They were off to the Four Seasons to pick up Knight Ryders for tonight's gig. Knight Ryders were a metal band, a quartet of hoary old rockers who'd survived addiction, divorces, bankruptcy, near-death heart failure, motorbike crashes, internal strife, kiss-n-tells from their adopted children and much, much more. Many of their audience, who paid the high ticket prices, came along not in order to hear their hits from the early seventies, but simply to marvel that all four of them were still alive.

The boys were on their eighth month of a nine-month world tour and they'd been in Ireland for two very long days. Katie's greatest worry was Elijah Knight, lead singer, living legend and proud owner of a secondhand liver (one careful previous owner). He'd been clean and sober for almost a year but whispers had reached Katie's ears that he was wearying of it all. Certainly it was true that every word out of his mouth to Katie was a complaint: the Irish hotel was too chintzy; the Irish press were too fawning; the Irish AA meetings had too little whooping.

Katie or one of her team made it their business to be with him at all times-Tamsin was over there right now-and a "bodyguard" (i.e., guard) kept watch at night outside his bedroom.

As Katie slid into the back seat of a blacked-out limo, she got a call from Tamsin. "It's Elijah."

"What's up?"

"It's time for him to start backcombing his hair, but he's just sitting there with his arms folded, like a child."

"I'm on my way." Katie crossed her fingers and said a silent prayer that tonight would not be the night that Elijah Knight went back on the sauce. Not on her watch. If he could just wait until tomorrow, when he and his three big-haired, craggy-faced, liver-damaged compadres left for Germany, she'd be very grateful.

The problem, however, was that everything went off fine. With Katie's kindly inveigling, Elijah obediently backcombed his hair until it stood a full eleven inches above his head; the Knight Ryders played an entire set and none of them had a stroke; they even bowed out of a gratis trip to Dublin's finest brothel.

This meant that when Katie got home at the unexpectedly early hour of 2 a.m. there was room in her head for the reality of her job situation to hit her. She was done for, she abruptly realized. She might as well face it: getting Elijah Knight safely home to bed might have been her last act as Senior PR of Apex Entertainment.

It made sense to get rid of her-of the six PR staff, she was paid the most. Also, a more painful acknowledgment, she was the oldest, and the music business was a young woman's game. I'm thirty-nine, she said to herself, in wonder. Thirty-nine! It's a miracle I've survived this long.

She had to go to sleep now. But how could she? Tomorrow she was going to be sacked and she'd have no money, and in these recessionary days she'd never get another job because she was qualified for nothing except bringing rock stars to nightclubs.

I'm ruined, she thought.

She would lose her flat and her car and her highlights and her personal trainer, even though she had only one session a week, but her time with the behemoth that was Florence was vital-without it she mightn't be able to get herself to do any exercise at all.

And, oh, her lovely flat. There wasn't a chance she could keep it. Her mortgage payments were gulp-inducing, even on her current salary. She'd bought at the height of the boom, when cardboard boxes were changing hands for a million euro. She'd paid dearly for every square foot of her home. But how she loved it. It was only small-being an attic conversion, most of her rooms had been short-changed of their corners-but it was cozy and got loads of light and was walking distance from town. Not that she'd ever tested it, not in her shoes.

The killer was that she'd never meant to work in the music business. Oh why had she, why? Because she'd been wildly flattered when they offered her the job, that was why, so flattered that she'd turned a blind eye to the fact that the money wasn't as good as you might have thought. All she'd cared about was that they must have thought she was cool if they wanted to employ her. But she should have taken the job in the government press office instead. Old people weren't mocked in that industry; they were valued, revered for their wisdom. No one cared if you had big thighs. No one cared if you had facial hair (and you were a woman) (not that she had). In fact, they positively liked fat ugly spokes-people in politics because they had more credibility.

Ruined, she thought. Yes, ruined.

As the night ticked away, her head buzzed with calibrations and calculations: if she let out her flat would she earn enough to cover her mortgage and hairdressing bills? If she got a job in Blockbuster, how would she manage for food? She'd read a thing in the paper about people on the minimum wage: even if they ate the gone-off half-price things in Tesco, they were still perpetually hungry. Co-existing with her appetite was tricky enough on a healthy salary, when even as she had her first bite of something she was worried about the last. How would she cope with genuine hunger?

