The shelter of neighbours

When Martha wakes up in the middle of the night, she stays right where she is, in bed, and waits for sleep to return and rescue her from her worries – which it invariably does, although often not till about half an hour before it’s time to get up. During that half-hour, sleep is as sweet as cut grass. On this night in September she has spent more than an hour brooding over something her neighbour, Mitzy, said to her. Something about how public servants are parasites, ruining the country. It’s over a week since Mitzy said that. It’s a common, a banal, opinion; every time you turn on the radio someone is dissing public servants and blaming them for the economic downturn. But it annoyed Martha and it’s still on her mind, coming between her and her night’s sleep. None of her usual tricks works – visualising a peaceful rural scene – a lake, a green field, some fluffy sheep – or imagining that her body is being sponged down from the toes to the crown of the head with warm water. So she tries a new strategy. She gets up. She gets up to make herself a cup of tea. An article about insomnia in the Sunday newspaper – today’s, or yesterday’s now – recommended this. Anything is better than lying there, the article, which was in the ‘Life’ section, said. Martha agrees. Even though the last thing she feels like, at 4.20 a.m. – she glances at the time on her the clock – is a cup of tea, a drink she never much cared for.

Seamus, Martha’s husband, is snoring away. His neat body is a low wave in the pale duvet; a cap of glossy grey-black hair peeps over the top like the head of a seal who has got stuck in a net. Seamus is one of those lucky sods who fall asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow, and never opens an eye till morning. The snoring – and the tossing and turning, the sleep-shouting (at pupils, or colleagues, or maybe at her) – is one of the reasons for Martha’s insomnia. She could move to another room but she knows he’d hate that, so she’s hasn’t suggested it. Yet.

Yawning – and how can she yawn when she’s wide awake? – she pads over to the window and opens it. A breath of air comes into the room and kisses her face like a friendly animal. She hears a bird singing, clear as a star. The front garden is ghostly in its pale coat of dew but there’s a rosy stripe in the navy blue sky over the houses on the other side of the street: Dunroon Crescent is edging into daylight. At this in-between time a deep harmony settles over the road. Everything looks perfect: the white houses, the clipped gardens behind their tight hedges. Maybe it would be better if people stayed in bed, sleeping? It’s when they wake up that all the hassle starts.

She thinks these thoughts and notices the sliver of rosy sun and the velvet hush and the eerie grass. But the main thing Martha notices is that the O’Keefes have their green bottle bin out. Finn is always quick off the mark with the bins. And of course he gets through plenty of wine; he could keep the bottle recycling crowd in business all on his own.

Lucky she got up.

She goes downstairs and puts on the kettle, then hobbles out the back to get the bin. Clara Byrne’s dog, Bran, one of life’s great opportunists, tries to get in as soon as she opens the kitchen door. He seems to live on Martha’s patio, waiting for the main chance. ‘Shoo, Bran,’ she says. Usually she lets him in – sometimes she has to ask Clara, who is a beautician and works from home in a shed in her back garden, to look after her cat, Fluff, when they’re are away, so Martha gives Bran a lot of leeway. (And food. Fluff’s leftovers. Fluff is a Norwegian Mountain Cat, a cat with a capital C, a fusspot.) But today she kicks Bran, not all that gently, in his scruffy behind, and down the garden he shoots like a bullet into the shadows, yelping. Unbelievable the speed of him, and he fifteen years old if he’s a day. Martha can’t be bothered working that out in dog years at this hour of the morning. You don’t have to do the sums to know that Bran’s ancient.

Just as she’s pushing her bin through the gateway, someone comes around the corner of the road. Martha feels a cold bite of fear. She can’t see the man’s face. But there are young men in hoodies around this neighbourhood – they live in Lourdes Gardens, the Corporation housing estate at the other side of the railway line – who frighten her even when she meets them in broad daylight. Those eyes they have – defeated and aggressive at the same time, eyes that tell you they’d think nothing of scratching your eyes out if you so much as looked at them sideways. It’s not their fault they’re so sad and angry. But it’s not hers either and she’d rather steer well clear of them. She’d move to another, more secure, neighbourhood if it weren’t for Seamus. She’d like to try living in the middle of the city – but Seamus won’t hear tell of it. He loves Dunroon, a rus in urbe, between the mountains and the sea (they’re two of his reasons for loving it; he can come up with quite a list, if pushed; he’s good at rationalising his whims and desires). Seamus feels strongly about the house and has told her, if she moves, she moves alone. Also, that she can move when he’s dead – as if she needs to be told that.

The man sees Martha seconds after he turns the corner and he stops dead in his tracks. Just stands there on the footpath. Frozen. Why? What is he afraid of? A short, tubby, middle-aged woman in her nightdress? She’s hardly reached the path and the bin is over the dish of the gateway but she leaves it exactly where it is, half in and half out, and takes to her heels. Like the hammers of hell, she sprints across the garden and in through the side door.

