‘And now,’ said Mike, ‘for the best bit.’

My heart leapt, chasing away the last few wisps of anger. What was he about to show me? The gym? The celebrity wing? The swimming pool?

His bedroom actually.

He dragged me up the stairs and threw open a door and said ‘The piece de resistance.’ He didn’t even attempt a French accent. He just wasn’t that kind of man.

Now that my anger had receded I was left with feelings of shame and a desire to be very nice. That was the usual sequence of events. So, while I might have drawn the line at giving him a blow job if that was why he’d taken me up there – I didn’t feel that guilty – I was more than prepared to stick my head round the door and compliment his room to the hilt.

And I could hardly believe what I saw! It looked as if there had been a competition to see how many single beds you could fit into one room. It was crammed with beds. Packed. Each bed was in contact with at least one other.

‘Nice and intimate, isn’t it?’ Mike asked drily.

I laughed. I thought he was funny. Although I would still have laughed even if I didn’t think he was.

‘Come on, let’s go back downstairs,’ said Mike after I had used every compliment I knew to describe his room.

‘No, show me the rest of the place,’ I protested.

‘Ah no,’ he said, ‘it’s dark and cold outside now. I’ll show you tomorrow’

The gym and pool and sauna must be in a separate building, I realized. So back down we traipsed. Back to the dining-room, where about ten of them were still sitting. Still drinking tea, still heaping spoonfuls of sugar into their mugs, still lighting cigarette after cigarette.

They loved the dining-room, it seemed to be some sort of spiritual home. With a sinking heart, I finally admitted to myself that these men probably never went to the gym. They probably never even left the dining-room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they slept there. None of them gave a damn about their bodies or the way they looked, that was glaringly obvious.

Except for Chris. He had disappeared, and I was willing to bet I knew where he was.

While I sat there I began to feel – there was no getting away from it – depressed. The yellow walls were getting to me, the tea-drinking was wearing me down, even though it wasn’t me that was doing it. And thoughts of Luke were back in my head. The glamour that I was depending on to take my mind off him remained tantalizingly out of sight.

I tried to cheer myself up by asking Oliver, the man with the Stalin moustache, where he was from. Only because I wanted him to say that he was a ‘Born and bread and butthered Dublin man’. And, when he replied ‘Dublin, I’m a Dublin man. Born and bread and butthered’, it lifted my spirits, but only for a moment.

This wasn’t the way I’d expected it to be, I thought with acute sadness.

Just as it occurred to me, accompanied by a violent lurch of my stomach, that there might be two Cloisters, and that I was in the wrong one, Clarence came in. His face was bright red, his sparse hair was wet and he was grinning fit to burst.

‘Where were you?’ Peter asked, with a forced bark of laughter that made me itch to pour a cup of boiling tea all over him.

‘Beyond in the sauna,’ said Clarence.

With those words my heart leapt with joy. And, I had to admit, relief. Now that I had proof, my fears seemed silly. Laughable even.

‘How did you get on?’ Mike asked.

‘Great!’ said Clarence. ‘Just great.’

‘Wasn’t it your first time?’ someone asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. And it went grand, so it did. I feel really good after it.’

‘And well you might,’ said someone else. ‘Fair play to you.’

‘It feels lovely to get rid of those impurities, doesn’t it?’ I asked, eager to be a part of this.

‘Don’t talk to me about impurities,’ laughed Clarence. ‘Sure, I hadn’t a clean pair of jocks to my name.’

Ah, Jesus! I recoiled in disgust. Ugh! I was revolted. What did he have to mention his jocks for. I’d gone right off him. Which was a pity, seeing as I had just started to like him.

Clarence sat down and the conversation returned to whatever it had been before he arrived. I suddenly felt very, very sleepy and unable to concentrate on what the men were saying. All I could hear was the murmur of their voices, rising and falling, as conversation waxed and waned. It reminded me of when I was a little girl and used to stay in Granny Walsh’s cottage in Clare. In the stillness of the evenings there were constant visitors, who quietly came and went, sat around the turf fire, drank tea and chatted into the small hours. Our bedroom was just off the main room and my sisters and I would fall asleep to the murmuring voices of the local men who came to visit Granny. (No, she wasn’t a prostitute.)

Now, as the waves of mostly rural, mostly men’s voices washed over me, I began to feel drowsy in the same way as I did back then.

I wanted to go to bed but I was paralysed by the fear that I would draw attention to myself if I stood up and said goodnight. I had made a big mistake by ever sitting down.

I’d always hated being tall. So much so that when I was twelve, and my sister Claire told me in tones of delighted horror, ‘Mum’s going to talk to you about The Curse,’ I thought she meant that Mum wanted to talk to me about my height.

Although strangely enough, only about two months after she gave me my ‘Introduction to Periods’ talk (which included the sub-speech ‘Tampons are the work of Satan’), Mum took me aside for another mother-daughter chat. This time it really was about my height and the fact that I hunched over so badly I was almost folded in two.

‘Stand up, come on now, don’t be like a tree over a blessed well,’ she said briskly. ‘Shoulders back, head up. God made you tall, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

Of course she didn’t believe a word of it. Even though she herself was tall, she thought that being twelve years old and five foot seven was freakish enough to deserve my own page in The Guinness Book of Records. But I mumbled ‘OK’ and promised that I’d try.

‘No walking along inspecting the footpath,’ she warned. ‘Walk tall!’ That sent her into a bout of what sounded like hysterical giggles. ‘Sure, what other way could you walk?’ she snorted and bolted from the room while I stared after her in bewilderment. She couldn’t have been laughing at me, could she? I mean, my own mother…?