She wouldn't even be able to afford to kill herself. For the last couple of years, probably since Jason, she'd had a whimsical contingency plan in case life ever became truly unbearable, like the cyanide pills spies used to carry in their teeth in case they were captured. Her cunning notion was that she'd eat herself to death-it happened, people really did it, doctors were forever warning the obese that if they continued with their bad habits they'd snuff it. She'd always thought it be a joyous way to go, gorged to the gills on chocolate cheesecake. But chocolate cheesecake cost money and she'd need an awful lot of it to administer a fatal dose. Gripped by middle-of-the-night terror she saw what a wasteful fool she'd been all these years. She should have started stockpiling baked goods long before now. But she wasn't a stockpiler. If it was in her flat she ate it. Fact. Nothing lasted more than a day.

All of a sudden her thoughts veered off in an unexpected direction and she began to blame Jason. (Between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-seven, Jason had been her boyfriend. In their sixth year, just as they'd started trying for a baby, they had the tremendous shock of discovering that they were no longer in love. They faked it for almost a year, hoping to rekindle the flame, but they were kaput. Kiboshed. All washed up.) If she and Jason had got married and had a baby, and if Jason wasn't marrying Donanda the Portuguese stunner instead, she wouldn't have these worries.

But oh no! He had to decide to stop loving Katie and then they had to split up and she had to buy a flat on her own. Well, in fairness, she'd stopped loving him too, but that was also Jason's fault because if only he hadn't become unlovable everything would be different.

Her anger filled her stomach, then her chest, until she began having difficulty breathing, and even though it was five past six in the morning and far too late to take a sleeping tablet-Curses! She hadn't had an ounce of sleep!-she had to sit up and turn on the light and get her de-bittering books off the shelf, to stop herself from drowning in her own bile.

Gasping, she read a few lines of My Happiness, My Responsibility, but it did nothing. She cast it aside and hungrily scanned The Spiritual Laws of Success: nonsense, rubbish! She was starting to think she'd have to ring for an ambulance when she opened the next book and a line jumped out at her: "The Chinese word for "crisis" also means "opportunity."

That's what did it.

She felt as if she'd been hacking through dense jungle and suddenly found herself on top of a mountain where the light was clear and the air was thin. A load fell away from her. Yes, her life was over! Yes, she was a goner. Unemployed-indeed, possibly unemployable-but her crisis could become her opportunity. Surely she could do something else with her life? Live in Thailand and learn scuba diving? Or, better still, go to India and become enlightened, and when she came back-if she came back, hoho-she wouldn't mind being homeless and carless and having to wear terrible shoes and having to do her own motivation to go for a run.

It would all be okay.

Day 60.

Sixty-six Star Street remained silent until 5:30 a.m., when Lydia got up. She lurched into the bathroom where she showered-there's only one word for it-resentfully. She disliked getting wet. She feared the water. (She wasn't to know this but in a previous life she'd been a meerkat, a creature of the desert and a stranger to moisture. Some traits linger into subsequent lives.) She reached behind her for her conditioner and her elbow dislodged Andrei's shower gel from the shelf. No! There was a slippery scramble as she tried to catch it but it leaped from her sudsy grasp and landed on the floor of the shower with an echoey three-bounce clatter. Irkutsk! She didn't want to wake Andrei or Jan. They were bad enough when they got a full night's sleep, the miserable bloody pair; they'd be even more stony-faced and grumpy if they were woken prematurely.

God, they were hard work. Not once in three weeks had she seen them laugh. And no one could say she hadn't made an effort, trying to jolly them along with good-humored bad mouthing, the kind she employed with all men. But instead of rising to the challenge and giving as good as they got, they were baffled.

And she was stuck with them: it was their lease. In fact, she wondered why they didn't just tell her to hop it, because it was so obvious that they hated her.

