"It's well known that as you age, your skin color fades and-"

The words tumbled from Katie's mouth. "Look, I know you're meant to go lighter as you get older but I like my hair the way it is!"

A screechy gasp came down the line, followed by a long, outraged silence. Katie was baffled by her own audacity: you tussled with Penny Richmond, arch-martyr, at your peril.

"Sorry, Mum," she said awkwardly. "I don't know what happened there."

In a trembly voice, Penny said, "I don't know what happened either. I won't pretend I'm not hurt, Katie. But because it's your birthday, I'll do my best to forget it."

As soon as Penny hung up, Katie rang MaryRose. "Pick up, pick up," she urged, but it went to voice mail. That's what happened when your best friend accidentally had a child by a married man. Her availability to listen to Katie bitch about her mum suddenly shrank dramatically because she was running around sterilizing things or mashing sweet potatoes or pacing the floor with a screaming teething child.

Katie didn't know how MaryRose coped and MaryRose herself had threatened to jump off the bridge over the Stillorgan dual carriageway when she'd found herself pregnant at the age of thirty-nine. She was so old, she'd said-she'd be forty and a half when she gave birth. And how had it happened? It seemed like every woman in the world was having to try IVF and here she was, practically menopausal, having taken one, one condom-free risk, only to find herself pregnant. It was all wrong!

But within days of the terrifying blue line appearing on the stick, MaryRose had changed her tune. Proudly, she told Katie that she'd just been reading about herself in Vogue: there was a trend of single, first-time, forty-year-old mothers. "I don't mean to boast but I might be the first one in Ireland," she'd said. "How cool is that? I'm part of the zeitgeist. I don't think that's ever happened to me before. And I've been spared IVF or sperm donors or trying to adopt from China. I'm one of the lucky ones."

Katie had been flabbergasted. "I didn't even know you'd wanted a baby," she'd said. To which MaryRose had replied, "I didn't want one. But I do now."

Pregnant-women hormones, they'd both concluded.

Katie left MaryRose a quick message, then wondered who she could ring. No point trying Conall. He'd rung earlier, before going back to his desk, and she didn't want to disturb the slashing. Sinead, she'd try her. But Sinead was in some bar and could barely hear her, and refused to move because "some likely lad is giving me the eye." In the end, Katie had no one left to ring but Naomi. She wouldn't be sympathetic, but at least she understood their mum.

"I've just had a scrap with Mum."

"About what?"

"Nothing."

"Get used to it," Naomi said. "The minute you turn forty, you'll start having confrontations left, right and center."

"Oh God! It's going to make life so awkward. And I'm not even officially forty until tomorrow."

"That's because you've been a good girl and done your groundwork." Naomi had told her to start preparing at thirty-eight. "Keep saying to yourself, I'm forty, I'm forty, I'm forty, so that when it happens, you won't be so devastated."

But Sinead had advised the total opposite. "Denial, that's the way to go. Even when it happens, pretend you're still thirty-nine. Pretend you're thirty-nine for ever. Until you die. Of course, they'll find out then that you lied and they'll be shocked, but you'll be dead so what will it matter?"

"I'm glad you rang," Naomi said. "Your birthday dinner on Saturday night . . . can Dawn come? It's just that in the seven months since she's had her baby, she hasn't been out once."

Dawn was Naomi's friend, not Katie's, but she was okay. "Ah I suppose, yeah, why not?"

"Who else is coming?" Naomi asked.

"MaryRose, Sinead and Tania."

"Tania is coming!" Naomi sounded glad. "I'll have something in common with someone." Tania was married with two children. "Instead of all your bitter single friends."

"They're not bitter! No more bitter than you married women going on about how much you despise your husbands. And MaryRose isn't exactly single!"

"Her boyfriend, the father of her ten-month-old little girl, lives with his wife and four children and makes sporadic maintenance payments and hasn't seen Vivienne for nearly four months. Oh believe me, Katie, MaryRose is definitely single."

A period of silence followed, in which Katie regretted the way she could never keep anything, anything, from Naomi. (Except for one spectacular secret about her brother Charlie-which had come to her courtesy of Conall-and she was saving that up for when she really needed to reveal it.) Then she said, "You'd want to keep an eye on that, Naomi, you're turning into Mum."

Day 58 . . .

They met the stag party of Sikhs in the queue outside Samara and it was one of them who suggested they hijack the Viking Splash. Lydia was all for it because she hated queueing, it was demeaning.

"You're too impatient," Shoane had said earlier, when they joined the queue. Shoane had wanted to see the inside of Samara; she was showcasing new red shoes, which most of Dublin had seen, and she wanted to include the people inside Samara. "It's Poppy's hen night," she'd said. "You have to do everything she wants."

