quickly qualify what I have just said. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with asking questions, love. You just have to make sure they are sensible questions, and that you don’t already know the answers. Alright?’
She nods, and then enquires gravely, ‘Do you really want to shake her?’
‘No. Of course not. That was just a joke.’
I need to watch what I say in front of her these days. Not just the swearing; everything else too.
Another time, maybe at the weekend when we have a moment alone and Isla’s not hanging on my every word, I’ll tell Eddie how I overheard Brendan talking to Katie today, and how he had a note of respect in his voice that’s never there when he speaks to me. I’ll tell Eddie how irrationally hurt I felt. Come to think of it, I was genuinely at risk of shaking him, Brendan, taking him firmly by the shoulders, shaking until his hair was ruffled and his tie askew and he finally noticed, really noticed, my existence.
We continue to eat, our conversation wandering round everything from work, to school, to a TV program that Eddie wants me to record tonight.
Then, suddenly, our time is almost up. Eddie wolfs the last of his dinner, rinses his plate under the tap, his stubble grizzling my skin as he kisses me farewell.
‘I’m off.’
‘Alright. See ya.’
Eddie is thirty-two, eight years older than me. He’s had two other significant relationships, and as a result he knows what he wants from life: a family and home. Mum says I’ve struck gold with Eddie, and this is one of those few occasions when she’s actually right. Inside his rough-and-ready exterior there’s something shiny and good and lasting. He came at the right time in my life, and apparently I came at the right time in his. He says he wouldn’t have been ready if I’d met him earlier, just ask his exes. As if I would!
Eddie is lingering, a twinkle in his eye.
‘Are you going to do it tonight?’ Isla asks breathlessly.
He cocks an eyebrow. ‘D’you think I should?’
‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’ Her voice ascends with each affirmation, the last a shriek.
‘Alright.’
He steps towards the window, slides it back fully, and then pauses for dramatic effect. As the cold air rushes into the kitchen, he puts one hand on the sill and swings himself over to the other side. And with that he’s gone, into the dark, and we’re left with the open window and the startling draught. We’re laughing so hard you’d swear he’d never done it before.
Isla closes the window and I start to clear up. I begin a game, trying to come up with as many Red Robot words as I can.
‘Rock … Rabbit … Right … Rap … Rich … Rag …’
Isla sings each one after me.
When we run out of words, her little face puckers. ‘What day is it, again?’
‘Wednesday.’
She counts on her fingers. ‘Two days until the weekend.’
‘Yes,’ I say with false cheeriness.
We both hate the weekends. Well, every second one anyway. Like her, I count down on my fingers, my dread increasing as it gets closer and closer.
‘Rightio, Miss Red Robot … Time to rub you clean, and read you a story, and put you to sleep in your room …’
Her laugh is restrained, and I know I haven’t succeeded in distracting her.
Suddenly, Jamie looms between us, as menacing as he is invisible.
‘Time for bed,’ I chirp, as though the mere movement from one room to another is enough to make him disappear from our lives.
The weekend foists itself upon us, and once again the flat is hollow without Isla. Gone is her sing-song voice, musical laughter and frequent crescendos of ‘Mammy’. Her absence creates a pause. The tempo of our lives won’t resume until her return.
Every second weekend, two days and two infinitely long nights, she is in his care. I use the term ‘care’ loosely, because keeping a child up past her bedtime is not caring for her. Feeding her greasy junk food isn’t caring either, and neither is having your drunk, drug-using friends in the flat when she’s there. I know that the sheets she will sleep in have not been changed in weeks. I know that when she wakes in the morning she will have to switch on the TV and wait for hours until he remembers her and stumbles out of bed. I know all this for a fact because she has told me so. When she was younger and without the language skills to recount what her weekend had been like, I had to draw my own conclusions from her bloodshot eyes and clinginess and tantrums when she got home to me. That was harder. At least now we can speak about it and I can assure her that it isn’t normal, and that most people — most fathers — don’t live like that.
‘I hope he dumps her at his mother’s house again,’ I mutter to Eddie, who’s trying to talk me out of this dark mood I’m in.
‘Maybe he will. Look, Emma, try to distract yourself, otherwise you’ll go crazy.’
‘Don’t ask me to switch off. I can’t. I know Jamie. I can’t fuckin’ trust him. Not for one single moment. That’s what’s so fuckin’ hard.’
‘I know it’s not easy,’ Eddie says calmly, ‘but you need to find something to do other than worrying yourself sick. You need to find some other way of occupying yourself on these weekends.’
My helplessness bubbles into misdirected anger. No, Eddie, it is not easy. It’s downright heartbreaking, that’s what it is. Bloody hell, the most difficult part of being a parent is not childbirth — though at the tender age of eighteen, it was a horrendous shock — nor the sleepless nights that go on for years afterwards, nor the constant demands, negotiation and complaints that seem to come hand-in-hand with children of any age. The hardest part, for me, has been giving my child over to someone I don’t trust. A minute is too long. Two days and nights? No parent in the world should be asked to do that.
Eddie squeezes my shoulder. ‘Do something nice. Go and have a look around the shops. Or get your nails done.’
He’s anxious to get going. Saturday is a working day for him, even better than weekdays because he gets paid double time. We’re saving for a house of our own, and every extra euro that goes into our bank account brings him inordinate satisfaction, happiness even. As he sets off for work, he holds his cheerfulness in check, because he understands the depth of my misery.
After the door shuts — he saves the window exits for Isla — I spend some time staring at my fingernails. They’re uneven and dry. It’s been a long time since I had a manicure: my birthday last year. Isla came too and we sat in the salon like spoiled princesses, acting as if we did extravagant things like this all the time, when in fact it was our first time ever. Afterwards we went for a milkshake, cupping the tall pale-pink tumblers with our freshly painted hot-pink nails.
Instead of taking Eddie’s advice and slipping on my jacket to go out, I use my jagged-ended, dry fingers to tap out my mother’s number on the phone.
‘Emma!’ she exclaims. ‘I was just this minute thinking of you. How are you, love?’
My mother can drive me crazy more rapidly and profoundly than anyone else in the universe, yet — other than Louise — she’s always the one I go to when I’m down, or in trouble. I can’t lie to her. I can’t pretend to be happy when I’m not, and neither can she. If we were each able to gloss over our feelings, hide what we really thought, perhaps we would bicker less than we do.
‘Depressed.’
I don’t need to explain any further. Mum knows how painful these weekends are for me. In an ironic shift of time and responsibility, she herself used to feel similar pain and worry when I was with Jamie.
‘Please, Emma, he’s bad news,’ she would