Perhaps it was because her room was laughably small, barely more than a cupboard. (Apparently, it used to be the kitchen-a cramped, walk-in galley-before some mysterious previous owner had decided to convert the second bedroom into a bigger kitchen, spacious enough to house a table. All well and good, but it meant that the remaining space was barely deserving of the title "room.") Lydia suspected-correctly-that the ex-kitchen had been turned down by many viewers before she had shown up. The bed was narrow and short, there was no dressing-table mirror (because there was no dressing table) to drape her string of orange flower-shaped lights around, and there was no wardrobe so most of Lydia's clothes were kept in boxes under her bed. She also suspected-again correctly; Lydia didn't get much wrong-that Andrei and Jan had expected she'd bring a woman's touch to the flat. They were, of course, mistaken. It hadn't been easy to resist Andrei and his schedules, because he was a determined type, and it had taken every ounce of her considerable resolve, but it was important to establish from the get-go who was boss. As soon as she was certain that the lads didn't expect her to clean, then she would fall into line.

Perhaps . . .

In the meantime, the rent was astonishingly reasonable, a massive one hundred euro a week cheaper than her previous billet, and the house was conveniently close to the city center. And when she'd discovered that the lads hailed from Gdansk, she had been alerted-inadvertently on their part-to the excellence of words ending in "sk." Gdansk! She'd enjoyed saying it so much that she'd hit the net, looking for similar city names. And there were loads of them! Tomsk and Omsk, Minsk and Murmansk. She used them a lot. She couldn't exactly say why, she just liked them. Gdansk was a positive word, because it sort of sounded like "thanks," but all the others, especially Minsk and Irkutsk, sounded like swear words, only far hissier and snakier than the ones she usually called upon. Minsk! How pissed-off that sounded! It was great. You could scare the bejayzus out of someone if you said it right. Irkutsk! How riled you could seem if you put a bit of effort into the delivery. These were quality swear words that had cost precisely nothing and, in her current cash-strapped circumstances, she was grateful for free pleasures.

All the same, despite the gratis gift of new swear words, she badly missed Sissy and the lovely, large airy flat they'd shared. Hard to believe such luxury now, but she and Sissy had had a cleaning lady. In fairness, she'd only come once a week but it had been enough. Even when the kitchen was very bad, filthy enough for mice to be dancing jigs on the draining board, Lydia had been able to literally blind herself to it because she knew it would be fi xed in a day or so.

And Sissy was exactly the same. Sissy didn't care. She would never have hit Lydia up with a cleaning schedule. Days off were for staying in your pajamas and huddling under a blanket, watching telly and eating twelve bowls of Coco Pops; they were not for rolling up your sleeves and pulling on rubber gloves and running the hot tap.

But the days of cleaners and wardrobes and a normal flatmate were in Lydia's past . . . She stood before the bathroom mirror and poured large quantities of a serum designed to combat frizz on to her head. For no matter how impoverished her circumstances, she would never give up her hair. She would go hungry before she did without her serum. She and her wild springy curls were engaged in an ongoing battle of wills. Just because she was short of money was no excuse to simply give in and surrender, like many a lesser woman would have done. Lydia's hair was not her master. No, she was the boss of it.

Into the kitchen, where she heaped eight spoonfuls of instant coffee into a massive mug, which was called Lydia's Mug, and filled it halfway with boiling water, then the rest with tap water. She swallowed it like medicine, gagging slightly on the last mouthful, abandoned the mug on the table, dressed quickly in jeans, trainers and a hoodie, then left.

Down in the street, the morning was sunny but chilly and Lydia made her way to a taxi. A taxi? What kind of flashy minx spurns public transport?

Well, what a surprise when she climbed into the driver's seat! One could be forgiven for thinking she was proposing to hot-wire the vehicle, but when she shoved a key in the ignition it became clear that she owned it and that she was a taxi driver by trade!

It was some sort of generic Toyota, not a good car. Not a bad one either, just one of those unexciting ones that taxi drivers seem to favor. But interestingly, given Lydia's attitude to hygiene in the home, her car was clean and fragrant. She took evident pride in her charabanc.

Amid much static noise, she got on her radio and received word of a fare: picking a man up from the Shelbourne and driving him to the airport.

