Lifesaving for Beginners

jittery when I’m at the start. Before I commit to it. Then Thomas sort of insisted on moving in and, six months later, the book was finished, and when I rang Brona, my editor, and told her, she thought I was joking, even though I don’t joke as a rule and I never joke about my job. There’d be no point, for starters, because nobody knows about my job. Well, nobody except Minnie. And Brona, obviously. And now Thomas. I told him one day. Ages ago. Even before he insisted on moving in. I didn’t intend to. It just happened.
    That book – the one I wrote after Thomas moved in – ended up being the most successful one in the entire Declan Darker series. Brona said it was because Thomas was ‘The One’. She was always saying crazy things, where Thomas was concerned. The day he moved into the apartment, for instance, she said, ‘This is a great day for spinsters everywhere.’
    I suppose, officially, you could say that Thomas moved in sometime in the summer of 2010. There he was, in my apartment, surrounded by boxes and black bin-liners and two cabbages that still had the muck of one of his five fields clinging to their stalks. In fact, some of the muck fell onto the carpet. The cream carpet. The cream, wool carpet. I had to walk past him to get to the Hoover. He grabbed my arm and pressed me against the wall and he looked at me without saying anything but all the while his hand moved up my leg until it disappeared inside my skirt and kept on going until his fingers reached the edge of my knickers and then he stopped. He smiled and said, ‘You’re wearing your fancy pants.’
    ‘No, I’m not.’
    ‘You are. They’re those black ones with the lacy panel at the front. They’re your good knickers.’
    ‘I don’t have good knickers.’
    ‘You do. You wore them the first time I stayed over. I remember.’
    ‘I did not.’ Although I did.
    He grinned. ‘You’re wearing your fancy pants because I’m moving in. Aren’t you?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Admit it.’
    ‘I won’t.’
    ‘I won’t play Grey’s Anatomy if you don’t.’
    His fingers slid down the lacy panel and disappeared between my legs. He was close enough to kiss. His grey eyes were green that day. Bright green.
    I said, ‘OK, then.’
    ‘Say it.’
    ‘For fuck’s sake, Thomas.’
    ‘Say it.’
    I sighed. Then I said, ‘Fine, then. I’m wearing my good knickers.’
    ‘Ha!’
    ‘Are you going to have sex with me or what?’ I made my voice sound bored out of my skull.
    Afterwards, he said, ‘You’re going to love living with me.’
    And back then, lying on the living-room floor with my good knickers down round my ankles and my skirt hitched over my hips and my breath coming in fits and starts, I thought . . . just for a moment . . . I thought . . . yes, I am.
    And I did. I liked it. Not every day, obviously. But most days. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I liked it enough for people to notice. Like when Ed and I met Mrs Higginbotham in town about a month before the accident. We usually met once a month after Mrs Higginbotham retired from her job, which was minding me and Ed pretty much from the time we were babies. Ed used to get confused sometimes and call her ‘Mum’.
    Anyway, we met in town and Mrs Higginbotham commented on it. On how happy I seemed. She said, ‘Watch out, Katherine. If the wind changes, your face might just stay like that.’ I was smiling when she said it.
    Even Mum noticed. She said, ‘I don’t know what’s got you so cheerful.’ That was shortly after she’d been nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. She’s not a big fan of literary prizes. She says, ‘It’s not a bloody beauty pageant,’ when the journalists ring and ask why she has demanded to be removed from various long lists and short lists. She’s cantankerous during the literary-prize season.
    So yeah, things were OK before the accident. Better than OK, really. Good, even. A lot of the time. Most of the time, in fact.
    Later, in bed, Thomas says, ‘Will you at least think about it?’
    I say, ‘I don’t want to move. I like living in this apartment. I’ve lived here for years.’
    ‘You never say “home”.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You never call this place home. You never say, “I’ll see you at home”.’
    ‘I do.’
    ‘No, you don’t. You say, “I’ll see you at the apartment”.’
    ‘No, I don’t.’ Except I do. I do say that.
    I switch off the light and bash my pillow a couple of times with