They call it a side door but it’s not a door. It’s a wrought-iron gate, with a complicated pattern of twisted black leaves and shoots and branches, some of them rusting. As soon as she closes it she peers out through the wrought iron. The person is walking right past her house now – she can see him over the escallonia hedge. And it isn’t a man at all. It’s just a girl. Or woman, really. It’s just Siobhán Moriarty from next door. Mitzy’s daughter.

Siobhán is skinny as a sweeping brush, and nearly six feet tall – the height she gets from her father, Eugene, who is the biggest man in the parish. She has herself all wrapped up in a big anorak or coat or something, so in the half-light she looks like a man. Still, Martha has known her since she was five years old – Siobhán must be over thirty but she’s living at home at the moment, between jobs or relationships or flats or something.

Martha shakes her head and smiles at her own foolishness. How did she not recognise Siobhán’s walk? Siobhán has that gait all the girls have these days when they’re out on the town, dressed up (or down, because they go out in their underwear, it looks like). They mince along on their spindly high heels like blackbirds after a worm in the grass. Siobhán is more like a young heron as she picks her way along Dunroon Crescent. She must have come home on the Nitelink, or a taxi – does the Nitelink run this late? She could have waved, then Martha wouldn’t have felt scared. But Siobhán had been startled, too – the old and the young don’t normally meet on the road at four thirty in the morning on Dunroon Crescent.

The kettle is well boiled when Martha gets back into the kitchen and she has to switch it on again. She makes her cup of tea, and sits at the black granite counter in their new extension and drinks it – then she goes back to bed and, yes, she manages to fall asleep, as usual, exactly one hour before the alarm rings and another week starts.

The Moriartys have been Martha’s neighbours for ages. They were already living on the road when she and Seamus moved in. Eugene wasn’t the friendliest then. He had a way of examining Martha with a shifty look in his sharp green eyes – the eyes of a pet fox. It was as if he suspected she was capable of doing something abrupt and untoward – taking a swipe at him or something. He didn’t know what to make of her, he told her later, when they got to know each other better. She wasn’t – she isn’t – warm and chatty like most of the women on the road, and didn’t take care of her appearance, like Mitzy. Martha was surprised to hear this, since it seemed to her that she took plenty of care – it’s just a different appearance from that of the other wives on the road. More casual and, in those days, hippyish: maxi skirts, flat sandals, and she wore her mop of curly hair parted in the middle and tumbling down any old way over her shoulders – no hairdresser got within a hairdryer’s roar of Martha in those days. Mitzy, however, always looks as if she’s just stepped out of a salon; she’s as smart as the president of Ireland even when she’s, say, driving up to the shop for a bottle of milk; but she’s a dote, inside and out.

Mitzy called on Martha the day after they moved in with a loaf of bread. ‘It’s an American custom,’ she said. Martha thought for some time that Mitzy was from America. It would have explained something about her – her confidence, her teeth – even though she spoke in her own polished version of the local drawl. ‘We got used to it when we were in Boston.’ Eugene had worked in an international bank in the us for two years, before he got his job as something significant in health insurance over here. (He’s an actuary, able to work out when people are going to die. Though when Martha once asked him to reveal the fateful date to her, he laughed and said, ‘If only!’) ‘Welcome to Dunroon Crescent,’ Mitzy smiled and gave a little mock bow. Martha said nothing. For a few seconds her mind turned to sponge as she stared at Mitzy: her thick fringe of auburn hair, her cream polo neck, her small golden earrings. Mascara, grey eye-shadow. Against the backdrop of the neglected garden, all scutch and dandelions and thistles, she looked like a princess who had strayed into a pigsty. Then Martha felt the heat of the bread through the white linen tea cloth and she inhaled its smell – as nutty and yeasty and calming as a mother’s love. It restored her. ‘Would you come in for a cup of tea?’ she asked, even though she hadn’t the time, and Mitzy said yes, even though she hadn’t time either – Siobhán and Conor were due to be collected from school; Mitzy’s mother was with Lauren, but couldn’t be relied upon to watch her for long – not many people could, Lauren was a real monkey. But Mitzy always accepted invitations to tea, knowing that a refusal can be hurtful.

‘Excuse the mess,’ Martha said, delighted that Mitzy had agreed to come in, that she already was making friends after just one day in her new home. ‘A mess’ did not go halfway towards describing the house. That implies untidiness, unopened boxes, furniture in the wrong places. It doesn’t indicate that there was a huge damp patch on the hall ceiling, that the lamps in the living room had been pulled off the wall, leaving exposed wires, that the lino had been ripped off half the kitchen floor, leaving depressing patches of grey concrete here and there, like puddles of rain. Seamus had insisted that the house, which was not too far from where he worked, was in walk-in condition because it had central heating, unlike lots of the older, more picturesque ones he had decided against. But apart from the heating, which didn’t work properly anyway, it had nothing. It was a shell. Martha planned to move out after a few years and get a house she liked herself.

