"I suppose," I sniff, "you think I'm a danger on the roads?"

As Sylvana tries to reason with me, I'm getting this vague, bitter burning smell through the window. Her rashers and sausages are going to cauterize on the grill if she's not careful. Sylvana is so nose-dead you could stuff her head in an oven and she'd tell you she smelt roses.

"Julie, you shouldn't be alone."

My friend is in serious danger of becoming well-meaning.

"What makes you think I'm alone?"

"Okay, then, will you promise that you'll..."

"I suggest you turn down your grill, Sylvana."

"I'm sorry?"

"Do you want your grill to burn?"

Pause.

"How did you know I had the grill on?"

Good point.

"I heard it on the phone."

"You couldn't have; my mobile isn't in the kitchen."

More hesitation.

"Julie, where are you?"

Suddenly there's this loud knock on the window. She's seen me. I scramble to my feet, stub out my fag on her lovely white wall and chuck it on to the pretty but mangled-looking hydrangea plant beneath me. I emerge through the conifers past two women my own age who give me a good look. I start running. Sylvana has just burst out through the main door, shouting through her mobile for the whole neighbourhood to hear.

"Stop embarrassing me in public, Sylvana," I address my mobile, breaking into a canter.

"Julie," she pants into her phone. "Come back."

"No!"

I'm feeling this dreadful, heavy fatigue. I slow down to a walk. Forty feet behind me Sylvana is talking to me on the phone, brainwashing me, trying to persuade me that it's okay, that I'm her friend, andmost significantlythat she's sorry for the way she argued with me about Ronan earlier.

I stop.

And stand there on the pavement like an idiot. She comes up to me. I'm expecting to see a face brimming with determination and command in the face of my helplessness and tragedy. I should know Sylvana by now, but I don't. Nearly seventeen years as friends, but still she's no less alien to me than the little green people with bug eyes.

What I get from her is something totally different from what I expected. She looks urgent and troubled, like she's desperate to tell me something she's never told me before because she's never known how.

With total genuineness she says she's sorry for being insensitive, for making out she knew best how I should run my life. Her eyes are moist, something I've never seen before. She gently grabs me and strangely I don't resist. Instead, I find myself sobbing uncontrollably into her shoulder.

We get back to her place a whole five minutes later, me feeling closer to Sylvana than I've felt in my whole life.

The kitchen is a cloud of thick black smoke. She could have burnt the whole place down but she didn't care: she put me first. She complains about the sausages and rashers: they are brittle black bones on the grill. She complains about the black sediment everywhere. She complains about having to scour the grill with steel wool. She complains about being starved after her day at work.

Not once, though, does she complain about the stink.

We decide, on balance, it's best to dine out this evening.

21 21.

Like so many males of his breed, Ronan finds it hard to express emotion by screaming, weeping, effing and blinding, teeth-gnashing, smashing plates, kicking, pulling hair, etc.

Odd things, men.

But I've just done something real bad real bad and I'd be interested in seeing what effect it will have on his short-term personality, viewed on the ape scale. and I'd be interested in seeing what effect it will have on his short-term personality, viewed on the ape scale.

Now what might this something be?

Told him he's an intellectually repressed womanizing creep?

No.

Told him his erection looks like a half-cooked pork sausage?

No.

Inquired after his receding hairline?

No.

Asked him how his haemorrhoids are doing?

No, none of these things.

What I've done is this: I've just moved my mother in.

Mother O'Connor is in the bathroom. More precisely, she is enjoying the cosy, bubbly luxury of our Jacuzzi. She's had her tea and shortly will be going to bed; she does not wish to be in significant evidence when Ronan returns.

I've installed her suitcases in our second bedroom, which up to this evening has served as Ronan's study. The second major change in Ronan's living environment will be his TV monopoly, followed closely by his bathroom monopoly after my own bathroom monopoly. From now on he is going to share his toilet and toaster and Jacuzzi and a host of other things with a woman half his size.

The only thing that will remain truly Ronan's will be his electric shaver.

And the food! Ronan has no idea what's coming. To put it all-encompassingly: Mother has a deep, caring, supportive relationship with fridges. Although he is familiar with her weakness for biscuits and tarts and sweet snacks, of all kinds, Ronan seriously underestimates her abominable lust for French cheeses and Danish pastrieshis own personal favourites. Mother will, to Ronan's horror, come to represent food larceny on an unprecedented scale.

I can't wait to see his face when he returns.

Of course, what I really want to do is to punch Ronan and kick him and pull his hair out by the roots and scream at him and scrape my nails into his face until he comes away looking like a flayed indigenous Amazonian warthog.

Maybe then he'd tell me why he's doing this to me.

But I must not react. He must not suspect a thing.

There will be no confrontation. That much Sylvana and I agreed just now, over her pizza and my cannelloni supreme and our two bottles of Castle Ridge.

