12.07 pm

The trouble with doing it on your own, Ruth thinks, is how alone you are. Sometimes it is as if there are no other bodies in this building, oh, a door closing to another room, or a floorboard squeaking somewhere, the click of a switch, or even the flush of the loo on the landing (another dispute with the landlord, because the cubicle is just too small, too exposed, there on the landing, for any comfort, material or personal). But the building is mostly quiet. The street can be heard, in waves, there are people out there, life happening. Perhaps she should go out. She’s not due at the hospital until two (only a check-up). Or perhaps she’ll just slump under her desk, curl into a ball, hope that the world will just go away. ‘Do you know that way,’ a teacher had asked her once, ‘how sometimes you feel like you are in a film?’ He had a habit, he confessed, of pretending while he was doing things, supermarket shopping or making dinner, that he was performing his life.

Ruth puts on her coat, the notes can wait, the windows can be left, she will go out and forget the way the room looks, both expectant and forlorn. The door softly thuds behind her, and the stairs are dark. She can’t be bothered with the light, so she feels her way down, back through the narrow hall. She and Lisa had speculated about painting it, or hanging posters, but then it had been three years since they took the rooms, their shared practice, and it seemed to be going well, in fact, it took all their time, so the posters and the paint, the windows, all got forgotten. (Though the toilet, perhaps they could at least paint that when Lisa gets back from her leave.) Out on Capel Street the air is milder than earlier, Ruth loosens her scarf. Walking towards the river, she changes her mind, turns left.

Ruth wants so often to tell clients that they are normal, but that, she suspects, is not what they want to hear. For some it was a comfort, to know that how they felt or what they had done or had had done to them did not make them different, it made them the same. Their lives were not extraordinary. But for Ciara, as for Anthony, now she thinks about it, this sameness was not what they wanted.

The air is fresh, and this was a good idea, walking, moving, though it is hard to avoid, completely, the sense that she’s running away. (Run! Stay!) Abbey Street is easier than the quays, less stressful than going through Temple Bar, though the street’s quietness is not a good thing, on the whole. Strange that the city had changed so little since she was a kid. Apartments was the main thing. So many of them thrown up. Damp. Fire risk. Ahead there is a couple, or a pair of boys, close together, some kind of dispute, looking at something together, then an embrace. A barber’s, always annoying how men’s haircuts were cheaper, as if they had fewer hairs. Ruth steps into the road to avoid the group of boys, bikes on pavements, taking up all the space, the irony of the empty road, and she wonders what would happen if you did that, just walked into the road and stayed there, walked slowly so the traffic built up behind you, horns going and people yelling, and you, there, defiant, for once refusing to let another person’s needs come first. ‘No need to be a drama queen,’ another of her mother’s observations.

Ruth passes one of the city’s many language schools, students clumped together, T-shirts in October. Ahead, she sees the lurid sign for the leprechaun museum and wonders if it’s any good, if her godson would enjoy it? She should take him to more things, but Ruth is too aware of being a pretend aunt, and she can still feel the childhood tedium of being made to go to shows aimed at children that were slightly too young for her, the horror of being asked how she was getting on at school. She had taken him, Conor, to the Sea Life place at Bray one bank holiday and it had not been a huge success, he was either too small or not small enough, and the tanks were cramped, seemed cruel. The Zoo had been better, they had gone in a group for his birthday and had seen elephants, tigers, giraffes. She had bought him a stuffed animal in the shop, though she has no memory of what it was – toucan? tiger cub? She had loved it when he took her hand, she did it for those moments of love. No – not that – think of something else. How did leprechauns come about anyway? It was true, apparently, that Ireland had more rainbows, something to do with latitude, or the fact that it was always raining. Where the pot of gold came in she isn’t sure, but she had passionately believed in it as a child, urging her mother to drive in pursuit of the rainbow’s end. It’s over there.

It’s too early to cross the river, acres of time till her appointment. Ruth hates dawdling. She should have stayed at her desk, tried to come up with some new thoughts after all, to finish some paperwork, at least she could have done some emails (another kind of displacement), but she has not and so she stands on the pavement edge, undecided. A tram is leaving the stop and Ruth pauses to let the mill of people pass. There is a newspaper abandoned on the bench in the shelter. TURKISH ASSAULT ON KURDISH FORCES. AN IMPEACHMENT. HOMELESSNESS.