She did a screechy U-turn and headed toward town, the traffic lights changing to green just as she neared them. "Gdansk," she said, with satisfaction, almost smacking her lips with the pleasure of saying it.

The next lights were also green. "Gdansk." She nodded her thanks at them.

But when she pulled up outside the Shelbourne and the fare climbed into the back of her car, she saw him do a double-take. Irkutsk! she thought.

"You're a girl!" he declared.

"Last time I checked," she said stonily. Irkutsk! Irkutsk! Irkutsk!

Why a chatty one? Why? When it was so early and she'd had only eight spoonfuls of coffee?

" What's it like?" the fare asked eagerly. "Being a female taxi driver?" Her mouth tightened. What did he think it was like? It was exactly like being a male taxi driver, only with gobshites like him asking unanswerable questions at some ungodly hour in the morning.

"How do you deal with trouble?" he asked. The question they all asked. "If someone won't pay?"

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.

"By all means!" He was delighted by the interplay with this springy-haired little stunner, still damp and fragrant from her early-morning shower.

"Have you accepted Christ Jesus into your life as your lord and savior?"

That shut him up. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

Day 60 . . .

Back at 66 Star Street, people were stirring. Andrei had been awake since 5:35 when Lydia had deliberately dropped something on the bathroom floor, with clattery force. Since she had moved in, he and Jan had been in a state of shock. They had never met a girl like her and the only good thing about her was that she was small. Small enough to fit into the tiny bed in the tiny room.

Andrei stared wistfully into space, remembering the halcyon days with their previous tenant, a Ukrainian electrician-cum-accordion player named Oleksander. Life with him had been so harmonious-because he was never there. He'd spent every night at the much swankier digs of his girlfriend, Viktoriya, and his room at 66 Star Street functioned mostly as his wardrobe. Until Viktoriya had fallen for the charms of an Irishman, a civil servant who held a high-ranking post in the Department of Agriculture, and Oleksander was thrown back on his own resources. He'd endured a succession of sleepless nights with his legs extending six inches over the end of his narrow single bed. When he'd tried to remedy the shortfall by putting a chair there, to rest his heels on, the wooden footboard had cut into his calves, marking him with two livid purple weals which linger to this day. He successfully managed to remove said wooden footboard and the only downside was that the frame of the bed collapsed entirely. His next solution was to sleep with the mattress directly on the floor, but the lumbar region of his back set up a clamor of objections and after thirty-four days of excruciating pain, he told Andrei he could take no more.

Lots of people, most of them Polish men, had come to view the room but without exception declared themselves too big to fit into the bed. They also enjoyed much mirth at the thought of Oleksander Shevchenko (who was a well-known figure; his busking outside Trinity had become almost a tourist landmark) trying to get some shut-eye in such doll-like quarters. So when Irish Lydia arrived, Andrei and Jan had been so dazzled by her suitably miniature proportions they entirely neglected to notice that she was an evil little pixie.

Now they were paying the price.

They had endless discussions, when they asked each other: Why? Why was she so unpleasant? So lazy? So cruel?

Andrei warned Jan that they might never get answers. It would probably be best, he advised, if they accepted that her sour nature was a fact of life, as inevitable as the rain, like everything else in this damp unpleasant country.

After washing and dressing, the boys descended to the street, where they extended the palms of their hands outwards and expressed lengthy and sarcastic surprise that it wasn't pissing rain, before walking ten minutes to the Luas stop. There they went in different directions, Andrei east to an industrial estate and Jan north to a shopping mall.

Jan liked to say he worked in IT, which in a way he did. He was employed in an enormous supermarket, filling the online orders. His days were spent toiling in the aisles, pushing a massive super-trolley device off which branched twelve baskets, representing twelve different customers, each with a separate grocery list. When he'd located every item on all twelve lists and put them into the correct baskets, he'd deposit the merchandise in the loading area, for the truck to spirit throughout Dublin, then he'd trudge to the printer to pick up another twelve lists, hook twelve new empty baskets to his super-trolley and commence the whole procedure again. He lost track of how many times a day he repeated this exercise.