They sat at the table – Martha’s first table, made of shiny beige Formica imitating wood – and drank instant coffee out of china cups painted with roses, which Martha’s mother had given her when she and Seamus bought the house. Mitzy, who took in the state of the house and of Martha in one discreet glance, gave her some useful information about the neighbourhood: after Mass on Sunday is a good place to meet people; you can play tennis by the hour at the club, you don’t need to be a member; and the Protestant school is the best by far, but you need to put your child’s name down the minute it is conceived.

Martha shook her head and laughed. She assumed she would never have a baby, because her periods were light and irregular. Seamus wasn’t desperately interested in getting a child, since he already had one, a son, Shane, who lived with his mother. And on top of all this, they weren’t married, since there was no divorce. But, in fact, she was already pregnant as this conversation was taking place, although she didn’t realise it for another six weeks. Then she went to the doctor because she believed she was suffering from travel sickness. She was working, then as now, in an office in the city – the Department of Justice – fifteen miles away. She commuted by train, the old brown diesel train that ran along the coast of Dublin before the dart came on track, in 1984, and changed life for the better. It stopped at Dunroon station at 8.15 a.m. If she missed it, the next one was at one o’clock. She came home again on the five fifteen – there was another evening train at six and that was it. Because it ran so seldom, the train was always crammed. People were squeezed into every crevice – even the accordion-pleated corridors were packed with bodies. You had closer physical contact with strangers on that train than you had with any other human being, ever, apart from your spouse or lover. Everyone on the train had the same fantasy, as, glued together into one writhing snake of human flesh, they lurched from the suburbs into the city. And it wasn’t an erotic daydream. The fantasy was about Jews on the trains going to the concentration camps. Everyone knew the association was absurd. Martha, too. But she couldn’t stop it popping into her head as she endured the nightmare, morning and evening, those first months of her life with Seamus. They must have felt like she did. Sick as dogs. Sick as dogs, and trapped, and unable to move one inch.

‘Good news,’ the doctor said. She had a chirpy English accent. Martha was speaking to her on a public telephone in the entrance hall of the Four Courts, beside a statue of a flabby naked woman with a broken nose, holding a tiny weighing scales in her right hand. Martha knew what good news meant. But she stalled as she took it in and said, ‘What do you mean?’ She’d only been living with Seamus for three months. They didn’t have a sofa for the front room, or a proper double bed, just two singles shoved together, one lower than the other.

‘You’re pregnant,’ said the doctor, getting impatient.

Martha wanted to put the child’s name down for Mulberry Primary School, the Protestant school that Mitzy had recommended.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Seamus. ‘He’s not even born. He doesn’t have a name.’ He thought for a second and added, ‘He mightn’t be a boy.’

‘The school is co-ed,’ said Martha. That was a word still in currency at that time. ‘Luke, if he’s a boy; Lucy, if he’s a girl.’

They didn’t have the scans then that let you know the sex of the baby. You just had to wait the whole nine months and find out what it was when it was born.

‘What’s wrong with the local national school?’ Seamus started to light his pipe, which he was soon going to have to give up, for the sake of the baby, although he didn’t realise it. ‘St Bernadette’s.’

‘It’s too rough,’ said Martha. Mitzy had said the children from Dunroon Crescent who’d been democratic and tried it – it was in the middle of Lourdes Gardens – got beaten up by the other kids every day of their lives. And they got bad results in their Leaving later on because their primary education had been so traumatic.

‘Crap,’ said Seamus, shaking his head disbelievingly.

He taught in a rough school himself. He ran one, in fact: he was a headmaster. Before he opened his school in the mornings he drove around to the houses of three or four of the worst cases, honked his horn and waited for them to come out and get into the car. He drove around, resenting the price of the petrol – it had gone up to nearly two punts a gallon. But if he didn’t drive around and round them up, they would never attend. Seamus’s ambition was to get fifty per cent of his ruffians into good secondary schools and half of them on into third level, an ambition that he eventually fulfilled, almost.

Seamus didn’t want his child to attend his own school, though not because it was the roughest school in the country – which, Martha was pretty sure, it was – but because he just didn’t want a conflict of interest. But he was down on snobbishness of all kinds and especially snobbishness where education was concerned. That business of sending your child to a Protestant school got his goat. (He was an atheist, something which of course he, as a schoolteacher, had to keep quiet about. His separation they could just about stomach, as long as he kept quiet about it. He was a Catholic atheist.)

Martha didn’t argue further. Two weeks later she took a morning off work – in those days it was like a sparkling gem of a present to herself, one free morning – and walked to the school.

It was surrounded by a high grey wall and spreading chestnut trees. A gravel drive led from a simple white gate up to the front door. The stones crunched under her feet, and twice she trod on a shining chestnut, which split like an apple under her shoe. The oldest part of the school was built of rough cut stone, with a slate roof, and the weathered plaque over the door said: mulberry school 1890. The new bits had flat roofs and windows with red wooden frames. On one side were two tennis courts and on the other a playground with an old swing and a wooden seesaw. Children were playing in the playground when Martha arrived. Children were actually chanting ‘SeeSaw Margery Daw’ and ‘Red Rover, Red Rover, I call Sarah over!’ Their voices rose into the clear autumn air and to Martha the old rhymes sounded like the songs of angels.

