After she’d dropped Craig at school, Clodagh wasn’t sure where to go. Usually on Mondays, she dumped Molly in playgroup and took herself off to the gym for a couple of hours. But not today. Molly had been suspended for a week from playgroup for biting another child, and the gym had no crèche. Clodagh decided to go into town and go around the shops until it was safe to go home. The day was sunny and mother and daughter traipsed slowly up Grafton Street, stopping – at Molly’s urging – to stroke a homeless boy’s dog, admire a flower stall and dance to a fiddle player. Passers-by smiled indulgently at the beautiful Molly, cute and ludicrous in her pink, furry, deerstalker hat, attempting to do Riverdance.

As they made their way up the street Clodagh was in a pocket of besottedness, her heart swollen and sore with love. Molly was so funny, with her little sergeant major’s strut, marching along with her chest puffed out, wanting to befriend every child she encountered. It wasn’t always easy being a mother, Clodagh admitted dreamily. But at times like this she wouldn’t change her life for anything.

The paper seller openly admired the short, shapely woman trailing a small girl in her wake.

‘Herald?’ he offered hopefully.

Clodagh looked at it with regret. ‘But what would be the point?’ She elaborated. ‘I haven’t had time to read a paper since 1996.’

‘Not much profit in buying one so,’ the paperman agreed, appreciating the back view of Clodagh as she walked away from him.

She knew he was watching her and it felt surprisingly good. His bold, roguish stare stirred memories of when men used to look at her like that all the time. It felt like a very long time ago, almost as if it had happened to someone else.

But what was she doing? Getting excited because a newspaper seller had given her the glad eye?

You’re married, she scolded herself.

Yeah, she answered wryly, married alive.

It took a contented hour and a half to reach the Stephen’s Green Centre and by then, according to the law of averages, Molly and Clodagh were due a bust-up. Sure enough, when Clodagh wouldn’t buy Molly a second ice-cream, Molly promptly threw the mother of all tantrums. She behaved as though she was having an epileptic fit, thrashing about on the floor, banging her head on the tiles, screeching abuse. Clodagh tried to pull her up but Molly wriggled like an octopus. ‘I hate you!’ she screamed and though Clodagh was ashrivel with embarrassment, she forced herself to speak in a steady voice, assuring Molly that a second ice-cream would give her a stomach-ache and promising that if she didn’t get up and behave herself immediately, she’d be going to bed early every night for the next week.

Scores of hard-faced mothers passed, laden with children, whom they cuffed and hit on an automatic rota. ‘Hey, Jason,’ Ddush! ‘leave Tamara alone.’ Smackkk! ‘Zoe,’ Thump! ‘if I catch you at Brooklyn again I’ll fucking kill you.’ Clouttt! With their scornful looks, the women derided Clodagh’s liberal principles. Give that brat a good belt, their school-of-hard-knocks’ faces sneered. Going to bed early, my foot. Bate a bit of sense into her, it’s the only language they understand.

Clodagh and Dylan had made a decision never to hit their children. But when Molly started kicking her, while continuing to screech, Clodagh found herself yanking the child off the floor and administering a smart smack to her bare leg. It seemed as if the whole of Dublin gasped. Suddenly all the slab-faced child beaters had melted away, and instead Clodagh was assailed by pair after pair of accusing eyes. Everyone around her looked like they worked for ChildLine.

A wave of crimson shame slapped her in the face. What was she doing, assaulting a defenceless little girl? What was wrong with her?

‘Come on.’ Hastily she tugged the roaring Molly away, appalled by the mark of her hand on Molly’s tender leg. To atone for her guilt, Clodagh immediately bought Molly the ice-cream that had prompted the ructions in the first place, and expected peace for precisely the length of time it took Molly to eat it.

Except the ice-cream started to melt and Clodagh was asked to leave a fabric shop after Molly rubbed her cone carefully along a bolt of curtain muslin, patterning it with a thick white trail. The morning had soured and, wiping a Father Christmas beard of ice-cream from Molly’s chin, Clodagh couldn’t help feeling that life seemed to have had more of a sparkle to it once, a kind of yellow glow. She’d always rushed forward to greet her future, blithely confident that what it delivered would be good. And it hadn’t ever let her down.

Her requests of life had never been overly ambitious and she’d always got what she wanted. On paper everything was perfect – she had two healthy children, a good husband, no money worries. But lately everything felt like unrelenting drudgery. Had done for quite a while, actually. She tried to remember when it had started, and when she couldn’t, fear squeezed perspiration through her pores. The thought of this mind-set crystallizing into anything like permanence was terrifying. By nature she was a happy, uncomplicated person – this she could see by comparing herself with poor Ashling who tied herself in knots about almost everything.

But something had changed. Not so long ago she was fuelled by anticipation and optimism. What was different, what had gone wrong?

14

‘Diet Lilt or Purdeys?’ Ashling mused. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, make your mind up,’ Trix urged, her pen poised over her spiral-bound notebook. ‘The shop’ll be closed if you don’t hurry.’

Though the Colleen team had been working together less than two weeks, already they had a routine. A shop run was done twice a day, morning and afternoon. This was separate from the lunch run and the hangover-cure run.

‘Uh-oh,’ Trix observed. ‘Here’s Heathcliff.’

Jack Devine strode into the office, all tumbled hair and troubled face.

‘I just can’t make my mind up,’ Ashling lamented, agonizing between drinks.

‘Of course you can’t,’ Jack said nastily, without breaking stride. ‘After all, you’re a woman?’

His office door slammed behind him and heads were shaken in sympathy.

‘The reunion lunch with Mai obviously wasn’t,’ Kelvin observed, wagging a beringed finger.

‘What a tormented man.’ Shauna Griffin looked up from proof-reading this Summer’s Gaelic Knitting, her voice trembling. ‘So handsome, yet so unreachable, so unhappy.’