home,’ Dad says.
I shrug and say: ‘I put her in a taxi.’
My mother straightens out the arm covers on the sofa. My dad smiles. He has his hand up on top of the open door, leaning on it.
‘I hope you gave her enough money,’ Dad says, looking at the back of Mum’s head. She picks up the remote control and puts it on top of the TV.
‘I gave her three quid.’
‘Good. And how was the romantic meal?’ My dad is grinning, waiting for my mother to look at him. She doesn’t.
‘It was fine. She liked her asparagi.’
They do not even suspect that their bed was an accomplice. Jordana is two months older than me and, as such, she is the criminal mastermind.
I go upstairs. The first piss of my sex life twirls like the corkscrew rollercoaster at Alton Towers. And it stinks. Like acid and bins and homeless people. I begin to think I have done something truly terrible for which I am being punished and my insides are turning to mulch, but then I remember that we had asparagus for dinner.
Afterwards, I retire to my bedroom and write a letter to Razzle. It contains the metaphor: ‘I spread her legs as you might the centre pages of a porn magazine.’
II
Diuretic
Last week, I found Dad’s tricyclic antidepressants in the bathroom bin. I defeated the childproof lid with an insouciant push-twist motion. The bottle was half-full of chalky white pills.
On alternativemedicine.com, a bookmarked website on my dad’s computer, it says that ‘the emotional lull from coming off Prozac is often far worse in the patient’s eyes than the original depression.’
I think that the website means ‘in the view of the patient’ and that eyes are not especially affected.
The first sign was a downturn in Dad’s otherwise impeccable attendance record for Monday breakfasts.
When I got home after school on Monday, I found him at his bedroom window in his blood-coloured dressing gown, watching the Cork ferry coming in to dock. Their bedroom light was on full-beam.
‘Here’s Corky,’ I said, in the game-show voice, as I entered the room.
‘Here is Corky,’ he confirmed.
He was holding a mug of water with a knobbly stub of lemon floating in it. He was wearing slippers and socks.
‘Are you bad?’ I asked.
He turned to me. The pouches under his eyes looked soft and smooth. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.
‘I don’t feel very well,’ he confirmed. ‘I’m going to stay in bed.’
His pupils were small.
I looked around the room. The bed was made. He had even laid the cushions out in a diamond pattern against the headboard.
I didn’t see him then for a couple of days, except when he came downstairs to refill his mug with hot water and, sometimes, change his wedge of lemon. He was using the mug that has the word Persona written on it, next to an unimaginative logo: a Ferris wheel of coloured dots, fading from red, through yellow, to green and back to red.
On the Monday night, Dad was upstairs in bed; it was just me and my mother having dinner. Although I am often frustrated by my parents’ seemingly pointless teatime yakking, I should be thankful that, at the very least, they manage to entertain each other.
I spent most of dinner listening to the sound of my own jaw moving. Even the infinite possibilities of my plateful of Alphabites did not throw up any topics for conversation.
In the silence we bore, I decided that I would write and memorize a list of topics of conversation to help us through the rest of the week. I tried to keep a balance of both our interests:
Appropriate
Inappropriate
Fungi
Chips’s views on women
Homeopathic treatments for Jordana’s eczema
Suicide – a cure for depression
What happened to that nice friend Rick?
That time when Keiron came round
Her weight
Dad’s sexual performance
Sharks
Chips’s views on immigration
The meaning of the word Persona on Dad’s mug
Is it okay to have such an elastic foreskin?
My metabolism
Sunrises or sunsets?
Jordana’s parents
The rhythm method of contraception
Oxbow lakes
Chips’s views on my mother’s legs
The Mount Pleasant Quarry Group
Dad – hot or not?
What happened to that nice friend Zoe?
Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen – discuss
I can now confirm that the best of these topics was the Persona mug.
Mum spoke in the chirrupy voice she uses to answer the phone: ‘Persona is a brand-new form of birth control that works in harmony with your body.’ Her head waggled from side to side as she spoke.
‘Right,’ I said.
She turned to look at me.
‘Basically, you wee on a stick and it tells you whether you