It turned out that you couldn’t put down the name of a child who had not been born, or even of a child who had been, until he or she was three. Mitzy had been wrong about that, or maybe just exaggerating for the sake of effect, the way good storytellers do. ‘Contact us on the day of the third birthday,’ the secretary said. She smiled at Martha, who looked very young that day, in her new denim maternity dungarees, her snow-white jumper. Martha’s hair tended to frizz, but pregnancy had tamed it to a wavy mane. The hormones had a similarly beneficial effect on her skin. There was none of the patchy redness that plagued her; even her freckles had vanished. ‘Don’t worry,’ the secretary said kindly. Her own severely bobbed white hair was held back with a pink plastic slide and this plastic slide made Martha’s eyes fill with tears and her mouth with the unmistakable comforting taste of rich tea biscuits. She knew Mulberry School was just what she wanted for the child in her belly.

Over the years, Martha did not get to know the neighbours as well as she might have. That was largely owing to her personality – the words people used about her were ‘reserved’, if they were nice people, like Mitzy, and ‘a cold fish’, if they had sharper tongues, which Linda Talbot, for instance, had. But she put it down to something else entirely: to logistics, to timetables. She was a worker, away from home for ten hours a day, in the Department, where she was a Higher Executive Officer in the Prisons Division (she was moved to Family Law when it expanded and got very busy in 1997 after divorce came in). Mitzy and most of the other women on Dunroon Crescent were full-time mums, apart from Audrey Bailey, who was single and eccentric, and taught in Mulberry Manor, and Clara, who spent her day in her shed, removing unwanted hair and giving facials. (No planning permission, a bone of contention with some, but they didn’t report her because they felt sorry for her. Single mum.) That’s because most of them were about ten years older than Martha. At the time Martha was doing the Leaving they were busy getting married and starting their grown-up lives. By the time she had graduated from college they had had their first babies. It wasn’t that they had not gone to college themselves. Some were well educated. Mitzy, for instance, had a degree in science, and Linda had studied Latin and Greek in Trinity, though you’d never think it. Audrey of course had a ba in English and something else. German? But as far as Martha could see, they’d never felt either ambition or pressure to have long-term jobs, or careers, as she and her friends called their work, whatever it was.

In the ten years that separated Martha from Mitzy all those rules had changed. Whereas before, you had to stay at home and look after your children, now you were supposed to go to work and find a childminder for them. Whereas before, you changed your name to your husband’s, now you were expected to keep your own – perhaps, after a while, adding his to it, which resulted in a lot of double-barrelled names and people wondering where it would all end. In three generations, would all surnames have sixteen components? Molly Maguire-Murphy-Sweeney-Byrne-O’Connor?

Mitzy and her peers would have felt guilty, and their husbands, too, if they had jobs. ‘He has her out working’, was a phrase you might have heard about a man whose wife was a schoolteacher, say. As if he were exploiting her. It was almost as bad as beating her up when you had too much drink taken. But for Martha and her friends it was the exact opposite. They would have felt guilty if they’d stayed at home. It wasn’t just that that seemed old-fashioned, and a betrayal of the fight for equality, which it did. But if they decided not to keep their jobs, people would have thought they were lazy. Their own husbands would have thought that, and their mothers-in-law. In some cases – not so many – their own mothers would have.

When Martha and Seamus moved to Dunroon in the eighties, Conor Moriarty was eight and Siobhán was five and Lauren was two. Five looked old, to Martha, for a child, when her baby was not yet born. She would see Conor and Siobhán walking to school when she was on her way to catch the train. They were both tall and athletic, and to Martha they looked very independent, able to go to school on their own, while her baby was still rocking around in a puddle of fluid inside her body. And she was rocking inside the train, still feeling sick.

The train. Work. Sleep. The train. Work. Sleep.

Martha saw the sense of working, and she often said she liked her job. She knew that life had changed for the better, for women, and would as soon have given back the new entitlements to equality and jobs as she would have handed in her voting card. But at the same time she was consumed with envy of Mitzy, and the other Dunroon Crescent women. She envied them their freedom. She envied them their time. She envied them their chance to work on their houses and gardens and their hobbies, and, after a while, to be with the children.

She wanted to go to their coffee mornings. Not that they had formal coffee mornings, as such, they’re an American thing or a figment of novelists’ imaginations. But some of the women occasionally got together, little groups of them, or couples. There were best-friend partnerships, just like in school. All this friendship, chatting, laughing, went on during the day when the men and the children were out of the way. When they came home, there would be no time for such frivolity. Then the women of Dunroon Crescent would go back into their kitchens and look after their families.