Ruth looks up to see where the noise is coming from, notices a blonde woman with a buggy, its cargo screaming. They’re close to her, manoeuvring onto the pavement, stopping by her. ‘Fuck’s sake, shut the fuck up!’ There is something about that, the child, suddenly silent, that arrests Ruth. Too late, she realises the mother has seen her staring. Ruth steps into the road, without a glance for the traffic. A bike swerves. ‘Sorry,’ she calls out, too late. Glancing back, Ruth sees the woman bending over the child. What is she doing? Just giving the little thing a bag of sweets, it looks like. There had been an occasion when Ruth had spoken out. On the bus one evening, a man was letting a very young child swig from a bottle of Calpol. Ruth had waited for a while, but the third time he did it, she said, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ And she had felt every person around her, their attention keen on her, as the man had shouted, ‘Mind your own business, cow!’ Of course, Ruth had let it go. She feels even now the mix of shame and anger, thinks of the number of times she’d been hit or screamed at in public, and no one had ever said anything, not to her mother with her nice middle-class accent. And Ruth is not sure why her mother is in her mind so much today, when she can go weeks without a thought of her, for her, and it is ironic, almost, when her mother was the last person she would ever confide in.

Ruth rounds onto Liffey Street, and has to step into the road again, the pavement full with a huddle of tourists and a man on his phone. Walking is like an antidote to the counselling room, perhaps it is too intense this one-on-one all the time. She has been considering a request for group sessions, a support group for teenagers. She imagines them, a disconsolate circle, or maybe not, maybe they would be loud, full of life, which is even more terrifying.

Ruth doesn’t offer family counselling. Finally, Ruth had said, in desperation, ‘Well, Mum, maybe we should talk to someone, you know, together,’ and her mother, to both their astonishment, had mutely nodded. But it had not been a success. They had met on the steps outside, sat next to each other in the waiting room, her mother’s body jerking when their names were called. Ruth had hoped for – what? – a new beginning. She could no longer carry her mother’s anger (she could not, she would not). But as she began to speak, it was something innocuous enough, an opening gambit, her mother’s head had shot back as if she had been whipped. That, Ruth had wanted to say, that was nothing. Her mother’s constant fury, that was what she’d wanted to tell the therapist about, to find an ally against. But the minutes had dragged by, with each of them answering every question only yes or no. At the end Ruth had apologised to the therapist as they left, nodding when he’d said perhaps they weren’t ready yet and he was here if she wanted to come alone. What, though, Ruth suddenly wonders, what had her mother wanted to say?

Across the road had been a food court, there was an archway just there surely, leading through to stalls and cafés. Had it just vanished, Epicurean something it’s called. Was called. Now just a giant discount store, the huge coffee chain opposite.

Ruth had wanted a daughter herself. She would do it all differently. She’d – No – think of something else.

The archway is totally gone, but you can still get kebabs at ‘Istanbel’s Hyderabad House’, whoever named it covering all the bases. And there’s still the health-food place, the chocolate café. But the trimmings shop opposite is gone, where she’d bought ribbons, bedecking herself, a teenager tying black lace around her neck. Ruth glances at her watch, still too early.

Peering down the quay, the bookshop is still there at least. Ruth’s feet take her forward and halt before the window of the Winding Stair. The books are hanging, like a mobile, like they have escaped the prim confines of a bookcase, the orange covers of the classics mixed in with new books. She’s relieved that paper is still a thing, the smell of a book, it’s not the same reading on a screen. There are postcards and tote bags too. What was this one, ‘My mistakes are my,’ what, the bag was folded a bit, oh, ‘my life.’ Yes.

Ruth suddenly wants this. To do nothing with her days but read. A gentle kind of protest. (She will do the teenager thing, it will be a change.) But as her eyes skim over the books’ surfaces, it feels too much. Perhaps she should buy one? But do I want to carry it all day? Ruth hovers at the window, slowly one cover coming into focus. She sees the drape of red fabric across the bodies, enfolding them, the tender embrace. A Schiele painting. She leans closer, reads the little Post-it blurb attached to the cover, ‘Staff Pick … stories … women’. The handwriting is too small. She does not care, anyway, about the contents, it is the image. They had seen the show together, ‘Modern Something’ or ‘20^th Century Something’ or ‘Ways of Something’, the exhibition title eludes her, but the memory is strong. How they had stood before the picture, how they had been stilled by its tenderness, how Aidan had reached his hand for hers, fingers entwining. Mother and Daughter. It is their togetherness she remembers. Ruth’s hand trembles now. It could not be gone, all of it, surely?

At the register, the bookseller rings it up. Ruth asks a favour. ‘Could I pick it up on my way back, I have a meeting and,’ she shows her already-full bag, ‘I’d rather not carry it around all day.’

The woman smiles. ‘Of course, I’ll keep it behind the counter, just ask for it. I’ll put your name on the bag, Ruth Ryan, okay?’ Ruth nods. ‘Nice alliteration.’

It is a bookish thing to say.

And she is on the street again.

