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urging when, in an astonishingly short time, an offer for the house lay on the table. (‘Go on,’ the estate agent said to me cheerfully. ‘You never know how long it will be till the next one. So take it. Move on.’) The couple bought the curtains and the carpets, and threw in such a low offer for the dining table and chairs that they were astonished when I accepted that as well.
    But I’d stopped worrying about money. Only the day before, I’d started a proper accounting job with a small family firm, Hanley & Hanley, run by a somewhat tottery but sharp old fellow and his engaging son. The hours were longer and the shared room drab, with lighting that made everyone look sallow. But I consoled myself with the good salary, telling myself that now that the house sale was agreed, I could look for a smaller place – a neat sunny flatwith a balcony. If I chose well, I could get rid of most of my commitments and take my time to look for a more pleasant workplace.
    A flat with a balcony, then! De-cluttering my life became a passion, and I was ruthless. In that last couple of weeks I took particular pleasure in smuggling boxes out of the house into the back of my car. Early one morning Jan slopped out in her dressing gown to stop her side gate banging in the breeze and called across, ‘They certainly must be keeping you busy at that new job of yours, Lois, if you’re having to schlep this amount of stuff back and forth every day.’
    I simply smiled. I’d wait until the coast was clear to slip out some unwanted painting or a nest of stools to give to a charity shop or drop off for auction. I cleaned the house from top to bottom. I mowed the tiny lawn before I sold the mower. I even borrowed my own ladder back to wash the windows. Nor did I neglect the matter of paperwork. Like Stuart, I fixed up a box number for mail that might follow, but, unlike him, I took the time to write the details on a piece of card with a brief note for our son. ‘
Dear Malachy, I won’t nag. But when you’re done with all that poisonous stuff, this is how you can get back in touch. All my love, Mum
.’
    It seemed so horribly inadequate. I tore it intopieces. This was my boy, after all. I’d nursed him, cuddled and bathed him, taught him how to tie his shoelaces – the million small intimacies between mother and child. How could the two of us have found ourselves beached up this way? Forgetting for a moment that he was the cause of all this upheaval, I thought of writing, ‘
Oh, Malachy, sweetie. Come away with me. I’ll give you one last chance if you just promise to try
.’ But what would have been the point? He’d have been heading back to his old haunts within a matter of hours. So in the end I wrote the first note out again, except for the word ‘stuff’. ‘Stuff’ was too weak a word for what had put an end to all my dreams of family. They called it ‘shit’ and shit it was. So that’s what I called it, and then, because that’s such an ugly word, I didn’t simply seal the envelope; I stuck on sticky tape just to be sure that no one else would read it by mistake.
    I picked a lunch hour when I knew Soraya would be working on her own to drop the envelope off at SwiftClean. I tried to sound casual: ‘I think I’ve lost Malachy again. If he comes in to find me, would you give him this?’
    Soraya took it with a worried look. ‘It isn’t
cash
?’
    Leaving a box number for your own son sounds so unloving that I lied. ‘No, it’s my new mobile number.’
    She slid the envelope between the wall and theradio, where we had always kept the bits and pieces with no proper home. I hung round chatting till the next customer showed up, then slid away to pick up the keys to the small service flat I’d rented for a month.
    That Saturday, at a time when I knew the Tallentires would be out shopping, the van I’d