On Dunroon Crescent, Martha was like a man or a child, heading off in the morning and coming home on the train at night. So it took a long time to get to know the neighbours. And if you spend too long getting to know people, you never become close friends. The moment when people can change an acquaintanceship into a friendship comes soon enough in the chronology of a relationship, and if you don’t seize that moment, it won’t, as a rule, come again. Time is a factor, and timing. Lots of people know this instinctively, even when they’re very young. But Martha didn’t and she let various opportunities pass.

It was even harder when the children came. Then her life was so busy she never had time to be with the neighbours, at all, at all. She rushed through her days, from early morning to late at night. There was hardly time to sleep, in those days, when she had no trouble at all doing it, when she, too, became unconscious the second her head hit the pillow.

When she had lived on Dunroon Crescent for more than sixteen years, Martha started to cut down on work. She and Seamus had got married as soon as the divorce legislation came through. Being married gave her a sense of security, oddly enough. Also, their mortgage was nearly paid. Interest rates had dropped and salaries had gone up and Martha and Seamus had more money than they needed. For the first time they were never in the red. It was the era of the Celtic Tiger – that is how Martha experienced it, at first: the debt to the bank diminished, then vanished, without her doing anything about it. Later, the affluence affected her in other ways. More holidays. Their holidays used to be down the country, in the west of Ireland. They’d rent a damp bungalow near some windswept beach, or, less often, they would drive around the country – ‘getting to know our own country’, they called it – and stay in B & Bs, also bungalows, though with more expensive, frillier curtains and bedspreads than the rented places. Now they began to use hotels. Cheap hotels at first. Soon Martha became a connoisseur. In particular, she had high demands where bathrooms were concerned, and bathrooms were what changed most, she noticed, during the time of the prosperity, every year becoming bigger and more and more beautiful, until in the end they were the most palatial and ornate rooms in the entire land, nicer than any other part of the house or hotel – like the tombs of the Pharaohs (whose mosaics and carvings they often emulated).

But the best thing about the healthy economy was that it created thousands of jobs, and that conferred a new sense of freedom. Being employed was no longer a privilege – there was more than enough work to go around for the first time ever, it seemed. Nobody wanted to work in the Public Service any more; the big money was to be made elsewhere. So the Public Service enticed people in with better pay and better conditions. Flexitime, career breaks, parental leave, term-time leave – all these inducements became available. Management was bending over backwards to make life easier for parents – by which was meant, mothers, although they pretended it was for fathers, too. In the Four Courts, women were doing four days, three days; one young woman in Family Law was doing a one-day week. (She had twins; the crèche would have cost more than her salary, even though they gave her a ten per cent reduction on the second twin. And of course she lived in one of the new housing estates in Portarlington, sixty miles away from Dublin, and had to get up at six in the morning on the days she worked.)

After nearly eighteen years of full-time work, Martha decided to give herself a break and try the three-day week. So she was at home on Fridays and Mondays. She had time for herself – which she interpreted as time for the house and the garden, for Seamus and Robbie (a giant of a boy aged fourteen who needed mothering as much as he needed a broken leg). And for the neighbours.

But things had changed for the women on Dunroon Crescent. Now that Martha had time to befriend them, her neighbours were all out working. Women who had seemed destined for a life devoted to children and housework and tennis and gardening, who had indeed seemed to disdain any other kind of life, were going back into teaching, they were taking up jobs as receptionists and bankers, and in computers. Ingrid Stafford was in college, getting a law degree – there was a lot of work in conveyancing because the property market was so strong.

Even Mitzy had a career of her own.

She had started when Lauren went to secondary. She didn’t want to apply for a job. ‘I don’t think anyone would take on an old hag like me,’ she said, caressing her fingers, which were long and nimble, white as marble. She was in her early fifties.

Martha nodded. Anyone over fifty was ancient then, as far as she was concerned.

‘I’m going to buy an old house and do it up,’ Mitzy said.

‘That makes sense,’ said Martha, although it didn’t really. ‘You have a flair for decoration.’

Mitzy agreed: it was obvious. Her house was perfectly, effortlessly, beautiful.

‘But will you make money on it?’ Martha wondered. She had heard that doing up your house was something you did only for yourself. You couldn’t expect anyone to pay extra for a house just because it looked nice inside.

‘I think so,’ said Mitzy. ‘I think people will pay more for a house that is really nice and ready to walk into than for somewhere that needs a lot of work.’

She bought an old Edwardian house for fifty thousand pounds. This was at the end of 1996. The owner of that house had been trying to sell it for more than a year. The place was a dump, inside and out. Mitzy got the worst of the structural problems attended to, and did a big redecoration job herself – she could paint and hang wallpaper and bore holes in the wall for hanging things. The garden was a wilderness but she trimmed and tamed it in no time, popped in a few flowering shrubs and geraniums in pots. In November the following year she sold it for three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. And then she bought two small Corporation houses in Harold’s Cross. They tripled in value by the time she sold them nine months later. By 2000, Mitzy was a millionaire twice over, and set to get richer.

