I’m not a total klutz. I read magazines, I’m an enthusiastic shopper and I take a keen interest in skirt lengths, heel shapes and the light-diffusing qualities of foundation. But you only have to look at my single friends to see that they’re all thinner and more glamorous than me and their make-up bags are cornucopias of breaking-news wondrousness. While I’m still reading about something, they’re already wearing it. (Do you know how long it took me to realize that blue shimmer shadow was back in? Honestly, I’d be too ashamed to tell you, and even though it’s a cliché, it is something to do with having a man and not being ‘out there’.)

Despite our divergent lifestyles and living several thousand miles apart, my friendship with Emily has endured. We’d e-mail each other twice or three times a week. She’d tell me about all her disastrous relationships, then she’d debrief me on my dull, married life, then we’d both go home happy.

It was a great source of sadness to me that we couldn’t seem to manage to live on the same continent. Garv and I had only been married a few months before we moved to Chicago for five years. Then less than four weeks before we returned to Ireland, Emily departed for Los Angeles.

What happened was, Emily had always wanted to be a writer. She’d tried her hand at short stories and novels and got nowhere. Her stuff always seemed good to me, but what would I know? Like Helen says, I’ve no imagination.

Then, five or so years ago, Emily wrote a short film called A Perfect Day which was picked up by an Irish production company and got shown on RTE. It was whimsical and charming, but what normally happens with a ‘short’ is that it gets shown once, then disappears. It’s regarded as a type of practice run for wannabe film-makers. But something unprecedented happened with A Perfect Day, because it was a very odd length: fourteen and a half minutes. Whenever Ireland had some sort of corruption scandal (every other week), the nine o’clock news would run over and a ‘filler’ item would be needed to occupy the airwaves until ten o’clock, when things could get back on schedule. Three times over a four-month period A Perfect Day was that filler, and it began to work its way beneath the skin of the nation. Suddenly at water-coolers and photocopying machines and bus-stops throughout the land people were asking each other, ‘Did you see that lovely thing that was on after the news last night?’

Overnight, in Ireland at least, Emily became a householdish name – people didn’t exactly know who she was, but they knew that they’d heard of her, and they had definitely heard of her film. She could have made a decent enough living in Ireland, if she’d been prepared to be flexible, and do sit-coms, plays, ads – apparently they pay very handsomely – as well as films. But she decided to go for broke, left her dreary day-job and departed for Los Angeles.

Time passed, then news came back that she’d been taken on by one of the big Hollywood agencies. Not long after that came the announcement that she’d sold a full-length script to Dreamworks. Or was it Miramax? One of the big ones, anyway. The film was called Hostage (or it might be Hostage!), and was about a tiny, honeymooners’ island in the South Pacific, which is invaded by terrorists who kill the few locals and take several of the honeymooners hostage. Others escape into the undergrowth, survive castaway-style on twigs etc., and plot a rescue mission. It was described as ‘an action movie, with a love story and comic overtones’.

The Sunday Independent did a feature about the deal, RTE ran A Perfect Day again, and Emily’s mother bought a long, navy, spangledy dress for the première. (She got it in the sales, at 40 per cent off, but it was still fairly pricey.)

More time passed, and not much happened. No one got cast and whenever I asked what stage they were at, Emily said tersely, ‘We’re still fine-tuning the script.’ I stopped asking about it.

Eventually, Emily’s mother rang and asked Emily would she mind if she wore the long, navy, spangledy dress to Mr Emily’s Christmas work do? Only it was nearly a year since she’d bought it, and though it had been in the sales, at 40 per cent off, it had still been fairly pricey. She’d like to get some use out of it.

Work away, Emily advised.

Then, lo and behold, a rival studio brought out a film. It was about a group of eight couples who go on a golfing holiday on a tiny island off Fiji. The island is invaded by terrorists, who kill the few locals and take several of the golfers hostage. Some escape into the undergrowth, survive castaway-style on twigs etc., and plot a rescue mission. It was an action movie, with –you’ll never guess – a love story. And even, would you believe, one or two laughs. I’d worked on the fringes of the film business long enough not to be surprised when news filtered back that the studio had decided to ‘pass’ on making Emily’s movie. ‘Pass’ was Hollywood-speak for ‘turn down’, ‘reject’ or ‘want nothing further to do with’. I rang Emily to tell her how sorry I was. She was crying. ‘But I’m working on a new script,’ she told me. ‘You win some, you lose some, right?’

That was a year and a half ago. Soon afterwards, she came home to Ireland for Christmas and persuaded me to go out on the town with her, just the two of us.

Garv begged to be allowed to come, but sorrowfully Emily told him it was a girls’ night out and he wouldn’t be able for it. And she was right – at the best of times, she was a dangerous person to go out with, and when she was feeling raw, humiliated and disinclined to talk about it, she was even worse.

It was the pink stetson night: the rock-chick look was reaching critical mass and was about to collapse under the weight of its own silliness. But it hadn’t yet happened and she looked sensational.

I jumped all over her, so happy to see her, but despite our delight in each other’s company, it was a strange night. At the time I thought I was having the time of my life, but in retrospect I’m not so sure. Emily drank an awful lot at high speed – since she’d started drinking she’d become very good at it. Normally I didn’t even attempt to keep up, but on this particular night I did. Obviously I got very drunk, but strangely I didn’t realize it. I felt perfectly sober. The only indication that anything was amiss was the fact that everyone I came into contact with seemed to do something to insult or annoy me. It never occurred to me that the fault might be mine.

We were in a bar in the Hayman, a new fancy-dan hotel, where everything from the roof tiles right down to the ashtrays had been ‘created’ by some celebrated New York designer. I’d heard about the place – it had been all over the papers, not least because most of its objets were for sale – but had never been there, whereas Emily had only been home three days and had already been there twice.