"I just hate wasting time," Lydia had said in frustration. These days she got so few nights off . . .

"We're queueing as fast as we can," Poppy'd soothed. "We'll be inside in ten."

"Ten minutes!" Lydia had exclaimed. "This poor man-" she'd indicated the great-grandfather of the Sikh party, a hale but aged gentleman sporting an impressively Old Testament-style beard and a turban the size of a small car-"he could die in the next ten minutes. No offense," she'd added to the man.

He'd replied that none had been taken, that he agreed with her, that at his hour in life, aged eighty-one, he liked to maximize every second. "I had always hoped to die nobly," he'd said. "To die in the early hours of the morning while waiting to be refused entrance into a Dublin super-bar would not be noble. The obituary would have to be deliberately vague."

"It could say you died among family and friends," Lydia had said. "That part would be true." She'd gestured at the many turbaned men present. The stag party-who had come from Birmingham-numbered seventeen and there were four generations present: the groom-to-be, his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, plus assorted cousins, brothers and uncles.

"You seem like a resourceful young woman," the elderly man then said. "If you could extricate me from this queue, I'd be grateful."

"Okay." Always one to step up to a challenge, Lydia had raised her voice and yelled, "Hey! Pops here is looking like he might snuff it."

Several people seemed to take this seriously, then someone-they tried to piece it together the following day but no one's memory was reliable enough to identify the ringleader-yelped, "Let's hijack the Viking Splash!" And the suggestion met with everyone's approval, even Shoane's.

The Sikhs, Lydia and her three friends, and sundry hangers-on surged from the queue and swarmed up Dawson Street, through the reveling throngs, to where the Viking Splash awaited.

This was an amphibious vehicle, popular with tourists. Its route took in many Dublin landmarks and as an electrifying finale it plunged into the Grand Canal and pootled around sedately before returning to dry land. It operated only in daylight hours but-again details were sketchy-the Sikhs had accumulated some new friends, three blokes all called Kevin, one of whom was a Viking Splash tour guide who had filched the key from the office and was prepared to do a middle-of-the-night tour for a reduced and strictly off-the-books fee.

Alarmed at having no alcohol for the duration of the tour (forty-five minutes), Poppy managed to purchase ten cans of "psycho cider" from a cluster of homeless men, and distributed them to Lydia, Shoane, Sissy, the three Kevins, the hilarious Bulgarian leg-waxer, her hilarious friend and the tall silent woman who, in retrospect, belonged to no one. ("I thought she was one of the Bulgarians." "The Kevins thought she was one of us.") The Sihks, bewilderingly, didn't drink.

Everyone clambered into the vehicle-the orange life jackets wouldn't fit over the Sikhs' turbans but it didn't matter because they were breaking so many laws anyway, one more wouldn't do any harm-then they whizzed off into the night.

This was more like it, Lydia thought happily, as the buildings whipped past her. If she had to lose her income from Thursday, one of the most lucrative nights of the week-and she had to, she'd been best friends with Poppy since their first day at school so she could not miss her hen night-she wanted it to be a good one.

Thursdays were big party nights, perhaps even more so than Fridays, and Lydia was used to spending them ferrying around parties of drunken girls who spilled into the back of her cab in a tangle of bare legs and glittery toenails and blow-dried hair, singing and crying and muttering into their chests. Her plan for tonight was to be one of them.

She'd left the house in heavy eye make-up and high heels and a short dress. It was so short that Jan had pressed a tea towel to his eyes with one hand and blessed himself with the other. Andrei had watched her but said nothing.

"Go on," she'd said to him.

"Go on?"

"Say whatever's on your mind. I can see you're bursting to."

He'd shrugged indifferently. "You look good."

She'd waited. There had to be more.

"Slutty but good."

Bad feeling had blossomed between them.

"Better than looking like I keep my lady-garden in the deep freeze," she'd said.

Andrei had seemed to swell in size. "You talking about Rosie?"

"Who else do we know who keeps their lady bits in the deep freeze?" Lydia-well, there was no other word for it, really-Lydia hated Rosie. All that demure country-lass thing Rosie went on with, with her modest skirts and her white wine spritzers and her buying good leather boots in the sales. Lydia never found anything but shite in the sales, and if you got boots, by the time it was cold enough to wear them they'd be last year's boots and no one with any common sense would go out in last year's boots.

Lydia had swiped her lip gloss across her mouth, flashed Andrei a look of contempt that had an extra witchy effect because of her glittery dark-green eyeliner, and left the flat.