Even though Mitzy was busier than she ever had been, Martha got to know her much better after she went part-time herself. Mitzy was busy but she worked from home – she set up an office in one of the bedrooms. They had six, so there was room for it. As the first decade of the new millennium moved on she worked less. The restoration of houses she left to others, and she bought and sold less and less, anyway – it cost so much to buy property, even a run-down shack, that the business was not as lucrative as it had been at the start of the decade. She and Martha had lunch together on Fridays, and on these occasions they talked about their families mostly, and the neighbourhood, and their houses. But also about themselves.

Because Mitzy was so cheerful, good-looking, elegantly turned out, Martha had always assumed she came from a well-to-do background. But this was not the case. Mitzy (she had been called Patricia, even Patsy, as a child) was not even from the city. She had been born on a farm. Twenty acres, six cows. ‘Yes, I was up before school, feeding chickens!’ It was hard to imagine. Not because of her posh accent, or her clothes. But there was something about her face that looked quintessentially urban – classical, absolutely regular, with a tiny nose and large, slightly hooded eyes. She always looked made up, even when she wasn’t. When Martha heard that Mitzy had been brought up on a farm, the image that popped into her head was of Green Acres. Who was the star in that? Eva Gabor? New York is where I’d rather stay, that was the line in the theme song, I get allergic smelling hay.

‘I loved it,’ she said. ‘Mucking about. There was a great sense of purpose to it. And you belonged not just to your family, but to a community. Everyone knew everyone. And looked out for them. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.’ She quoted the well-known proverb in Irish, about neighbours depending on one another.

Martha nodded, surprised because she had never heard Mitzy say a word of Irish before. They were at either side of the long, stripped pine table Mitzy had in her enormous kitchen – new. Like almost everyone on the crescent, Mitzy had built an extension, even though her house was already huge. Behind her was a pale yellow Aga, and an old dresser filled with painted jugs and plates – all the most well-known potters in the country were represented on it. She’d replicated the country style here on Dunroon Crescent, although everyone knew no real country kitchen had ever looked like this.

‘It’s so different now for the kids in the suburbs,’ Mitzy said. ‘I pity them.’

‘But they have an easier life.’ Martha was thinking of the swimming clubs, the piano lessons, the designer tracksuits. Now it looked as though they would have their choice of careers, too – that they would not be forced to take whatever job they got, and stick to it for life, lest they don’t get a second chance, which was what she had done.

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Mitzy said.

That’s when she told Martha about Siobhán, who wasn’t a kid, anyway.

She had tried to kill herself a few months ago.

‘Overdose,’ Mitzy said. ‘She took all the pills she could find in the house and swallowed them.’

‘Why did she do it?’

‘Broken heart. She was living with Mark for four years. He seemed so nice!’

Martha remembered him, although to her all young men look pretty much the same.

‘Some tart from Poland got her mitts on him!’

‘These things happen,’ Martha said, remembering, with a sour twist in her stomach, her own history.

Mitzy laughed – harshly, for her, like a magpie squawking – and shook her head. ‘That was just the immediate cause. But there’s something deeper. She was carted off to the hospital, of course, to be detoxed, and they insisted on sending her to John of God’s.’

The psychiatric hospital. Martha tried to look deeply shocked and sad – the fact was she had heard some of this already, though in disjointed scraps, from other neighbours.

‘She was there for three months.’

‘But she’s ok now?’

Mitzi shrugged. ‘She’s back at work. I don’t think she’ll ever be ok. She’ll never get over it.’

But you have to, Martha thought. Everyone has to get over things like that.

That conversation with Mitzy took place about a month ago. Martha is listening to the eight o’clock news. Seamus has already left for school; he goes off just after seven. She’s exhausted, after being up during the night. She puts Fluff out for her morning pee and sees Bran slinking around the fuchsia bushes. He hates her now, after that kick – well, he’ll get over it. In the end, most people and animals get over everything, if you give them time.

Martha’s dopey as she drinks her coffee and eats her All-Bran. There’s the usual dispiriting news about the downturn in the economy. The leader of the small businessmen’s association is interviewed and calls, it must be for the hundredth time, for a reduction in the number of public servants and for more cuts to their pay. He has convinced the journalists and the public that public servants caused the financial crisis.

Martha thinks those people are the Nazis. They’re looking for a scapegoat. And for a while, until the hand of blame is pointed elsewhere, she and Seamus, the public servants, are it. It’s astonishing how easy it is to influence public opinion, and how easy it is for public opinion to influence the politicians. You plant an idea and keep watering it on the airwaves, and very soon a myth is transmogrified into a fact.

This is the very thing Mitzy and she fell out about last week.

Mitzy is feeling the pinch. She has four properties on her books now that she can’t sell, or even let, and she lost money in some sort of investment shares she has – not the kind the government is protecting, obviously.

‘We’ll be all right,’ Mitzy said. It was Friday, one of their Friday lunches. This one was in Mitzy’s house. ‘But we’ve taken a hit.’ She shook her head sadly and pursed her lips, but she didn’t disclose details.

