Broken Harbour

day, and it looks like I’ll be doing the same again tonight. I couldn’t manage Dina as well. I couldn’t.”

Dina’s episodes last anywhere between three days and two weeks. I keep some of my annual leave saved up just in case, and O’Kelly doesn’t ask, but that wasn’t going to work this time. I said, “What about Dad? Just for once. Couldn’t he…?”

Geri left the silence there. When I was a kid Dad was straight-backed and lean, given to clean, square-edged statements with no wiggle room: Women may fancy a drinking man, but they’ll never respect him. There’s no bad mood that fresh air and exercise can’t mend. Always pay a debt before it’s due and you’ll never go hungry. He could fix anything, grow anything, cook and clean and iron like a professional when he had to. Mum dying blew him right out of the water. He still lives in the house in Terenure where we grew up. Geri and I take turns calling down to him at the weekends, to clean the bathroom, put seven balanced meals in the freezer and check that the TV and the phone are still working. The kitchen wallpaper is the acid-trip orange swirl that Mum picked out in the seventies; in my room, my schoolbooks are dog-eared and cobwebbed on the bookshelf Dad made for me. Go into the sitting room and ask him a question: after a few seconds he’ll turn from the telly, blink at you, say, “Son. Good to see you,” and go back to watching Australian soap operas with the sound turned down. Occasionally, when he gets restless, he extracts himself from the sofa and shuffles around the back garden a few times, in his slippers.

I said, “Geri, please. It’s only for the night. She’ll sleep all day tomorrow, and I’m hoping I’ll have work sorted out by tomorrow evening. Please.”

“I would if I could, Mick. It’s not that I’m too busy, you know I wouldn’t mind that…” The background noise had faded: she had moved away from the kids, for privacy. I pictured her in their dining room strewn with bright jumpers and homework, tugging a strand of blond out of its careful weekly set. We both knew I wouldn’t have suggested our father unless I was desperate. “But you know how she goes if you don’t stay with her every minute, and I’ve Sheila and Phil to look after… What would I do if one of them started getting sick in the middle of the night? Just leave them to clean up their own mess? Or leave her and have her start carrying on, wake the house?”

I let my shoulders slump back against the wall and ran a hand over my face. My apartment felt airless, stuffed with the reek of whatever fake-lemon chemicals the cleaner uses. “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Don’t worry about it.”

“Mick. If we can’t cope… Maybe we should think about somewhere that can.”

“No,” I said. It came out sharp enough that I flinched, but Dina’s singing didn’t pause. “I can cope. It’ll be fine.”

“Will you be all right? Can you get someone to sub for you?”

“That’s not how it works. I’ll figure something out.”

“Oh, Mick, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. As soon as they’re a bit better-”

“It’s OK. Tell them both I was asking for them, and you try not to catch whatever they’ve got. We’ll talk soon.”

A distant yell of fury, somewhere on Geri’s end. “Andrea! What did I say to you?… Sure, Mick, Dina might be better herself by the morning, mightn’t she? You never know your luck.”

“She might, yeah. We’ll hope.” Dina yelped, and the shower shut off: the hot water had run out. “Gotta go,” I said. “Take care,” and I had the phone stashed away and myself neatly arranged in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, by the time the bathroom door opened.

I made myself a beef stir-fry for dinner-Dina wasn’t hungry. The shower had settled her: she curled up on the sofa, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants that she had taken out of my wardrobe, gazing into space and rubbing dreamily at her hair with a towel. “Shh,” she said, when I started to ask delicately about her day. “Don’t talk. Listen. Isn’t it beautiful?”

All I could hear was the muttering of traffic, four floors down, and the synthesized tinkle of the music that the couple upstairs play every night to send their baby to sleep. I supposed it was peaceful, in its own way, and after a day keeping hold of every thread in that tangle of conversations, it was good to cook and eat in silence. I would have liked to catch the news, to see how the reporters were spinning things, but that was out.

After dinner I brewed coffee, a lot of it. The sound of the beans grinding sent Dina off on a fresh fidget: padding restless barefoot circles around the living room, taking books off my shelves and flipping the pages and putting them back in the wrong places. “Were you supposed to be going out tonight?” she asked, with her back to me. “Like on a date or something?”

“It’s Tuesday. No one goes on dates on Tuesdays.”

“God, Mikey, get some spontaneity. Go out on school nights. Go wild.”

I poured myself a mug of espresso strength and headed for my armchair. “I don’t think I’m the spontaneous type.”

“Well, does that mean you go on dates at the weekends? Like, you’ve got a girlfriend?”

“I don’t think I’ve called anyone my girlfriend since I was twenty. Adults have partners.”

Dina mimed sticking two fingers down her throat, with sound effects. “Middle-aged gay guys in 1995 have partners. Are you going out with anyone? Are you shagging anyone? Are you giving anyone a blast from the yogurt bazooka? Are you-”

“No, Dina, I’m not. I was seeing someone until recently, we broke up, I’m not planning on getting back in the saddle for a while. OK?”

“I didn’t know,” Dina said, a lot more quietly. “Sorry.” She subsided onto one arm of the sofa. “Do you still talk to Laura?” she asked, after a moment.

“Sometimes.” Hearing Laura’s name filled up the room with her perfume, sharp and sweet. I took a big swallow of coffee to get it out of my nose.

“Are you guys going to get back together?”

“No. She’s seeing someone. A doctor. I’m expecting her to ring me any day to tell me that they’re engaged.”

“Ahhh,” Dina said, disappointed. “I like Laura.”

“So do I. That’s why I married her.”

“So why did you divorce her, then?”

“I didn’t divorce her. She divorced me.” Laura and I have always done the civilized thing and told people the breakup was mutual, nobody’s fault, we grew in different directions and all the usual meaningless rubbish, but I was too tired.

“Seriously? Why?”

“Because. I don’t have the energy tonight, Dina.”

“Whatever,” Dina said, rolling her eyes. She slid sinuously off the sofa and padded into the kitchen, where I heard her opening things. “Why don’t you have anything to eat? I’m starving.”

“There’s plenty to eat. The fridge is full. I can make you a stir-fry, or there’s lamb stew in the freezer, or if you want something lighter you can have porridge, or-”

“Ew, please. I don’t mean stuff like that. Fuck the five food groups and antioxidant blah blah blah. I want like ice cream, or one of those shitty burgers you stick in the microwave.” A cupboard door slammed and she came back into the living room holding out a granola bar at arm’s length. “Granola? What are you, a girl?”

“No one’s making you eat it.”

She shrugged, threw herself on the sofa again and started nibbling a corner of the bar, making a face like it might poison her. She said, “When you were with Laura you were happy. It was sort of weird, because you’re not one of those naturally happy people, so I wasn’t used to seeing you that way. It actually took me a while to figure out what was going on. But it was nice.”

I said, “Yes, it was.”

Laura is the same kind of sleek, highlighted, labor-intensive pretty as Jennifer Spain. She was on a diet every day I knew her, except birthdays and Christmases; she tops up her fake tan every three days, straightens her hair every morning of her life, and never goes out of the house without full makeup. I know some men like women to leave themselves the way nature intended, or at least to pretend they do, but the gallantry with which Laura fought nature hand to hand was one of the many things I loved about her. I used to get up fifteen or twenty minutes early in the mornings so I could spend that time just watching her get ready. Even on days when she was running late,