Jenny had watched over the last few years as the Dublin shopkeepers, barmen, taxi drivers had once more come to believe that they were players; maxing themselves out to get the new car, the new kitchen, the second home in Turkey. Dublin was, yet again, a site under construction, the city stain spreading, giving its people huge suburban houses with nominal finishes and bargain basement accoutrements. Jenny wanted to stick the knife in for her share of that sticky, gloopy, sugary pie and get rich quick before the inevitable crash.

  It wasn’t greed that drove her. It was her family. Finally, she had a chance to break free of them.

  Approaching their end-of-terrace Victorian home, she gazed up at the oak tree growing in the pavement outside the front gate and admired its lush leafy fingers splaying across the violet sky. She pictured her bed, the warm lampshades, the excellent hardback she was close to finishing. Jenny loved being in the centre of it all, living in that spacious building, feeling that her claim on the Clareville property was akin to acquiring another limb.

  Until recently it had been easy to forget that Jenny’s mother, Vera, owned the house and that they were only tenants who paid Vera rent. Just a few months ago, they’d received a letter from the family’s solicitors giving them twelve months’ notice. Her mother could have told Jenny to her face, but that would’ve been normal behaviour and therefore lack the drama and subterfuge that made Vera’s life so self-absorbing. The twelve months’ notice was ruining Clareville for Jenny. Everywhere she looked, there was someone living the life that had once been reserved for her.

  SMASH. It came blasting through the night, so loud, the air seemed to move. The noise came from above the roof of their house. It came from the laneway behind the backyard. Jenny went to insert her key, but the front door swung inwards from the slightest pressure. She stared down the hallway to the kitchen, where the back door swayed in the breeze.

  Something had happened to Shane. Something awful. Something that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been late home. The thought entered her mind and was staying there – like woodworm in a chair, like cancer cells, like vermin under the boards. Nothing would eradicate it. She longed to protect him from the knowledge that, this time, the sky had actually fallen.

  But it was too late; she was too late.

  Jenny pictured Shane in tangled metal, wanting to live but being denied his last and fullest wish. Please let there be no pain. Let it have been so violent that he just evaporates. Vaporises.

  Jenny, too, wanted to be atomised. She looked up at the tight cluster of stars that were surprisingly visible above the city, like a ragged tear in the galaxy. There was a whisper in the air, and it took her a moment to realise that it was her own. ‘Let him be OK… Let him be OK…’ She envied those, like her mother and sister, who had the crutch of God. It still seemed incomprehensible that God should exist and yet, for the first time, it somehow also felt incomprehensible that He should not.

  Jenny was on the decking in the backyard. It was as if she’d magically materialised there. She hadn’t been aware of running through the hall and kitchen. It wasn’t fair. They’d only had fifteen years together and she’d never told him her biggest secret. There it was, taking over her brain like an exploding firework lighting up the sky.

  Her secret should’ve been dead, gone, lost in the past, down the back of life’s sofa along with those memories of wetting herself at school, being humiliated by the cool girls, being disgraced by losing when she should’ve won. And finally, a flaunting image above all those memories. Mother.

  3

  The air shifted and the breeze hit Shane’s face like a shout. Glass beads were scattered over his knees and the front of his shirt. Shane had felt like this so many times in the past – car-crashed, stuck, buried alive. He’d gone through so much to get the life he now had with Jenny. He had a career. She had a future. They had their savings, enough to finally walk away from Jenny’s family.

  Yet here I am. Stranded. Maybe dying in a grubby laneway.

  Moving his toes, Shane felt the shoe leather cling, taut against his feet. His digits thrummed the steering wheel from thumb to little finger. Holding his breath, he slowly moved his neck left and then right. No paralysis. Releasing the steering wheel, Shane grabbed the rear-view mirror with such force that he nearly ripped it from the ceiling. He saw himself in the yellow glow of the interior light that had come on after the passenger door blew open.