Through Merchant’s Arch, up Crown Alley, which had seemed so exciting when you were fifteen and now, well, was it only for tourists? The building site ahead forces her to the left and around and on to College Green. She waits for the lights to change, crosses, and now here is Trinity Street and the pub on the corner, scene of so many student nights and, yes, the ATM still there across the road, the source of cash for one last drink. The street is for pedestrians now. The window of Avoca, brightly coloured blankets. Ruth had gone through a phase of buying them for friends’ babies, she inherited one herself from a similar gift to her mother, ‘This blanket is older than you,’ said so many times. Blue mohair, a mauve stripe. But the shop is owned now by that company that sells terrible food to asylum centres, she hasn’t been in since. (‘What’s the point of a boycott, if no one knows?’ Aidan said.) Ruth turns right, perhaps she will walk up Grafton Street, eat somewhere near the Green? She passes Brown Thomas with all its expensive, shiny things – and feels sick, suddenly, at the idea of it all and turns and goes back down to Nassau Street.

There is a gap at the corner of Dawson Street where there used to be a building, one of those ugly seventies constructions, eighties maybe, and now there is sky where there had been brown brick. The way things can disappear amazes her, the vanished arch, now this, from solid to air. Through the gap she sees the curve of a building, high windows. Why can’t they leave it like that, she wonders, put in a little park maybe, but the land is too valuable. Something else will be raised up, something not as good as air and sky. A homeless person is sleeping or lying, wrapped in a blanket and cardboard boxes, only his feet exposed, and he could be dead and they would not notice, all the people walking by (her life is one long freedom). In years to come people will ask, how could you ignore it, do nothing? And they will say, you don’t understand, it was different then. What lies. The tram clangs as it squeezes round the corner. It seems a bit of wonder, all these people moving across the city.

Her mother had always hated Dublin, had begrudged it for the way it blundered along, a bit grubby, a bit corrupt, a bit beautiful. In her last days in the hospital, she had imagined herself back in Wexford, had said, ‘Look, you can see the sea,’ gesturing to the windows. ‘It’s sunny.’ And Ruth had agreed, though it was grey out and you could only see the car park. Still, it was nice to be by a window and Ruth had sat, ignoring the pictures of the Virgin on every wall, and laid her hand over her mother’s. It felt unnatural, really, given how little they had touched in life, but Ruth felt it was appropriate. Touch. Aidan had said, ‘You can tell her, speak to her, don’t let her go without saying the important things.’ But when her mother had looked up at her and said, ‘I think I’m on the way out,’ Ruth had shushed her, had said something vague about getting better, and the lie had left them awkward again.

She had only gone down to the canteen for a sandwich, had only been gone half an hour, but her mother had lapsed into a coma. Ruth sat beside her unconscious body, and said, ‘I forgive you,’ and, ‘I love you,’ words that were unimaginable in real life. And in those hours of silence, she had intoned to herself, my mother is dying. But that was unreal too.

She had told the nurses no priest and when she’d left that evening had asked them to phone her only if there was a major change. The call came at 4 am. The taxi through empty streets, the run through deserted corridors, and the sense, all along, that she had failed the test. Her mother had not looked peaceful, not really, and this had agitated Ruth. The doctor came to certify the death, and Ruth wanted to ask, is she really gone? As if she might suddenly open her eyes. But the doctor only offered her condolences, and Ruth, taking the plastic bag of belongings, had gone home an orphan.

Ruth weaves past the people standing outside the jeweller’s, the baker’s, the stationer’s. It feels relentless. The Kilkenny shop, another brown building, perhaps lunch here, soup and a wholemeal scone, a classic. It looks busy, though, the window above full, the view of the college attracting every middle-aged woman in the vicinity. Ruth keeps going. Kildare Street. The Alliance Française, but she and Aidan had gone to the café there too many times. Go on, because she doesn’t want to, can’t, think about – no, think of anything else. Have a Brewbaker maybe? Café after café, on and on the choices and none of them are right. And here you are, this is what they did with the old street, knocked it down and turned it into glass and concrete and even when you look up, no variation, no beauty.

Ruth is aching, and any sensible person would say that she is hungry and nervous and tired, and that her day is a shitstorm, and she should just give herself a break. At some point, though, you have to take responsibility. ‘You’, what a classic distancing device, the client who always says ‘you’. Ciara was like that, saying ‘you’ when she meant ‘me’, and it is not pleasant, this feeling of transference, that Ruth has seen herself reflected. (Run! Stay!) She has to face it, but how could you when there was a chain of events, when there was not just you, there were at least two of you making the mess? She passes the area railings at the start of Clare Street, which was only a few buildings, really. The gallery ahead. The hospital. It is just a check-up. Ruth keeps walking.