At seventeen, Ashling left home and moved into a flat. Three years later, Mike got a job over a hundred miles away in Cork, and their subsequent move meant Ashling rarely saw her parents. During the last seven years Monica had stabilized: the depression and rage departed as unexpectedly and as unheralded as they had arrived. Her doctor said it was linked to the end of her menopause.

‘She’s not so bad now.’ Clodagh’s voice brought her back to the present.

‘I know.’ Ashling exhaled wearily. ‘But I still don’t really want to be near her. That’s an awful thing to say, I know. I love her, but I find it hard to see her.’

46

Ashling was due to arrive in Cork at lunch-time on Saturday, and she was getting the five o’clock train home on Sunday. So the ‘weekend’ was really only twenty-eight hours long. And she’d be asleep for eight of those hours. Which only left twenty hours to talk to her parents. No bother to her.

Twenty hours! Clutched by panic she wondered if she had enough cigarettes. And magazines? And her mobile? She must have been insane to say she’d come.

As she watched the countryside rickety-rack past, she prayed that the train would oblige and break down. But no. Of course not. That only happened if you were in a desperate hurry. Then the train would spend several unexplained half-hours loitering in sidings. Then you’d all have to change to a different train, then you’d all have to get off the new train and on to a waiting, freezing bus, and the original three-hour journey would end up taking eight hours.

Instead Ashling’s train arrived in Cork a galling ten minutes early. Naturally her parents were already there, waiting, looking determinedly normal. Her mother could have passed for any Irish mother of a certain age: the bad perm, the nervous, welcome-home smile, the acrylic cardigan draped about her shoulders.

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes.’ Monica was about to burst into proud tears.

‘You too.’ Ashling couldn’t help feeling guilty.

Then came the hug – Monica’s uncertain cross between ladylike cheek-to-cheeking and full-on body-slamming ended up being more like a scuffle.

‘Hi, Dad.’

‘Er, welcome, welcome, welcome!’ Mike looked uncomfortable – would he too be required to indulge in affection? Luckily he was able to grab Ashling’s bag and busy all available arms with that.

The drive to her parents’ house, the discussion about what Ashling had eaten on the train, and the debate over whether she’d have a cup of tea and a sandwich or just a cup of tea, took up a good forty minutes.

‘Just a cup of tea is fine.’

‘I’ve Penguins,’ Monica tempted. ‘And butterfly buns. I made them myself.’

‘No, I… oh…’ The talk of home-made butterfly buns poleaxed Ashling. Monica opened a biscuit tin, displaying small misshapen buns, each with two sponge ‘wings’ arranged in a blob of cream on top. The cream was sprinkled with hundreds and thousands and as Ashling swallowed a bite – a wing, actually – she discovered she was also swallowing a lump in her throat.

‘I’ve to go into town,’ Mike announced.

‘I’ll come with you.’ Ashling catapulted up.

‘Oh, will you?’ Monica looked disappointed. ‘Well, make sure you’re back in time for your dinner.’

‘What are we having?’

‘Chops.’

Chops! Ashling almost sniggered – she hadn’t realized that such a foodstuff still existed.

‘Why are we going into town?’ she asked her father as they backed out on to the road.

‘To buy an electric blanket.’

‘In July?’

‘It’ll be winter soon enough.’

‘Nothing like being prepared.’

They exchanged a smile, then Mike had to go and ruin it by saying, ‘We don’t see you much, Ashling.’

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

‘Your mother’s delighted to see you.’

Some response was called for, so Ashling settled on, ‘How, um, is she?’

‘Marvellous. You should come and see us more, she’s back to being the woman I married.’

Another silence, then Ashling heard herself ask a question that she had no memory of ever asking before. ‘What was it all about, that terrible time? What made it happen?’

Mike took his eyes off the road to look at her, his expression a grisly mix of defensiveness and determined innocence – he had not been a bad father. ‘Nothing happened.’ His joviality seemed unexpectedly pitiful. ‘Depression is a sickness, you know all this.’

As children, they’d had it explained to them that it wasn’t their fault that their mother was a basket case. Naturally, none of them had believed it.

‘Yes, but how do you get depression?’ She struggled for under-standing.

‘Sometimes it’s triggered by a loss or a – what d’you call them things? – trauma,’ he muttered, the car full of his ghastly discomfort. ‘But it doesn’t have to be,’ he continued. ‘They say it can be hereditary.’

That cheery thought knocked all talk out of Ashling. She rummaged for her mobile phone.

‘Who are you ringing?’

‘No one.’

He watched Ashling continue to press buttons on her mobile phone. Affronted, he demanded, ‘Do you think I’m blind?’

‘I’m not ringing anyone, I’m checking my messages.’

Marcus hadn’t rung her since he’d departed her flat on Thursday night. In the two months that they’d been going out – not that she was counting – they’d slipped into a routine of ringing each other every day. She felt his absence of contact keenly. Holding her breath, she yearned for a message from him but, once again, there was none. Disappointed, she snapped her phone away.

That evening, after her time-warp dinner – chops, mash and peas from a can – she decided to ring him. She had a good excuse: wishing him luck with the Eddie Izzard gig. But she got his answering machine – again. She had a horrible vision of him standing in his flat, listening to her message but refusing to pick up. Unable to stop herself, she tried his mobile: it went straight to message service. Mercury is in retrograde, she told herself. Then she reluctantly admitted, or maybe it’s just that my boyfriend’s pissed off with me.