  No bleeding. No scarring.

  Then, Shane noticed him. Wearing a balaclava. His body lay horizontally on the mashed bonnet of the Land Rover. Behind the man, the front of the Focus had ceased to exist, its engine crumpled inwards to become almost one with its steering column.

  Shane tried to ask him if he was OK, but only succeeded in swallowing. The man’s eyes stared at him through the twin holes of the mask. Blue. Piercing. Accusing. The man’s mouth opened and the startling red lips, surrounded by black fibre, silently mouthed, ‘Fuck. You.’ It was like a heart monitor bouncing back from a flatline. The young man was furious. Furious survives. Usually. That was good.

  Shane’s gaze moved down the balaclava to the man’s shoulders and upper body. His legs were broken and twisted at a gruesome angle up behind his lower back, his knees concertinaed to his buttocks as if he was an escape artist. Shane noticed his green jumper. It had the look of something second-hand, from a charity shop – as if the aura of other people’s sadness radiated from the acrylic.

  Someone else is here.

  The gloomy vision of a second man was sketched in the laneway shadows. He seemed to have no natural curves, a hasty line-drawing rather than a real person. Shane tried to move, but his feet were jammed beneath the steering wheel. This second man was going to do something to him. He wanted to move his hands to protect his face, but they retained their grip on the leather steering wheel. He opened his mouth to call out, but realised that he was only breathing in sudden gasps. In a whisper, he said, ‘Don’t…’ But he didn’t know what else to say. I can beg him to leave me alone. He didn’t need to play the part of a desperate man. He was a desperate man.

  Shane heard a voice. It was a low, deep whisper; ‘This is just the beginning…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have no idea what’s coming.’ The voice was stronger now, emphasising how the effects of the crash, for him, had been fleeting.

  The man stepped away from his colleague’s body, and Shane listened to the footsteps fade down the laneway. Just as they were about to disappear completely, they began to increase in volume again. He’s coming back.

  Louder and closer they came, until Shane felt the man’s hands on his forehead, running through his hair, then the skin of his cheek against his. The man had Jenny’s voice and he was repeating, ‘Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.’

  Shane wanted to warn Jenny about the other burglar, but the one on the bonnet wouldn’t close his eyes, wouldn’t stop staring at him.

  Jenny said, ‘You are the only thing that matters in my life.’ She leaned in further, placed her hand over his and repeated, ‘The only thing that matters’, as if saying it twice would make it more true.

  Shane said, ‘The second one.’ It was barely a grunt.

  Jenny looked to the guy on the bonnet. ‘Yeah. I’ll check him out. Don’t move anything.’

  Neighbours were emerging from their cosy cocoons of abundance and Jenny scanned their faces like an anxious parent at the school gates. She shouted, ‘Get the doctor,’ as if there was only one in the whole world.

  Leaning over the bonnet of the Land Rover, she grimaced at the twisted, broken body lying across it. Placing her hand on the side of the man’s neck, she waited, staring into the Land Rover at her husband’s face. ‘I can’t feel a pulse.’

  Her fingers dipped under the rim of the balaclava before carefully peeling it up.

  The nearest neighbour surveyed the sight revealed before her and exclaimed. ‘Oh. My. Word.’ Her tone, her expression, her wide eyes – it all filled the air with emergency.

  ‘Fuck me,’ Jenny muttered.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Shane said.

  Lying across the bonnet was a young woman, dark hair clipped to the sides. Her pale skin was smooth, eyebrows sculpted. Even in death, she was quite beautiful.

  4

  Now

  12.30 pm: It was Monday, three days after the crash, and Shane was back in Clareville, making a promise to himself that whenever he was to die, it would be at home. After just one night in hospital, his room had begun to feel like an asylum. He’d had visitors; he’d had peace and quiet; he’d had unrelenting queries of concern. By Sunday, he’d wanted to leave – but the doctor had insisted that he stay for at least one more night.

