to ghost. It’s like your phone conjured them up, so your phone can vanish them too.’
‘Have you ever had a real boyfriend?’
‘Totally.’ She looked offended. ‘For seven years, from age nineteen to twenty-six. We outgrew each other. Was still hard, though. Seven years is a long time. Even though the final year or two were kind of shitty. I was afraid I’d never meet anyone else,’ she said. ‘And I haven’t.’
‘Apart from Breadcrumb Guy.’
‘Oh, him!’ She made a dismissive flutter. ‘He was an asshole. And I was a bigger one for pretending he wasn’t. There’ve been lots of assholes! So, I’m going now.’ She stood up.
‘Can I have your number?’ Hurriedly he got to his feet. ‘I promise I’m not an asshole.’
She looked him in the eye. ‘You’re hot, you’re rich, you’re bored, you’re totally an asshole.’ But she laughed and gave him her number anyway.
He went home and slept for eleven hours, the first time in two years he’d managed more than five uninterrupted hours. When he woke, he wondered what had changed. Then he remembered. Haukart. Fermented shark, whatever she was.
That same morning, Nell woke up in her small, overheated room in Shankill, a suburb perched on the edge of Dublin. The room got unbearably stuffy in warm weather but remained Baltic during the winter. She’d been woken by the ping of a text: Morning ☺ You busy today? Come to the coast with me? Friends. You are NOT fermented shark.
Deep in thought, Nell opened her window to let in some air. Last night, her assessment of Liam had been ‘interesting but not for me’. He was too clueless about her life. But he was … stimulating. She’d quizzed him about the end of his running career and he’d been unexpectedly articulate. ‘After I stopped winning,’ he’d said, ‘disappearing into a marriage was a great place to hide from my failure. Paige had status and money. I wanted someone to take care of me.’
His honesty was intriguing. Attractive.
‘We had Violet, and that was a distraction. Then we had Lenore. Same. We were moving around a lot, a year in Vancouver, two in Auckland. Took a few years to notice how worthless I felt.’
‘Oh, yeah – performative masculinity. Men are told they must be hunter-gatherers. If you’re not one, you feel like a failure.’
‘It has a name? Wow. Okay! When we lived in Chicago I went to drama school. But Paige’s job moved us again, this time to Dublin, so I never graduated. Moving back to Ireland as a house-husband, that was the death knell. The shame was too much. I could do that shit in another country, but not here. The last two years of our marriage were …’
She waited, reluctant to provide the words.
‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,’ he eventually said. ‘In the end I just wanted it to be over. Paige despised me and I resented her. We went to counselling, which made it worse. Found out we’d got each other wrong from the get-go. She thought I was dynamic. I thought she was strong. We were both wrong.’
‘It sounds painful. Really.’
After a silence, he said, ‘I was shitty to her.’
‘What way shitty? Cheating?’
‘Hey, cheating isn’t the worst thing you can do.’ At Nell’s sceptical look, he said, ‘I sneered at her job, her dedication, her money. She believed in me for years and in return I was a tool. She hates me now. She’s right to.’
Nell looked again at her phone. No, she shouldn’t meet this guy. She typed a reply, then clicked back, deleting it all. Bad idea to commit to anything until she’d had coffee.
In the kitchen, used saucepans were piled along the worktops and the bin was overflowing. Six people lived in this three-bedroomed house and it was too small for them.
Molly Ringwald was mewing angrily, obviously hungry. ‘Sorry, Mol.’ She poured kibble into a bowl, then filled the kettle.
Wondering where to start with the clean-up operation, she thought, for the first time ever, How much longer do I have to live like this?
In wandered Garr, who lived in the adjoining sitting room. Frosted-glass doors were all that separated his space from the kitchen.
‘Morning,’ he said sleepily.
‘Sorry, did I wake you?’
‘You’re okay. Kettle on?’
‘Yep. But help me clean this pit. Garr, I met this guy last night … Not Tinder. Real life. But it’s not that sort of thing.’
‘What sort of thing is it?’
‘He’s … a babe. I guess. There might be something, but I’ve wasted enough time on mexperiments.’