Andrei also worked in IT. Except that he really did. He drove around the city in a white van, fi xing broken computers for office workers. The van itself took up a lot of his thoughts. He was a pragmatic man and it irked him terribly that he was obliged to return it to base every evening, where it idled for fourteen useless hours in a parking lot, when it could be used for his own purposes-specifically, picking up Rosie. He fantasized about parking outside the house she shared with four other nurses, honking the horn and seeing her skipping down the steps, van-shaped admiration on her heart-shaped face. He had been dating Rosie (an Irish girl, but in all other respects entirely different from evil pixie Lydia) for two months and eight days and thus far she had refused from surrender her virginity to him. Andrei, with his muscles and astonishing blue-eyed good looks, was accustomed to getting his way with the girls but he was genuinely impressed by Rosie's old-fashioned virtue and his initial lust had blossomed into something far more complex.

Day 60 . . .

On the ground floor of 66 Star Street, Matt and Maeve were roused gently from their slumber and welcomed into the day by a Zen alarm clock, a plinky-plonky affair, which sounded like Tibetan goat bells. It started off with isolated peaceful plinks, like an occasional tap on a xylophone, then over ten minutes it built up into a cacophony of delightful chimes. Not very Matt. He seemed more like a man who'd prefer an alarm that behaved like a defibrillator, issuing a cruel discordant BRRRING to make every nerve in his body stand on end and oust him instantly from the bed, to beat his chest in a Tarzan roar. "Yaaaar! Watch out world, I'm coming to get you!"

But Maeve wanted the chimes, so Maeve got the chimes. She also got a leisurely breakfast. Matt, I suspect, would have been happy to mindlessly scarf down a Snickers bar while rushing to work, but instead he made tea for Maeve, Maeve made porridge for him, then they sat at their kitchen counter, mirroring each other's actions, checking that the other had honey, orange juice and other breakfast paraphernalia.

On their kitchen windowsill, in a curlicued silver frame, was a photo of them on their wedding day. They glammed up well, the pair of them, I must say. Maeve, in particular. Judging from the picture, they'd gone for a traditional wedding, the full white monty. Maeve's dress was one of those deceptively simple numbers: a slender unadorned fall of heavy satin, from an empire-line bodice. An off-the-shoulder neckline revealed a pair of pretty creamy-skinned shoulders, and a pearl headdress gathered her thick fair hair into a bun from which slinky ringlets escaped, framing her face. She looked like a girl from one of those Jane Austen novels she seemed so fond of reading. Matt, clutching onto Maeve and gazing at the camera with the expression of a man who has just won the lottery but is trying not to gloat about it, was kitted out in a dark, serious-looking suit. The kind of suit that people wear to sign peace treaties. Evidently, he had tracked down the most impressive rig-out he could find, to convey just how momentous his marriage was to him. (Without wishing to be unkind, there was considerably less of them three years ago, when this photo was taken. Both of them were a lot, well, narrower. Clearly, the trans-fat didn't play so large-forgive the pun-a part in their lives back then.) Maeve swallowed the last of her orange juice, Matt clattered his spoon into his empty bowl, they each took their vitamin tablet, knocking it back with a shared glass of water, and-finally-left the flat and prepared to go to work. Matt had a car, polished shoes, a sharp suit and a sharp haircut. Maeve had a bicycle, flavorless chapstick and a pair of cords so unattractive (too big for her and a most unappealing shade of olive-green) that it seemed as if they had been chosen specially for their ugliness.

They kissed and said goodbye. "Be careful," Matt said.

Of what? I wondered. Anyone foolhardy enough to negotiate a bicycle through rush-hour traffic could expect admonitions from their nearest and dearest, but, all the same, I knew that coming a cropper at the hand of a careless car was not what Maeve feared. Oh she was definitely scared, don't get me wrong, but I didn't know what of; she was blocking me. All I could tell from looking at her was that she had no fear of being mocked for her crap clothes. Fascinating. Matt stared after Maeve until she was absorbed by the gridlock, then he thought about his car. It was parked so far away that he wondered if he should get a bus to it.

Day 60 . . .

In Jemima's flat, the dog was suffering no ill effects from the dizzying he'd received the previous night. Jemima was trying to tempt him to the kitchen but he was playing hard to get. "Grudge, Grudge, my lovely Grudge." So it seemed the beast really was called Grudge! How . . . well, how peculiar.

