‘The prick!’ I exclaimed. ‘Playing games with me, getting everyone to fancy him just because he feels inadequate, leading me on…’

‘Arra, girl, go easy on him,’ Nola interrupted, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. ‘It’s not his fault.’

‘That’s OK for you to say,’ I said, breathless with what I felt was justified rage.

‘Would you not try to remember that he’s no different from you?’ she suggested kindly. ‘Just an addict very early on in a new life.’

That took the wind out of my sails.

‘Even though he was giving you a load of guff about how to behave, he obviously hasn’t a clue how to conduct himself.’ She smiled fondly at me. ‘If he had half a brain he’d never have slept with you.

‘No offence meant,’ she added, nicely.

I muttered that none was taken.

‘So, come on now, calm down,’ she urged. ‘Deep breaths, good woman.’

I was almost annoyed when I found I was calming down.

‘Forgive yourself,’ Nola said, just as I realized I had. ‘It wasn’t your fault he rejected you. And forgive him while you’re at it.’

And to my great surprise, the anger I felt for Chris and the hurt he’d inflicted on me, just shimmied away. Everything had changed and I saw him as a poor sap, no more able to cope than I was. He shouldn’t have slept with me, but I shouldn’t have slept with him either. I wasn’t a victim. I’d made the decision to go out with him, even though I’d been warned not to. And if it all went pear-shaped – as, of course, it had – I was partly to blame.

I liked that feeling. Responsible, in control.

‘Anyway,’ Nola pointed out, ‘you went off him as much as he seemed to go off you.’

But instead of feeling victorious, I found I was thinking of Luke.

‘What’s up with you now, girl?’ Nola asked.

‘How d’you mean?’ I asked.

‘You’re looking a bit, I don’t know… annoyed.’ My eyes were almost popping out of my head in rage, but Nola couldn’t seem to deal in any emotion more negative than annoyance.

‘I had a boyfriend,’ I found myself saying, my eyes filling with unwelcome tears. ‘A real boyfriend, I mean, not just a half-shag like Chris.’

Burning with anger, choking with bile, I told her about Luke, what a complete bastard he’d been to me, how he’d humiliated me and hurt me with the terrible things he’d said the day he came to the Cloisters.

Nola listened sympathetically. ‘And you still love him,’ she said, when I finished.

‘Love him?’ I demanded, looking at her as if she’d lost her reason. ‘I fucking hate him!’

‘That much?’ She looked at me compassionately.

‘No, I mean it,’ I insisted. ‘I hate his guts.’

‘Even though he was fierce good to come all that way and help you see how addicted you were to the quare stuff?’ She sounded amazed. ‘I think he sounds like a dote.’

‘Oh, don’t you start,’ I said moodily. ‘I hate him, I’ll never forgive him, I hope I won’t clap eyes on him until my dying day. That’s one part of my life that’s well and truly finished.’

‘Sometimes, if it’s meant to be, people from your old life come back,’ she said, as if it was meant to be some sort of comfort.

‘If it’s meant to be,’ I mimicked. ‘Well, I don’t want him back!’

‘You’re in desperate bad humour.’ She smiled indulgently.

‘I mean it, I don’t want him back,’ I insisted to her fond face. ‘But I’ll never meet anyone ever again,’ I wailed, flattened by sudden despair. ‘My life is over.’

Nola stood up suddenly.

‘Hurry up, finish that,’ she ordered, pointing at my coffee, and throwing a couple of quid on the table. ‘And come on!’

‘Where…?’

‘Just come on,’ she said, breathless and excited.

She marched out up the street and, rattling keys, approached a silver, sporty-looking car.

‘Get in, good woman,’ she ordered me. Fearfully, I got in.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as she sped like a mentaller through the streets.

‘Something to show you,’ she muttered, vaguely. ‘You’ll like it.’

And she said nothing more until we came screeching to a stop outside a red-brick house.

‘Out you get,’ she said. Nicely, but very firmly. I no longer thought Nola was the mild-mannered sweetie she seemed on the surface.

I got out, and she marched at high speed over the gravel, opened the front door of the house and gestured me in.

‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Harry.’

I thought Harry must be her dog because no Irish person was called such a thing.

But when a dog didn’t come scampering, it dimly occurred to me that Harry was the nine foot three, tanned, blond-haired ride who came into the hall in response to her summons.

‘This is Harry,’ she said. ‘My husband. I met him when I was three years off the quare stuff, when I was eight years older than you are now. He’s pure mad about me, aren’t you?’ She turned to him.

He nodded. ‘Pure mad about her,’ he told me, confidentially.

‘We have a fabulous relationship.’ She twinkled at me. ‘Because I’d learnt to live with myself before I met him. I was an awful miserable poor eejit until I learnt that.

‘Am I making myself clear?’ she asked, her face a sudden picture of perplexity.

‘Crystal,’ I mumbled.

‘Good.’ She beamed. ‘Great! Sometimes I seem to confuse people. Come on, so. I’ll drive you home.’

And every time over the next twelve months, whenever I woke in the middle of the night thinking I would die without ever feeling the touch of a man again – and such occasions were many – I would think ‘Operation Harry’, and the panic would abate. After I’d been clean and celibate for a year, I could claim my free Harry.

Nola rang me and took me to a meeting the following day. It was in a different church hall, with different people, but the format was the same. ‘Keep coming back,’ everyone said to me. And things will get better.’ The next day Nola took me to yet another different meeting. And the day after that.