At long last I've got her over to my way of thinking.

She was most graceful about it.

While the mother of all wars is still in the middle of her long-life Jacuzzi soak, Ronan troops in the front door soon after nine.

I'm sitting on the couch reading Cosmo Cosmo when he strides into the lounge, consigning me to the planet of the unseen. He is agitated-looking, presumably because he's just visited Nicole, beaten up for love. He's carrying a large, fat, yellow, plastic bag. when he strides into the lounge, consigning me to the planet of the unseen. He is agitated-looking, presumably because he's just visited Nicole, beaten up for love. He's carrying a large, fat, yellow, plastic bag.

"What's in the bag?" I wonder, idly scanning this trashy article about who really wears the trousers.

"I managed to pick up some fish," he says, walking in.

"I hope you were wearing protection."

Hold on, did he just say fish?

There's this rustic, brook-like sound of rushing water.

I look up. Ronan is pouring a ton of water from his plastic bag into our aquarium. And it's full of fish. I jump up and over.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I cry.

I almost add: putting that bitch's fish in our community aquarium? putting that bitch's fish in our community aquarium? But I stop myself just in time. But I stop myself just in time.

I quietly explain to him that he should not put too many fish into the same fish tank or else some will get bitten due to the universal law of natural selection that says: "Because I am hungry and we are competing for scarce resources and you are quite tasty and you are also smaller than me, it follows that you are mine for the eating. Now be a good little fish and swim into my jaws, please, while I eat you."

"Oh, sorry." He grins.

He peers into the tank as if he's expecting a decent naval battle to occur. But this is not how it works at all. It could take days for a fish to lose its fins to a companion's marauding teeth.

Heavy-hearted, I peer inside the tank myself.

Cavorting away in our aquariuminterspersed with our own puffers and triggerfishes and oldwives and our yellow-bellied devilare now several additional items: two bleeding-heart tetras, two lemon-peel angelfish, one oriental sweetlips (which I used to think was a type of lipstick), the zebra-like humbug damselfish, the tiger barb with the green and black scales and the large tiger-like fin, and two guppies.

And there's one skunk-striped clownfish, which I don't recall seeing in her aquarium. It probably skulked behind a lump of coral when it saw me advance with the ice-pick.

Clearly, Harry returned home just in time to save them. In the absence of an aquarium, they were most likely dumped in the bath for a day. And they end up here: somehow, Nicole managed to pass them on to Ronan this evening.

"I never knew you liked fish, Ronan."

"I love them."

The lying creep! He has zero interest in fish. They don't go with the image. Fish might be aesthetically and chromatically interesting, but they definitely aren't cool.

"When did you get them?" I inquire, handing Ronan yet another opportunity to truth-twist.

"Oh," he replies, "after work. I chanced on an aquarium dealer and thought I'd buy a few."

"Where was that?"

"I wasn't paying attention to the precise location. Not having my Porsche back from the panel beaters yet, I had to walk to the bus stop. And I bumped into an aquarist."

"Did you say sorry?"

"They were going for a song."

"They look a bit undernourished."

He shrugs. "I thought you'd be pleased."

"I'm thrilled," I reply dreamily, stroking his cheek with my index finger. "Really."

He backs away.

Me, the great big naive idiot. He has gallantly fostered these surviving tropical marine fish from his mistress. And simply offloaded them on to me. And I am supposed to do the decent, unselfish thing and give them a new and better life. Without a blip of protest.

"I'm sure they'll be fine," he assures me.

"I don't think so. See our little baby yellow-bellied devil?"

"Yes."

"Two to one it will not be here tomorrow morning."

He just laughs. But of course, he has no comprehension of the fact that fish have feelings too. "I'm going to bed," he announces wearily.

"Mother's in the bathroom."

Unsure whether to believe me, Ronan gives me this look and disappears swiftly out to the hallway to verify my story. It sounds like he's stopped outside the bathroom door. It's locked, but I can hear that humming Jacuzzi sound from where I'm sitting.

He must be thinking this can be only one of two people: either it's Sylvana in there or it's my mother.

Please let it be Sylvana, he's secretly pleading.

For the first time in his life he's desperate for Sylvana to be not just in our apartment but in our Jacuzzi. Because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate: that it has to be my mother who is in our Jacuzzi. Because if she's in the Jacuzzi, then she's certainly staying the night. And if she's staying the night, Ronan will have to be civil to her tomorrow at breakfast.

Soon he reappears at the doorway, ashen-faced. "She can't stay here," he croaks.

"She's an old lady."

"Not old enough," is his callous reply.

"If you can't find it in your cruel heart to be generous to an elderly citizen who also happens to be my mother, I'm not sure I want to stay married to you."

He proceeds through the room and sits down on a leather armchair, grabbing last Sunday's paper from the coffee table.