Jemima had been washed and dressed since 6:15 a.m. She couldn't abide slugabed behavior. She hunkered down, her knees cracking like pistol shots, until her face was level with Grudge's sulky one. "Just because Fionn is coming doesn't mean I'll love you any less," she said.

All became clear: Grudge was sulking because he'd discovered that "The Fair One" was due to visit.

"Come and be fed."

Within moments Grudge was dancing the Dance of Breakfast. A thin-skinned creature, slow to forgive, except when food was involved.

I kept my distance from Jemima. I didn't want to frighten her. Not unless I had to. Nonetheless, her thoughts reached me. She was pulsing on a strong, steady, strident vibration, which fought its way through the clutter of the flat and insisted on attention.

She was thinking with great fondness about the word grudge. Such a splendid noun, she thought. So suitable for purpose: you couldn't possibly utter it without your face contorting itself into a sour prune of grudgingness. Krompir was another word she savored; it was Serbian for potato and had a most satisfying chomping sound. Or bizarre, possibly her most favorite word of all, a festive, joyous sound, which always brought to mind the jangling of tambourines.

Grudge was regarded by many as a strange name for a dog, but when people were crass enough to mention this, Jemima's answer was that he had chosen it himself. They'd told her at the pound that his name was Declan but he was no more a Declan than she was. She believed that he should be trusted to make the best choice for himself, so when she got him home-where he wedged himself tightly into a corner and sat, low and mournful, on his paws-Jemima reeled out a long list of high-esteem dog names. Champion? Hero? Rebel? Prince? She watched carefully for a positive reaction but, after each suggestion, Declan growled, "GGGGRRRRR," followed by a short little bark which sounded like "Udge." Eventually, she heard him: Grudge it was.

They'd warned her in the pound that he was a very damaged dog. There was a lot he couldn't tolerate. Men in wigs. Folk singers. The color yellow. The smell of hairspray.

But he could be soothed by the rustling of Crunchie wrappers. Girls with red hair. Yorkshire accents. The music of George Michael, though only the earlier stuff (and not Wham!-he abhorred Wham!).

He was a highly strung, mercurial creature, who would require careful handling, but Jemima wasn't daunted. Her philosophy, which she related to the man at the pound, was that a well-balanced dog would always get a home, but it was the poor damaged ones who really needed it.

Entre nous, I'm wondering if I was too quick with my initial judgment of Jemima as a prickly old crone.

His breakfast consumed, Grudge stared at Jemima with melting Malteser eyes, then flicked a few anxious sideways glances around the room. He was a wonderful dog, Jemima thought with pride. More intuitive than most humans. Which wouldn't be difficult, seeing as the vast majority were walking about with their heads stuck up their own fundaments.

"Yes, I feel it too," Jemima told Grudge. "But we won't be bowed!" She whirled around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and planted her legs wide, like a warrior woman. "You hear me?" she said-nay, demanded-glaring hard (but into the wrong corner of the room, God love her). In ringing tones, she repeated, "We won't be bowed!"

Keep your pants on, Jemima. It's not all about you.

Day 60 . . .

Matt liked to get his daily Act of Kindness out of the way early. As he drove to work, he scanned the streets looking for a chance to do good. At the upcoming bus stop a lone woman was waiting. It was clear that she'd just missed a bus because at this time of day usually dozens of people were gathered, watching each other like hawks, careful not to be left at the back of the melee when the bus eventually did show up.

He opened the passenger window and called out, "Where are you going?"

Startled, the woman looked up from her texting. A well-upholstered type, bundled into an orange jacket, she was aged roughly between thirty-seven and sixty-six. "What's it to you?"

"Would you like a lift?"

"With you? I can't get into a car with a strange man! Don't you read the papers, son?"

Ouff !

"I'm not a strange man, I'm a nice man."

"Well, you're hardly going to admit you're an ax murderer."

"I'm married. I love my wife. I don't own an ax."

"Kids?"

"Not yet."

"I've four."

"Hop in, you can tell me about them."