"Extracting teeth isn't much fun."

I snatch out a branch from the middle of the hedge like some crazed anarchist type and I fling it on to the path beside me. That's better, I can see him now. As he speaks through his phone, he is surveying Miss Bosoms, who is still on her back sheltered from the sun by her book.

"You're extracting a tooth?"

"Yes."

Pause.

"Is it sore?"

"Not my own tooth, Julie."

"So because it's not your own, that means it's not sore?"

Pause.

"Well, if there's nothing else..."

"Is it the sixth molar?"

"Julie, have you been drinking?" He sighs, a reference to my slightly slurred consonants.

"Or the bottom left wisdom tooth?" I suggest.

I am trying his patience.

"It's okay, Ronan. Don't mind me. Go and extract her tooth."

"Who says it's a she?"

"You mean you don't inspect the insides of women's mouths?"

"Men's mouths, women's mouthsthey're all the same."

"Do you kiss men?"

"Julie, I have to go."

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, Ronan. I was merely checking up on you."

There's a slight pause.

"What do you think I've been doing in your absence?" he quips. "Laying some sexy blonde?"

We both watch as the Nicole woman raises her left arm and slaps him in jest. Grinning, he shields himself. She returns to her book. Sylvana, grim as death, blinklessly studies the scene.

I hit him with it: "I'll be home in an hour."

He jerks his body on to his side and flurries on to his behind, holding up his other hand as if telling Nicole not to move. "I assume you're joking, Julie," comes his calm voice.

"I'm not joking. The Cliff Castle Hotel was haunted."

"Where are you now?" he snaps.

"On the motorway."

He scrambles on to his feet.

"Is it a problem, Ronan?"

I smile crazily at Sylvana.

Now Nicole gets up like lightning. Her book falls to the ground. How inconsiderate of me, disturbing her pleasant afternoon read. She stuffs my towel into the yellow bag, arches her slender arms one by one and pokes them through a yellow T-shirt, a brief visual experience which aggravates me intensely.

"Where exactly are you?"

"We've just entered the western suburbs."

He puts his hand over his mobile and says something to Nicole. She starts moving towards the wooden gate. Ronan tells me to hold on a minute, kneels down quickly and stuffs something into a bag. Presumably he is calculating that it will take me a minimum of one hour to get home, taking into account rush-hour traffic. He slips into a mustard-coloured T-shirt, then follows Nicole towards the gate, apparently deep in concentration, mobile phone to his ear. Sylvana and I pull back further round the bend as they approach.

"Aren't you thrilled, Ronan? Now we can have a few extra nights together."

"Yes, it's wonderful," he says.

He has caught up with Nicole now. Alongside him, she is almost as tall as he. She has a relaxed, graceful way of walking, though she tilts her head downwards. I wish she'd take off her shades. With shades off, you can measure the more abstract qualities such as intelligence and personality, if she has any.

They pass through the gate and head towards the car park.

"Look, Julie," comes his voice again, "why don't we have dinner in town together? Say, La Boheme's? We haven't done that for a while. You can park your car in town overnight and I'll drive both of us home in my Porsche."

Pause.

"In your Porsche?"

"Yes."

"I don't think that would be quite...feasible."

He insists that it would be quite feasible.

I tell him it's a sweet thought but I'm a bit tired. He insists, so for the hell of it I promise to meet him at La Boheme's at six o'clock.

We say goodbye.

We both stalk them along the narrow pathway to the front of the block. They disappear through the main entrance and I make a beeline through the car park towards my green MG.

Sylvana: "Where are you going?"

She's panting behind me. Sylvana was never the fittest.

"Never mind."

"They've gone up to your apartment, Julie."

"You don't say."

She starts pleading with me now. To follow them upstairs on a seriously fun slash-and-burn jungle trip.

"No, Sylvana."

"Julie, you must confront them. You're not thinking straight."

Oh yes I am thinking straight.

I'm thinking: Nicole's address on the back of my hand. Cherbury Court, Sandymount, by the sea. I'm thinking: someone's house is about to get added to the trash list. I'm thinking: ice-pick. There's one in the picnic hamper in the boot of my car.

You can't get much straighter than an ice-pick.

When I get to my car I check to see if it's still there.

It's still there.

I circumvent a frowning Sylvana and get into the driving seat.

"Julie, where are you going?"

"See you later."