They were in the conservatory at the back of the house, overlooking the pool Mitzy had put in a few years back. The water in the pool glistened under the autumn sunshine; Mitzy’s lemon trees, in tubs behind the glass, were in flower – they flowered at the strangest times – and their intoxicating scent filled the air. Martha could inhale that perfume as if it were opium – this must be against the law, she said sometimes, as she sniffed greedily. The white wine sparkled in the shining glasses. They were eating smoked salmon terrine and Caesar salad, and the soft smoked Wexford cheese they loved that you could only get at the farmer’s market in Glendalough. (Dunroon Crescent women drove down especially, on Sundays, to buy it.) A year and a half into the downturn and their lunches hadn’t changed. Or their clothes or their holidays. As yet nothing in their lives had changed, although they were hearing every day that the country was in recession and that disaster was on the horizon.

That’s when Mitzy took a swipe at the public servants.

‘They’re bleeding the economy dry,’ she said, waving her pale hands in the air, and repeating what you could hear on the radio any time you turned it on.

Then she told a little story.

‘A friend of Siobhán’s was working in some department last year,’ she said. ‘Education, I think. I’m not sure. And in November, some of them said, “We haven’t taken our sick leave yet!” And they took two weeks off, before the Christmas holidays!’

Mitzy shook her head in disgust. Her fringe was silver now, but it was as thick and shining as ever.

Martha’s innards boiled; her stomach felt like a pot of poisoned stew on a high flame, ready to erupt.

She looked out the window, instead of into Mitzy’s eyes. There was a congress of starlings in the garden. Hundreds of them were sitting in the big sycamore trees, looking like black plums on the branches, gathering for that thing they do. A murmuration?

‘I’m a public servant.’ Martha kept the lid on. As she always did. Almost always. ‘And so is Seamus.’

Mitzy was confused, but not for long. Mitzy was never confused for long.

‘I don’t mean you,’ she said quickly. She laughed. Her earrings danced. They were silver now, to match her hair, and her white linen blouse. ‘I don’t think of you in that light. I meant …’ She paused. ‘I meant, you know … the mandarins who sit in offices all day drinking tea at the taxpayers’ expense.’

Martha nodded and ate a bit of salmon. She could never think of the right thing to say when a friend insulted her. The smart retort always occurred to her long after the conversation was over, when it was too late.

And – when it was too late – Martha remembered that she’d heard that rumour before – the story about the sick leave. She’d heard it from her own mother about thirty years ago. Now it was doing the rounds again. When it was too late, Martha remembered that no civil servant is allowed more than two days’ sick leave at a stretch, without a doctor’s certificate. And the Public Service year doesn’t end in December, anyway, but in March, so there’d be no reason to use up any kind of leave in November. When it was too late, Martha realised that Mitzy’s story was just one of those urban myths. But you never cop on to the urban myths until it’s too late, that’s the way they work.

She finished the terrine and the wine, although she couldn’t stomach the cheese. She watched the starlings lift off the sycamore tree in one giant black flock and then vanish into thin air. How do they do that? So abruptly and so thoroughly. Where do they go?

She has not spoken to Mitzy since that day. If Mitzy is in her front garden when Martha comes out of her house, Martha withdraws and waits till she has gone, even if it means being late for work. And she didn’t invite her to lunch last Friday. Now Mitzy has got the message. When she spots Martha, she makes herself scarce.

Morning Ireland.

‘A report has just come in about a body found in the south suburbs this morning.’

Martha, filling the kettle, turns off the tap to listen properly.

‘The woman is believed to be in her late twenties and her body was discovered by a man walking his dog in shrubbery near the railway track in Ashfield. The woman, who sustained multiple stab wounds, has not yet been identified. The state pathologist is on her way to the scene. It is believed that she was killed in the early hours of the morning.’

Later it is revealed that the dead woman is Katia Michalska, aged twenty-five. She had been at a party in town but left alone. It was thought that she had walked home and been attacked when she was within two hundred yards of her own house, which was in Ashfield Park, the next suburb to Dunroon.

On Dunroon Crescent, it’s generally assumed that somebody from Lourdes Gardens murdered the Polish woman. Those thugs were bound to murder someone, sooner or later. There’s a rumour that Katia was mixed up with a fellow over there, and that she was into drugs.

‘She was no better than she should be,’ Mitzy said. In the excitement of it all she has forgotten that she and Martha have fallen out and aren’t on speaking terms. They’re talking over the garden wall. ‘Not that that excuses anything. Poor creature!’

According to Robbie, Katia was involved with Siobhán’s ex, Mark.

Mitzy didn’t seem to be aware of that.

Hmm.

Over the next few days the Gardaí call to every house in the neighbourhood.

‘We’re doing a routine check,’ one of the two Gardaí says. They are in Martha’s sitting room. Seamus and she have to give an account of their movements on the night of the murder. Sunday night. Robbie has already been questioned – they talked to the young folk first, naturally.

