fastened so attentively on to hers that I had a strange urge to laugh.

As though he knew I was watching him, he suddenly looked up and gave me a stare that went straight to my stomach. Mum craned her neck to see who he was looking at and, when she saw me, beckoned me over – and of course I went. Out of obedience? Politeness? Curiosity? Who knows. But I found myself standing beside him where, big and kind of shaggy and smiling and charming, he was being very Shay Delaney.

‘Look who I found!’ Mum was skittish and over-excited. ‘We were just reminiscing on old times. It only seems like yesterday that I had Shay Delaney sitting in my kitchen, eating… what were they again, Shay?’

‘Bakewell tarts!’ the pair of them said simultaneously.

‘You were the only one who ate any. None of my lot would touch them.’

‘I don’t know why,’ Shay’s eyes twinkled. ‘They were delicious.’

But he would have said that even if he’d gone home and promptly died of food-poisoning. He’d always been this way: full of compliments, and he went out of his way to make everyone feel good about themselves. Except for me. My look lingered on the golden stubble on his jawline and I swallowed a sigh.

‘And you’re married, I hear,’ Mum probed.

‘I am, six years ago, to a girl called Donna Higgins.’

‘The Higgins family from Rockwell Park?’

‘No, the Higgins from York Road.’

‘Malachy Higgins or Bernard Higgins?’

‘Neither, although she does have an Uncle Bernard…’

A brief detour to establish exactly which branch of the Higgins family Shay’s wife hailed from, then Mum was off again. ‘Margaret’s marriage is after breaking up, but sure these things happen. You’re no one these days if you don’t get married more than once. We have to move with the times, isn’t that right? What’s the point in having divorce if we don’t use it? Use it or lose it, as they say.’

With each passing sentence, my surprise stacked up until it became fully fledged shock. My mother is the woman who cried when divorce came to Ireland and said it was the end of civilization as we knew it. And how tactful it was of her to bring it up in front of Shay, considering his background.

‘And your wife?’ she asked Shay. ‘Is she with you right now or back… Oh, back in Ireland. I see. And you’re out here for work a lot? It must be tough when you don’t see that much of each other. Well, who knows, you could be one of the fashionable types who have more than one marriage, if you’re not careful!’