  Reluctantly, they let him depart that morning with a three-month prescription – not for painkillers, but for serotonin reuptake inhibitors for post-traumatic stress. Before getting a taxi with Jenny, he’d scrunched up the Zoloft slip and binned it. Shane had no intention of becoming medicated. He would prefer to feel bad things than to feel nothing at all.

  The moment he got home, Shane checked out the laneway, from where the emergency services had eradicated every last trace of both vehicles. Looking for evidence that Friday night had actually happened, all he found were diamonds of glass brushed to the sides of the wall.

  Now that he was back in Clareville, he felt up to dealing with the administrative issues concerning the crash. For example, the Land Rover was a write-off and, because of its age, they were only due about four thousand for it. Their next second-hand car would have to be something way more pedestrian. He wondered how much that would perforate Jenny’s self-esteem. Jenny’s first car had been the silver Mercedes that her father surprised her with on her eighteenth. Hard to believe that was twenty-five years ago. Back then they’d drive down to Dublin Bay, where they’d undress each other with the enthusiasm of two people who felt that they’d just invented sex.

  Shane returned to the house and went upstairs to the master bedroom. After showering in the en suite, he stood before the mirror to examine the smattering of small wounds across his body, the light discolouration on his legs and bruised forehead. Physically, he’d been lucky in life. Outside of a few adolescent-era punch-ups, the only true corporeal suffering he’d experienced had been when confined to the dentist’s chair.

  As Shane knelt to get his shoes from under the bed, he noticed a wicker basket containing Jenny’s old letters and photos. His wife had kept all their historical mementoes – Polaroids of them arm wrestling, cinema stubs, a poem he’d written for her at college. In hospital, Shane had found himself thinking of things he no longer owned – school yearbooks, diaries, even mix tapes – and he cursed himself for once believing that he was going to be young forever and that memories were there to be replaced by better, newer ones. Now that it was too late, he realised that without mementoes or the stimulus of children to share reminiscences with, the past just withered away and died. How he would’ve loved to have had kids with Jenny.

  Is it too late? Are we now too old? Can science help? The answers didn’t matter, because Jenny had never even intimated that she’d change her mind. While in hospital, it had occurred to Shane that aging was a process of gradually relinquishing everything of value until, in the end, you have absolutely nothing.

  He turned to face his father-in-law’s full-length antique mirror and focused on the lines of his forehead, the darkness beneath his eyes. I’ve begun my gradual extinction. It was as if he was witnessing the moment when the great herds of his cells, dividing and subdividing across the vast plains of his anatomy, paused, and sensed a shift in nature, a darkening of the sun, the first rousing draft of an ice age.

  Despite their never having had children, being in love did feel good. It was like winning at roulette every day. But that would mean there would come a time when he was destined to lose. Probability demanded it. Shane thought about his year at college with Jenny – back then, they’d talked about the future with a certainty that it would contain them both. Despite everything that would happen, they had eventually been right. They’d been right until that very month – when they just might be wrong.

  Shane sat at the edge of the brass-framed bed as the electric shaver droned on. He remembered waking in hospital on Saturday. It had been as if he’d no idea about the previous night. Zero. It was a movie he’d never seen. It wasn’t that he’d lost his memory. It was just that he’d refused to think about it. The police, Jenny and the doctor had all asked him questions. He’d said the same thing to each of them – ‘Not yet.’ Then, on Saturday evening, he’d finally spoken to the detective who eagerly took down every scrap, until he came to the fact that he’d seen a man. His outline. A sinister charcoal drawing next to the smashed red Ford. The man had been there, Shane was certain. And I think he said something. I’m sure he did. But what? It was a story that kept telling itself to him, but always leaving out the end.

