24 24.

An hour later I make a silent re-entry into our apartment.

It's a fantastic day outside. I've just had a stroll along the west pier as it cuts into the smooth pool of Dublin Bay and arches around the huge harbour almost to join the tip of the east pier. I walked there and back, stamping my fury into the concrete and gravel and dog dirt underfoot. I rested on the low blue wooden bench, put my head back against the knobbly pier wall and soaked up the benign rays of the sun. For a solid twenty minutes my face burnt in this solar paradise.

If I have nothing else, at least I'll have a suntan.

Ronan has left and Mother is fast asleep in her bed, a cup of semi-drunk coffee on her bedside table. The fish tank pedestal has been righted on top of the gleaming marble floor. The tank itself, of course, has gone, the glass shards more than likely shoved down the kitchen rubbish chute. But where are the fish?

I go straight into the bathroom. And sure enough, the Jacuzzi is full of colourful fish. Some swimming and some not so swimming. But all of them to all appearances alive, including five of the fish he got from Nicole.

I make a dive for the kitchen, extract the three fish from the freezer and dump them on the draining board. There's not a blip out of any of the little fatties as they lie there, cold, sodden, ogling and dead.

I grab a large glass bowl from one of the kitchen presses and place it beside our Moulinex mixer. From the drawer I extract a metal blade fixture and attach it to the pedestal inside the mixer.

Don't think about it, Julie, they're no longer alive.

First, the skunk-striped clownfish. It is orange-red in colour and has very pale fins. It's got a single white vertical stripe behind the eye, edged with black. Just like a skunk. You find these fish in Indonesia. Soon you'll find them in paste, manufactured courtesy of Julie Fitzgerald's Moulinex mixer.

The little bugger was a danger to life. A right little piranha. I saw it nipping away at one of our baby yellow-bellied devils earlier this morning. The clownfish eats only live food, whereas the devilall the way from the East Indiesis a poor henpecked vegetarian.

The clownfish is just three inches long. It will easily fit in the mixer, though at an angle. I pick it up by the tail and dunk it into the food processor. Then I close down the lid on top of it and twist. I press the button. I can't stand that high-pitched, hoovering sound it makes so I leave the kitchen and stand in the hall for a minute.

What a day!

I've heard a lot of funny things recently.

But the funniest thing of all echoes in my eardrums like the laughter of a circus clown: Ronan is a great communicator Ronan is a great communicator.

Nicole would make you split your sides. Ronan the great communicator. The sensitive listener. The purveyor of meaningful human intercourse.

I know better.

Classic conversation with me: he pontificates and I ignore. Regularly he tries to lecture me on contemporary culture. It's way easier to ignore him than to disagree with him because then he's likely to shut up sooner and save you a trip to your bag for a paracetamol.

Sylvana is quite right when she says Ronan thinks he's God's gift. He really does imagine that the sun shines out of his arse. I promise you that I've been to places where he hasn't and I can quite definitely swear to you that the sun does not shine out of his arse, since his arse is just the same as anyone else's arse (as far as I'm aware) and he's just an ordinary guy who thinks he's extraordinary and manages to dupe me and others at times into believing that his arse is extra high in calories.

The heart is the organ that counts here. But Ronan doesn't seem to have one. In the centre of his chest pumps a stiff muscle of rubber.

I re-enter the kitchen, go over to the mixer and calmly observe my russet clownfish juice. This is going well so far. Next in line: the bright yellow lemon-peel angelfish, fairly straight from the Pacific Ocean. I pluck it off the tray by its tail, a heavy, greasy slob of a thing. I drop it into the mixer to join its ensouped cousin and press the button, and I race out to the hall where I again take up sentry duty, this time seated on the banana couch.

Let's hope Mother doesn't suddenly decide to wake up.

It really aggravates me, though, the suggestion that Ronan is a good communicator. Take the incident last November, for instance.

One Sunday he drove me up the mountains for an afternoon trip. I say 'he drove me' advisedly; he doesn't like it when I drive because firstly, he has this weird idea that I enjoy breaking the speed limit and secondly, he doesn't trust me not to take a wrong turn.

He took a wrong turn.

He opened out his map without stopping the car. He wrapped it right over the steering wheel. Did he once ask me me to consult the map for him for safety's sake? He did not. He did not want to admit he required my help. Requiring my help is an admission of weakness. After all, it's an act of communication. to consult the map for him for safety's sake? He did not. He did not want to admit he required my help. Requiring my help is an admission of weakness. After all, it's an act of communication.

I said to him: "Why don't you let me consult the map for you?"

This sensible suggestion of mine was intended to make the vehicle in which we were travelling safe from a state of enwrapment around stray roadside trees.

But he cut down my suggestion with a machete: "No, Julie."

His reasoning was simple: I required remedial classes in map reading to supplement my retarded spatial abilities. His way of describing this ailment is that I, like most women, was geometrically challenged. We were useless as a class, he said, when it came to lines and curves and angles and distances. He qualified this analysis by conceding that we were excellent at bends.

