But when morning came, my tongue was superglued with dryness to the roof of my mouth. Automatically, I stretched out my hand for my glass of water and gulped it in one go. Only when the last of it was racing down my throat did I remember. My contact lenses. I’d drunk my contact lenses. Again. The third time in six weeks. They were only monthly disposables, but all the same.

And the following day, as luck would have it, I lost my job.

I wasn’t exactly sacked. But my contract wasn’t renewed. It was a six-month contract and since I’d moved back to Dublin from Chicago it had already been renewed five times. I had thought renewing it again was a mere formality.

‘When you first started here,’ Frances said, ‘we were impressed with you. You were hard-working and reliable.’

I nodded. That sounded like me all right. On a good day.

‘But in the last six months or so, the standard of your work and commitment has dropped dramatically. You’re often late, you leave early…’

I listened, almost in surprise. Of course, I’d known that in my head stuff hadn’t been great, but I’d thought I’d done a pretty good job of presenting a convincing business-as-usual façade to the outside world.

‘… you’ve been clearly distracted and you’ve taken ten days’ sick leave.’

I could have leapt to my feet and given a speech telling Frances why I’d been distracted and where I’d been on my ten days’ sick leave, but I remained sitting like a plank, my face closed. It was no one’s business but mine. Yet, paradoxically, I felt she should have seen that something had been very wrong over the past months and made allowances for me. I’ve been more rational, I suspect.

‘We want people who care about their work –’

I opened my mouth to protest that I did care, until I realized, with a shock, that actually I didn’t give a damn.

‘– and it’s with regret that I have to tell you that we are unable to renew your contract with us.’

It was years since I’d been sacked. In fact, the last time had been when I was seventeen and babysitting for a neighbour. I’d smuggled my boyfriend in when the children had gone to bed, because a house with no adults in had been too much to resist. But the horrible son – appropriately enough called Damian – spotted me smuggling my boyfriend back out. I’ll never forget it: Damian was standing at the top of the stairs, and his expression was so malevolent that the Old Spice music began playing spontaneously in my head. I was never asked to babysit there again. (To be honest, it was nearly a relief.)

But since then I had never been fired. I was a pretty good worker – not so good that I was ever in danger of winning the Employee of the Month Award, but fairly reliable and productive.

‘You want me to go?’ I asked faintly.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Now would be good.’

Oddly enough, it was losing my job that finally made me decide to leave Garv. I don’t really understand why. Because, you know, it’s not easy to leave someone. Not in real life. In fiction it’s all so cut and dried and clear: if you can see no future together, then of course you leave. Simple. Or if he’s having an affair, then you’d be a total idiot to stay, right? But in real life it’s amazing the things that conspire to keep you together. You might think, OK, so we can’t seem to make each other happy any more, but I get on so well with his sister and my friends are so fond of him, and our lives are too interwoven for us to be able to extricate ourselves. And this is our house, and see those lupins in our little back garden? – I planted them. (Well, not planted planted, I didn’t actually put them in the ground with my own hands, it was a narky old man called Michael who did, but I masterminded the whole thing.)

Leaving someone is a big deal. I was walking away from a lot more than a person, it was an entire life I was saying goodbye to.

But the shock of losing my job had triggered the conviction that everything was falling apart. Once the door to one disaster had opened, the possibilities for catastrophe seemed open-ended and I felt I’d no choice but to go along with my life as it unravelled. Losing a job? Why not go for broke and lose a marriage as well? It had suffered so many body blows during the past months, it was over in all but name anyway.

By the time Garv came home from work, I was in the bedroom, waist-high in a pathetic attempt at packing. How anyone manages to do a midnight flit is beyond me. Most people (if they’re anything like me) accumulate so much stuff.

He stood and looked at me, and it was like I was dreaming the whole thing.

He seemed surprised. Or maybe not. ‘What’s going on?’

This was my cue for the dramatic exit lines people always deliver in fiction. I’m LEAVING you! It’s OVER. Instead, I hung my head and mumbled, ‘I think I’d better go. We’ve tried our best with this and…’

‘Right,’ he swallowed. ‘Right.’ Then he nodded, and the nod was the worst bit. Such resignation in it. He agreed with me.

‘I lost my job today.’

‘Christ. What happened?’

‘I’ve been distracted and taken too much sick leave.’

‘Bastards.’

‘Yeah, well.’ I sighed. ‘The thing is, I mightn’t make this month’s mortgage, so I’ll give it to you from my Ladies’ Nice Things account.’

‘Forget it, forget it. I’ll take care of it.’

Then we lapsed into silence and it became clear that the mortgage was all he was planning to take care of.

Maybe I should have been angry with him and Truffle Woman. Perhaps I should have despised him for not jumping into the breach and promising me passionately that he wouldn’t let me go and that we could work it out.

But the truth was, right then, I want ed to go.

3

Maintenance level dysfunctional. That’s how I’d like to describe my family, the Walshes. Well, actually, that’s not how I’d like to describe my family. I’d like to describe my family as the prototype for the Brady Bunch. I’d like to describe my family as the Waltons of Waltons’ Mountain, only more lickarsey. But alas, maintenance level dysfunctional is as good as it gets.

I have four sisters, and the credo that each of them seems to live by is: The More Dramas the Better. (Sample thereof: Claire’s husband left her the day she’d given birth to their first child; Rachel is a (recovered) addict; Anna doesn’t really do reality; and Helen, the youngest – well, it’s kind of hard for me to describe…) But I’ve never been fond of chaos and I couldn’t figure out why I was so different. In my lonelier moments I used to entertain a fantasy that I was adopted. Which I could never truly relax into, because it was obvious from my appearance that I was one of them.