  So far, all the police seemed to have done was to arrange for the girl to be brought to the morgue. Writing true-crime explorations had armed him with the knowledge that often the police just go through the motions, simply to reassure the public that their taxes are not being wasted and to make them believe that they’re protected from the people who want to rob and kill them – because, when a serious offence was committed, then in most cases the guilty party was either known from the start, or unlikely ever to be apprehended.

  Shane pictured the woman on the bonnet of the Land Rover. She’d looked frightened, and young. True, she could’ve stabbed Shane in the house. She could’ve poleaxed him in the garage with his own hammer. But she hadn’t, because she’d been scared. She tried to kill me with her car. No – she tried to escape. She’d done what he would’ve done in her situation – run. Just like everyone else, she had imagined what it would be like to have more.

  Dressed, Shane was ready to face the detective, who was due any moment. He descended the stairs, rubbing his hand along the banisters as if he was extinguishing the last vestiges of the dead girl from the planet. In the hallway, he opened the front door to check for Monday’s mail. Lying there on the mat were wrapped white lilies. Scooping them up, he flicked open the small card. Four lines were scribbled in black pen. The first read:

  This is just the beginning.

  That’s it! That’s what he said on the laneway. I knew it. I was right. But what does he want? Is it the girl? Does he blame me for her death?

  Shane read the remaining lines, as a dark and slimy tide swamped him:

  Do you know what I’m going to do to you?

  Think of the cruellest things.

  By sunset today, I will have destroyed your life.

  5

  1.15 pm: Jenny sat at the island counter. The kitchen was her favourite room in the old Victorian house. It was where she watched TV, did most of her paperwork and relaxed. The kitchen was like something from a catalogue, perfectly in tune with the current fads – every cabinet handle, each smooth-sliding drawer, even the constitution of the tile grout had been chosen by Jenny to generate serenity.

  She still could not accept that she was going to lose Clareville. Not just because of what the bricks and mortar represented about her father – his sworn promise, his legacy to her, his loyalty. But also, Jenny loved her life inside it. Shane had made her Clareville home a pleasant sanctuary; because, to him, that was what a home was supposed to be. Shane’s family had been so laid back, sometimes it had been annoying. He’d grown up in a house where no one had to yell or cry or scream because that was the only way in which you could have your feelings heard. His parents were, basically, nice people. When times were good, they celebrated. When times were bad, they were optimistic.

  Jenny had grown up in a noisy house. Her mother had struggled with peace and quiet. Vera had her three children addicted to family showdowns and tear-jerkers; since she had never worked, she didn’t have the petty back-stabbings of the office to keep her appetite sated.

  A year ago, in what had appeared to be an unaccountable act of generosity, Jenny’s mother had assigned her a substantial budget to renovate the kitchen. However, now that Jenny knew the house would soon be on the market, she saw that for what it was. Vera had made an investment for Vera, and used the expertise of an interior designer without having to pay for it.

  Vera hadn’t called since the crash on Friday – which was strange. With all the coverage in the press over the weekend about the break-in, surely Vera would have some concern, if not for Shane, then for her youngest daughter’s welfare? After all, their family was no stranger to dynastic tragedy. Something must’ve come up. Maybe she’s not well. No – Joan would’ve told me in a text. It irritated Jenny that even when Joan was away in Florida or London, her sister remained more aware of their mother’s whereabouts than she ever was. Jenny sighed, as she usually did whenever she thought about her mother; Vera – the only person who could ruin her day without actually being in it.

  Pushing her coffee to the other side of the island top, she scanned the kitchen and hated the fact that it could soon be taken away from her. It seemed impossible to think that in a year, someone else would be sitting here having breakfast; someone else would be loving this kitchen. She knew it was her mother’s fault, but it felt as if Shane was equally responsible. He believed their lives were on cruise control. They had no debt. They could drive an hour to the countryside and take his boat out on the lake. They ate in chic restaurants. They took exotic holidays. He could spend an hour every night playing video games. Life was good. Why risk it all for more of what they didn’t need?