There were eleven of them at the start of the night and the chances that it would be sedate were never high.

"Give me four units of alcohol," Lydia said to the barman. "Any way you like. Surprise me."

When her surprise drink arrived (a blackcurrant daiquiri), she said, "We're binge-drinking. I mean, I know we're on a real binge, but even if we weren't, we would be. Two bottles of Magners counts as a binge these days."

"No wonder we go on proper binges if they're so mean-spirited about normal drinking," Shoane said and everyone agreed that if they were going to be accused of binge-drinking they might as well get the most out of it and get proper falling-down drunk.

"We're the kind of girls they mean in the articles in the papers."

"At least we're panties," Poppy said.

Although some of them had their doubts about Shoane.

"Another four units here or will we go somewhere else?"

Shoane decreed that they'd try another venue, so that the people there could see her new red shoes. Through the night they moved from pub to pub in great good humor, acquiring and losing people as they went. By the time they met the Sikhs it was just gone 2 a.m. and they were down to the hardcore of Poppy, Lydia, Shoane and Sissy.

The illegal jaunt in the Viking Splash was followed by an impromptu party in the Sikh best man's hotel room, then, after all the units in his minibar had been consumed, everyone drifted away home.

Sissy snogged her taxi driver. Shoane showed up at five in the morning at her parents' house, although she hadn't lived there for seven years, weeping and incoherent and minus her new red shoes. Poppy came to with flecks of matter in her hair, which she subsequently identified as vomit-almost certainly, she insisted with great hauteur, not her own. ("I'm many things but I'm not a puker.") And Lydia woke up in Gilbert's bed, where he explored her body with his beautiful hands and discovered three mystifying purple bruises on her left shin.

It was, by unanimous agreement, a great night.

Day 57 "I'm not normally a dog person, but you're different. You're in a category of your own. I suppose I trust you and I don't trust easy. Can I get you anything? What are these things here? Dog biscuits. Have a couple, I insist. You deserve it. If you like, I'll have one myself to keep you company."

From her bedroom Jemima could hear Fionn in the kitchen attempting to sweet-talk Grudge. A mighty battle of wills. Grudge, a paranoid, vengeful creature who felt under extreme threat, loathed Fionn. But Fionn had to make everyone, even dogs, love him. If they didn't at first, he would stop at nothing, he would chip away and chip away with smiles and compliments and simply erode a person until they surrendered and wearily agreed to love him with all their heart. But considering what he'd come through, poor soul, he'd turned out very well. Perhaps a slight propensity for preferring the company of vegetables to that of human beings, but when one considered the wealth of potential dysfunctional behavior on offer-drug addiction, compulsive home decorating and so on-she had no complaints.

Jemima could still remember when Fionn, aged twelve, had arrived in Pokey with Angeline, his mother. Their arrival had taken the town by storm. Only on television had the townsfolk seen the likes of Angeline, with her glamorous, hollow-eyed, breathless beauty, and her stunning mini-me daughter. (Because of his tousled, shoulder-length blond locks and pretty, pouty face, it took about six months for people to realize that Fionn wasn't a girl.) The story was that they'd moved from Dublin "for the climate." Naturally, this was accepted as a euphemism. Was Angeline on the run from the law? From a drug deal that had soured? Because who in their right mind would move to Pokey for the weather? Indeed, as many of the restless natives agreed, who would move to Pokey at all?

The mother and daughter took up residence in a one-bedroomed flat behind a bookie's, and almost as soon as they'd crossed the threshold they were behind with the rent. Angeline got a job, working in the pub, and lost it almost immediately. She found alternative employment in the fish-and-chip shop but got the sack within the week. A stint as a cleaner didn't last long either. The problem was that Angeline was often "sick."

Lazy, was the consensus. Or drunk. A lazy drunken Dubliner. Who wears too much makeup. And gives our men the glad eye.

And has a fake daughter, don't forget the fake daughter. (Angeline had never tried to fool anyone that Fionn was a girl but the townsfolk's mistake made them feel foolish and then resentful.) Drugs, someone else whispered, behind their hands. And no father for that ladyboy. They loved talking about Angeline. Endlessly, relentlessly, they watched and talked and talked and watched and lost any interest in spying on the oddball Protestants in their preposterous glass home. Angeline's beauty, her kohl-rimmed eyes, her murky past-she was better than a soap opera.

No one could believe it when she died.

It turned out that she'd had emphysema. Her story about coming to Pokey for the climate was entirely true. She'd been seeking fresh air to mend her poor damaged lungs when what she'd really needed was medication. But because she was a fragile, impractical type, who was desperate for positive outcomes, without any understanding of how to make them happen, she hadn't asked for help.