Going round them.

Here was an interesting concept, so I decided to pursue it further. I suppose I thought I'd get him to communicate.

I did, but not in the way I'd hoped. Actually, it ended up quite nasty.

"What's so critical about lines and curves and angles and distances?" I wondered mildly.

He gave me an incredulous sideways glance. "The civilized world as we know it could not have been designed without lines and curves and angles and distances. Never mind constructed."

"I get on quite well without them," I retorted.

"How would you feel living, say, in a mud hut?"

Pause.

"Unlucky."

"Exactly. You owe all your comforts to applied mathematics."

I thought about this.

"Without lines and curves and angles and distances, Julie, your teeth would have fallen out by now."

"Every woman's teeth would be equally rotten," I pointed out. "Not just mine. Therefore it wouldn't matter."

"Without geometry and mathematics you'd be wearing adapted potato sacks and animal hides instead of designer labels."

I made the point that as regards lines and curves and angles and distances, modern man has contributed precisely nothing to the single most important priority in Ronan's life after aesthetics.

"What's that?"

"Sexual pleasure."

"Correction: modern man invented the condom."

"Including the ones that burst."

"He invented vibrators."

"Thank heavens."

"Don't lie."

"Don't flatter yourself. I don't need a man to do it with. A vibrator is ten times more effective. Do you want proof?"

"You're warped." He laughed.

"Actually, it's the vibrator that's warped."

He considered this point, poker-faced. "You're right, Julie. And what do you think accounts for the warp factor? Lines and curves and angles and distances. If you've ever bothered to inspect the design."

"I have. Intimately."

"They're all about engineering," he prattled on, the condescending buffoon.

"They're also about multiple orgasms, something you're incapable of giving me."

"Do you blame me?"

It was getting nasty.

But the point is: Ronan's sheer inability to communicate in a way that women prefer is so thorough, so determined, almost, that it infiltrates even the most intimate area of our lives. In the very place where he has the opportunity to do some really mind-blowing communicationthe bedroomhe bungles it and it's all over in two minutes. When I actually think about it.

It's like a five-second confession: imagine you're just getting comfy in the confession box and you're about to reach the mortal-sin punchline and the priest suddenly stands up and walks out on you. Think how that would make you feel.

Still, for all his communicative neglect, Ronan seems to bond well with Nicole.

I go back into the kitchen and turn off the knob.

The smell is that soggy, raw odour you get from recently docked fishing boats.

The final fish to take a nosedive into my Moulinex is the truly lovely oriental sweetlips. It is dark brown and looks like it's just been covered in random round blobs of yellow paint. I chuck it into the mixer to join its fluid comrades. I switch on the button again and leave it for a minute. After this, I strain out any stray bits of skin or eyeball or fin with a fork.

Now I think I'll give my darlings one last shake-up together with a carton of cream. I pour in the cream and add a sprinkling of herbs. I press the button and wait a full minute, to ensure a proper merging of personality. Now I pour almost a pint of the much creamier fish booze into the glass bowl.

I must say, I feel a sense of achievement: we have here the basic, raw ingredients of my first fish mousseline, fine and lump-free as a soup.

I cover the bowl with plastic and put it in the fridge. If anyone discovers it I'll tell them I picked it up at the local deli.

I open all the windows and wash my hands with loo detergent from under the sink and dry them with half a roll of paper towelling.

Nauseated, I visit the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet lid, head hung low in my hands, I ponder the tragedy that is my marriage.

Trust.

It's like biting into a golden apple, trusting to its healthy, juicy goodnessand finding a worm crawling between your teeth.

Trust takes people as they are, sparing itself the effort of endless analysis and suspicion and doubt. But Ronan? His is a counterfeit generosity, a bogus sincerity, a fraudulent benevolence. Beneath the face of the man I thought I knew and understood lies a disease of deceit.

And it's making me sick to the gut.

I hear a door banging.

Feeling sordid, I stand up and flush my mouth with Listerine and wash and do up my face. In our bedroom, Ronan is lying on the bed with his hands behind his head. I must try to be normal.

"Afraid of bumping into my mother?"

"It's safest in here," he replies.

I sit down on the chair by the open window through which you can hear the piercing summery noise of kids splashing and shouting in the swimming pool below.

"Is everything okay, Julie?" he says, with unexpected concern.

"I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, Ronan," I sing. "Apart from the fish-tank episode, everything's fine."

"That was a bit..." he begins.

"Extreme?"

"Yes."

I don't reply.

"I never cared much for fish anyway," he comments, yawning.

"Thank you for saying that."

"They're in the Jacuzzi."

"I noticed. Thank you again."

"I've phoned the dealer. I'll pick up another tank."

The happy shrieking of the children in the pool is starting to dull my senses. I close my eyes. My eyelids are cold.

Ronan tells me he has to go to town for the afternoon.

I blink my eyes open again.

"I have to buy shoes," he explains.

"Shoes."

"Yes, my brown ones are wearing out. I thought I might have lunch in town, cruise the bookshops, buy new shoes"