Seamus does most of the talking. They’d gone to bed at 11 p.m. on that Sunday night. Robbie was in bed, too, because he had to get up for college in the morning.

‘Didn’t you wake up at some stage?’ Seamus puts this question to Martha.

The guard has only asked a few things, and it’s clear that he doesn’t expect anything to come of this interview. He gives Martha an interested look.

‘I suffer from insomnia sometimes,’ Martha says to him. ‘I woke up in the middle of the night.’

She sees Siobhán, walking down the road, wrapped up in that enormous coat. It hadn’t been cold. And young people hate coats even when it is. Mostly they wear tiny jackets in the middle of winter. Or no jackets at all.

She hears Mitzy, sitting at her table overlooking the swimming pool, saying, ‘They’re bleeding the economy dry.’

‘I got up and made a cup of tea, and I drank it. I heard a bird singing and I went to the window to look out.’

The bird must have been a blackbird. She can still hear its song – one line, repeated over and over again. She can’t write music but she knows the bird had three or four notes and the line sounded like words. Help you me, help you me, help you me.

‘You looked out the window? What time would that have been?’ The Garda’s face has come alive, or as alive as a guard’s face ever comes.

‘It was twenty past four. I looked at the alarm clock. Then I put out the bin.’

The two Gardaí look at one another and you could smell the tension in the room as if it were a gas.

Martha never put Luke’s name down for Mulberry School, or any other school, because he died when he was two and a half years old. He was ill for almost a year before that – he had leukaemia. Many children recover from leukaemia and for most of that year Martha and Seamus and the doctor clung to the hope that he would be one of those, that he would pass through this nightmare and come out at the other side, delicate obviously, but alive. Alive. Alive. The thing you want most in the world, when all is said and done: your child, alive.

Martha wanted to stay with him all the time in hospital, but she couldn’t. It was impossible to get time off work. There were no career breaks. You could get only one month’s compassionate leave. When Martha explained the situation to the Personnel Officer, that person – a woman – made her feel that she was a malingerer, trying to cheat the system. She made her feel that she was the typical new type of public servant, the working mother, who now wanted the system to bend over backwards to grant her favours and privileges, which no public servant had ever had before, because until a few years ago there were no mothers, no married women, messing things up. They’d been obliged to resign on marriage; now there was all this change, this chaos. Married women. Maternity leave. Mothers demanding endless favours, causing headaches for the entire system and especially for the Personnel sections. This Personnel Officer was not going to give in to Martha, the very first mother to work in her section in the Department of Justice, and, the Personnel Officer hoped, the last.

‘She seems to hate me,’ Martha said to Mitzy. Cried to Mitzy. She couldn’t bear it. Luke was so tiny, and sick, and she wanted to be with him from morning till night.

‘Wouldn’t you give up work?’ Mitzy asked.

No, said Martha. She wouldn’t. If she gave up her job, she knew she would never get another one. Seamus was older than her. If he died, and she didn’t have a job, she wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage, she wouldn’t be able to support Luke.

So Mitzy came to the rescue. She often sat in the hospital with Luke all day, when Martha was at work. Frequently, Siobhán, who was just six then, sat with her. They did that for eight months. In the end, Martha, although she got no time off officially, was told by her immediate boss, who had four children himself, that she should just take as much time as she needed, they would not report her to Personnel. She could make it up when Luke got better.

Her boss told her this around the time that it was becoming clear to him and to most people that Luke was not going to recover. But that was not something Martha accepted until Luke was dead and buried and she was expecting again.

Mitzy had a hand in that, too. Martha thought she would not have any more children after Luke.

‘You must.’ Mitzy had been quite firm about this and her conviction cheered Martha up and calmed her.

‘I don’t think we can,’ Martha said, wondering. Something had happened to Seamus. He wasn’t interested. He wasn’t able.

‘These days, that shouldn’t be such a problem,’ Mitzy, who had more cop on than anyone Martha knew, said. ‘You’ll be able to get around that.’

The Garda repeats his question.

‘Did you see anything from the window? Did you see anyone?’

Martha – and Seamus, and the other Garda – look at the window, as if they might see someone now. At that moment the street lamps go on, illuminating the hedge and the footpath. The evenings are closing in earlier and earlier. It’s the twenty-first of September, the start of the dark nights, and – as it happens – Martha’s birthday. Her fifty-first. They will celebrate later, with a special dinner and a bottle of her favourite wine.

She shakes her head slowly. ‘I noticed that I’d forgotten to put out the bottle bin.’

Seamus gives a start. He doesn’t like it when he forgets to do his chores. The Garda waits.

‘So I put it out.’

‘That must have been about four thirty?’

‘Yes. It must have been.’

Seamus looks at her and bites his thumb, a habit he developed after he gave up smoking, all those years ago. Martha meets his eye.

‘But you saw nobody?’ the Garda went on.

Martha is sitting on her hands. She looks at the faces of the three men, all staring at her.

Waiting.

She lets them wait. She’s in no hurry.