Obviously, no one in the town had offered assistance. They couldn't. Although they'd noticed she lived her life in chaos-Fionn didn't go to school and there were often scenes in the supermarket because Angeline didn't have enough money-not until Angeline's descendants had lived in the townland for four generations could she be accepted as one of them. Harsh, perhaps, but rules were rules.

Everyone assumed that Angeline had been an amoral floozy with no idea who'd fathered her child, but Fionn produced details and one phone call from the Pokey police was enough to conjure up Pearse Purdue. A beautiful man, in Jemima's opinion. As handsome as Angeline had been beautiful and, like her, a free spirit. (Or, if you wanted to be uncharitable, which Jemima didn't, pathologically irresponsible.) A fisherman, Pearse had spent his life working the trawlers up and down the west coast. Fionn had been the result of a short-lived but very passionate marriage with Angeline, and although they hadn't stayed together-Pearse was at sea eleven months of the year and Angeline spoke just a tiny bit too slowly for Pearse to endure-relations had remained cordial. Pearse loved Fionn but acknowledged he was incapable of parenting him.

He'd have to be fostered.

Which is when Jemima and Giles stepped in. They were aghast at Angeline's death. "How could we have let it happen?" Jemima asked Giles.

"You brought her soup."

"But I didn't understand how ill she was. Fionn was giving her Lem-sip. I thought she just had a bad cold."

"We weren't to know," Giles said, kneading her shoulders. "We weren't to know. But we can give him a home now."

"He'll be a handful," the man from Social Services warned Jemima. "He's inherited irresponsibility from both sides of the family. A double hit. He hasn't a hope. And he looks like a girl."

"Giles and I aren't daunted," Jemima said. "A well-balanced child will always get a home, but it's the poor damaged ones who really need it."

Day 57 . . .

Today is Katie's actual birthday.

"Forty," Danno said when she walked into the office. "Next stop, death."

A small delegation of staff approached her desk. "Happy birthday, Ms. Richmond," Danno said. They presented her with a card and a gift-wrapped parcel. "It's only small, we could never compete with Slasher's loot, but we put a lot of thought into it."

It was a fortieth-birthday diary. On the cover it said, "Life Begins . . . A guide to what's left of your life." At the top of each day was an uplifting thought.

"But this is divine." Katie flicked through it. "Let me read out today's message. "Dance joyously every day of your life. But don't let anyone else see you, not at your age." That's beautiful. You shouldn't have, guys."

"Slasher Hathaway's here!"

Wildly surprised, Katie looked at Danno.

"I thought you said he was in Helsinki," Danno said accusingly.

"He was."

"He's flown back just to take you out for lunch," George said.

George was probably right, Katie acknowledged. Conall was a great man for the grand gesture.

"In a private plane with cream-leather upholstery and royal-blue carpet, ankle-deep," George said dreamily. "Drinking Krug and eating Beluga caviar although caviar is strange and disgusting. That popping texture . . . it's like Space Dust for gourmets-"

"Shut up, you nutter," Danno snapped. To Katie, he said, "He's waiting downstairs. Eating chocolate, as usual, trying to push down all that guilt he must be carrying. He's keen to see you."

She took her time. She'd had other things lined up for this, her birthday lunch hour, and she was pissed off at Conall's presumption. Okay, so she'd only been planning a visit to the foot-protection section of Boots, but, for a woman who lived in high heels, it was where two of her specialist interests intersected. She was mildly obsessed with sole-protectors-invisible padded gel cushions which were meant to prevent that unpleasant burning sensation in the ball of the foot. She hadn't yet found a brand that worked for her, that didn't peel off the shoe and stick to her foot instead, but she remained hopeful. In addition, she'd seen an ad for a new product, a delightful see-through, wrap-around gel device to protect the little toe in open sandals, and she was keen for a look. And she was out of heel-guards, which she couldn't live without. Not only did they prevent naked heels from chafing against the back of shoes, but they also helped to anchor the foot in the shoe, preventing it from lifting out at pivotal moments in one's life, like crossing a stage to accept a prize in front of hundreds of people, as had happened to Katie when she had won PR of the Year some years back. The statue on her mantelpiece had eventually tarnished but that particularly humiliating memory had not. She would never permit it to happen again.

She made the four phone calls she'd been planning to make before Danno had announced Conall, then proceeded at a fairly leisurely pace to the ladies' and put on all the makeup she could find in her bag. Only then did she get the lift downstairs. There, as Danno had said, was Conall, clicking away on his BlackBerry, deep in thought and looking grim.