She looks flabbergasted. "Julie, they'll be gone when you get back. Now's your chance!"

"They're not going anywhere, Sylvana. Believe me."

Fifteen seconds later I'm doing ninety down the coast road towards Cherbury Court.

7 7.

I'd be lying if I told you tears weren't streaming down my face, melting deep ravines through my make-up.

But frankly, darling, who gives gives a shit. a shit.

I'm numb. Numb drunk. Dizzy. Reality is making strange shapes. Houses are pulling ugly faces at me. I swear that bent green postbox just gave me the finger. And I think that tree stuck out its tongue at me. I'm whizzing past out-of-focus telephone boxes and blurred parked cars and elastic garden walls. Shoe-shaped machines of varying colours are coming at me at various speeds.

Quite possibly, of course, I am hallucinating.

I slow down to seventynot bad for a residential area.

And suddenly, from nowhere, I am seized by an image of Ronan and Judy the daughter we were going to have, our wonderful new family. I can see Judy walking between us, a lovely tiny person, giggling, holding our hands.

My eyes fill with a fresh wash of tears.

What did I do wrong?

Is it the sex?

The personality? Am I too boring? Smothering?

Do I annoy him? Slam him down, what with his bragged-up vanity and his lesser intellect?

Has it anything to do with my poor skin?

Or the fact that I'm nearly thirty?

Already I'm whizzing up the motorway through Blackrock. Dangerous driving gets you places quick. I'm doing seventy again. The lights at Blackrock College suddenly turn red. I slam on the brakes and almost scream into the back of this bloke in his forties whose silver 2000D Mercedes has been holding me up for the last half-minute in the outside lane with his pathetic sixty miles an hour.

I have been a naive idiot.

I always thought Ronan was different. I thought we saw the world through the same eyes, breathed the same air, shared the same skin. I thought he was refined. Honourable. Trustworthy.

I remember the first time I met him.

It was at a party. Sylvana and I had gone there with the express intention of getting laidor so we said. I was twenty-six. Not having experienced that great primeval ape-to-ape thing since I'd attended the zoological enclosure frequently referred to as 'college', I was, let's say, moderately hungry for fresh banana. Poor deprived creature that I was in that impoverished five-year interregnumthe most I'd got from a man (apart from the usual insult veiled as casual interest) had been half a night of mouth-to-mouth fornication with one delicious piece of walking beef, followed by an ugly lip sore.

As soon as I set eyes on Ronan the first thing I said was: "Jesus, Sylvana, look at that."

"I prefer older men," she replied with disdain.

Next, Ronan appeared with his large brown eyes and serious expression, smart, neat and professional-looking. He spoke to me in that earnest, respectful way of his, although he barely looked at Sylvana, which possibly didn't get them off to a great start.

Right away I wanted to play apes with him.

The music swirled its warm arms around us as we danced, surrounded by bodies, voices, dimmed lamps, shadows. I loved his lean, handsome designer face and his velvet-smooth sexy voice as he told me of his love for art, for music, for everything French, of his toleration for dentistry.

I was sold. Before falsely imprisoning him in one of the bedrooms upstairs, I flung him a few impressive details from my own curriculum vitae, including my 'no grade' in pass maths due in no small part to my original though unautographed doodles of horse-mounted Mexicans toting sombreros on the examination notebook.

To balance the picture a little, I also told him about my three years studying for my law degree, my two years in the King's Inns imagining what it would be like to be a barrister, followed by my apprenticeship to a Junior Counsel and my scramble for a piece of the rich personal-injuries pie. Within two years, I modestly informed him, I had fought and won so many cases that I could afford to buy a penthouse apartment in Temple Bar where I then resided.

Two hours later, our mouths were locked in mortal combat in the upstairs bedroom on top of two dozen coats, him trying to pull my clothes off and failing, and me trying to pull his clothes off and winning.

With Sylvana standing outside keeping guard.

Little did I know that this small foray was the crucible for marriage one year down the road.

I have managed to overtake the silver Mercedes. I'm so annoyed at him for purposely holding me up on the fast lane that I give him the vigorously-moving-up-and-down hand sign.

I swing to the right across the railway tracks and speed up along the strand road towards Sandymount, maintaining a fairly respectable sixty-eight.

I brought Ronan home to Mother some weeks later. Big mistake. She thought there was something 'less than fully transparent' about him. "Is that all?" I wondered.