But I didn’t think about it because I thought I knew what I wanted. In retrospect, I’d sometimes wondered if maybe she’d been right. Maybe I had settled, maybe I had played it too safe. But it hadn’t all been bad…

‘We had a lovely time together for years.’ I could hear my voice shaking.

‘So what happened?’

I was silent for too long.

‘Go back to the beginning and talk it right through. Go on, it’ll help to make sense of it all. Start with the rabbits,’ she prompted. ‘Come on, you’ve never told me fully.’

But I didn’t want to talk about any of it. Especially not the rabbits. Because you can’t really tell the rabbit story without people laughing, and I was in no state to start making fun of the reasons why my marriage had broken down.

It had begun, innocently enough, with a pair of slippers. What happened was, one Christmas someone gave me a pair of slippers which looked like black furry rabbits. I was extremely fond of them. Not only did they keep my feet warm, but they were cute and cuddly without the shame of them actually being cuddly toys. In the event of any confusion, I could point out that they had a function and that I wasn’t one of those women who crammed her bedroom window-sill with an army of fluffy dolphins, pastel donkeys and squashy chickens, who looked down with their button eyes on people calling to the house and freaked the life out of them. Oh no. I had a pair of slippers, that’s all. They were made of fake astrakhan, and when Garv gave them personalities, he was obviously influenced by the astrakhan because they were both Russian. Valya and Vladimir. I could never tell them apart, but Garv said that Vladimir had a funny ear and Valya’s nose was shaped like a cross-section of a bit of Toblerone. (Why he just couldn’t have said triangular, I’ll never know.) Valya was a bit of a femme fatale and often said stuff like, ‘I hef hed menny, menny luffers.’ Sometimes she gave me advice on what to wear. Vladimir – who sounded almost identical to Valya – was a Party apparatchik who’d been stripped of his privileges. He was very gloomy, but then so was Valya.

Garv began to conduct the occasional conversation through the medium of the astrakhan slippers. He’d stick his hand inside and wiggle it about and say, ‘I em goink to the Vestern-style supermarket. I em queueink for menny, menny days. Vot vill I get for you?’

‘Who’m I talking to? Valya or Vladimir?’

‘Valya. Vladimir’s the one with the funny ear and –’

‘– Valya’s nose looks like a cross-section of a Toblerone, I know. We need pizzas, toothpaste, cheese…’

‘Woadka?’ Valya suggested hopefully. Valya had a bit of a problem. So, coincidentally, did Vladimir.

‘No woadka, but you might as well get a couple of bottles of wine.’

‘Bleck-Sea caviar?’

‘No.’

‘Bleck bread?’

‘Actually, we could do with a loaf of bread.’

‘I em helpink you.’ Valya was pleased with herself.

I didn’t mind. To be honest, I thought it was cute. Up to a point. But perhaps I should never have indulged him, because after that it was only a short step to the real rabbits.

As briefly as I could, I told Emily about the slippers. Then, ignoring her complaints that the story was only hotting up, I begged to be allowed to go to bed, on the grounds that I’d scratched my arm so much it was bleeding.

13

The phone woke me. I was out of bed and into the living-room before I realized it. In the wake of the previous day’s phone calls my nerves were like taut elastic – I was waiting for someone like my first primary-school teacher or the president of Ireland to ring, to tell me about Garv and The Girl.

‘Hello,’ I said suspiciously.

A sweet, squeaky voice rattled off, ‘Mort Russell’s office calling for Emily O’Keeffe.’

‘One moment please.’ I matched the girl’s efficient tone.

But Emily was in the bathroom, and when I knocked on the door she wailed, ‘Oh no. I’ll have to call them back. I’m dehair-ing my legs and I’m at a vital point.’

When I returned to the phone, some instinct stopped me from sharing this with Mort Russell’s office. ‘I’m afraid she’s away from her desk right now. Can I help?’

‘Could Emily call Mort?’ the sweet, squeaky girl requested.

I wrote down the number and said, ‘Thank you.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, sunny as you please.

Unlike me. I’d woken at twenty past three, my heart pounding with an irresistible need to ring Garv. I’d tiptoed into the living-room and, in the dark, dialled our home number. I just wanted to TALK to him. About what, I wasn’t really sure. But there had been a time when he’d behaved as though he loved me more than anyone had ever loved anyone. I think I needed to know that even if he loved this new woman, it wasn’t as much as he’d once loved me.

With a click and a rush of static, the phone began to ring on another continent, and agitatedly I gnawed at the twizzler around my wrist. But there was no one at home: I’d done my sums wrong. Ireland was eight hours ahead, so Garv was at work. My desperation had already begun to cool by the time I was put through to his desk, so when it transpired that he wasn’t there and that all I could do was leave a message on his voicemail, it threw me. Leave a message after the tone.

I decided not to. I crept back to bed, finished the twizzler and wished I had several hundred more. I’d had some black times in my past, but I wasn’t sure I had ever before felt so wretched. Would I ever get over it, would I ever feel normal again?

I seriously doubted it, even though I’d seen other people recover from terrible things. Look at Claire: her husband leaving her the same day, the same day, that she’d given birth to their child. And she’d recovered. Other people got married and got divorced and got over it and got married again, and talked about ‘My first husband’ in calm, easy-going tones, as if not one twinge of pain had ever been felt getting from then – when he was actually someone who mattered – to now, when he was just a walk-on part from your past. People adapted and moved on. But as I curled into a tight ball in the dark, I had a profound fear that I wouldn’t. That I’d stay stuck, just becoming older and weirder. I’d stop getting my hair dyed and I’d end up moving back home to look after my aged parents until I was old myself. No one on our road would talk to us, and when children called to the house on Hallowe’en we’d pretend we weren’t in. Or else pour buckets of cold water from an upstairs window on to their masked and sheeted finery. Our car would be twenty years old and in perfect condition and the three of us would wear hats when we went out for a drive – when Dad would insist on taking the wheel, even though he’d have shrunk so much that all the other drivers would be able to see of him would be the top of his hat peeping over the dash. People would talk about me: ‘She was married once. Used to be quite normal, they say. Hard to believe now, of course.’