Lifesaving for Beginners

bloke.’
    Afterwards, he looked a little shy, like he’d just met me and he was trying to think of something interesting to say. I got a kick out of it, to be honest.
    He said, ‘You dreamed up Razor Bill.’
    ‘He’s basically a male version of Minnie.’
    He laughed and that broke the ice and we were back to being us again. Kat and Thomas. Thomas and Kat. He said, ‘That’s pretty weird.’ But I could tell he was impressed too. And I liked it. A lot. I felt like I was fifteen again. Before everything went wrong. The good side of fifteen.
    ‘Why don’t you write under your own name?’
    ‘I like the anonymity, to be honest.’
    He nodded. He got it.
    I said, ‘What about you?’
    He said, ‘Well, I really am a farmer.’
    ‘You’re not, you’re a journalist.’
    ‘I’m a farmer who happens to be a journalist as well.’
    ‘You’re a journalist who happens to have a farm. A very small farm.’
    ‘It’s not that small.’
    ‘It’s five fields of stony grey soil in Monaghan.’
    ‘Five grand big fields,’ he said.
    Then he said, ‘I was married.’ I felt like someone had slapped my face. Hard.
    ‘It was a long time ago. We were young. In our twenties.’
    I said, ‘What happened?’ Even though part of me didn’t want to know. This was messy territory.
    ‘She died.’ He said it in a way that suggested he didn’t say it often. ‘In a car crash. She was five months pregnant. So I suppose they both died. That’s the way it felt to me anyway. At the time.’
    At first, I was kind of mad with him. Why couldn’t he have been like everyone else and just been married and then got divorced? Why did it have to be such a tragedy? How could anyone compete with that? The least he could have given me was a much-hated ex-wife who had left him for his best friend and was now screwing him for maintenance. That would have been a helluva lot easier to take.
    Another part of me was glad to know. I told him something. He told me something. This was what people did. People in a relationship.
    Out of the blue, I said, ‘I don’t want to have children.’ I don’t know why I said it like that. Just blurted it out like that.
    ‘Oh,’ is all he said.
    ‘I mean, I know we’re not serious or anything. But I just want you to know. I don’t want any misunderstandings.’
    I dived into the space in the conversation where he was supposed to say something but didn’t. ‘Just because I’ve got a womb doesn’t mean I have to fill it to the brim, does it? I mean look at you.’
    ‘What about me?’
    ‘Well, you’ve got those three nipples and you never use any of them.’
    ‘That’s a birthmark, I keep telling you.’
    ‘It’s a nipple.’
    ‘It’s a birthmark.’
    ‘It’s a nipple.’
    ‘Anyway. I am serious.’
    ‘About what?’
    ‘About you.’
    And in the space in the conversation where I was supposed to say something, he leaned towards me and kissed me and, even though my mouth might have tasted of vomit, I kissed him back.
    And there it was.
    I suppose, if you want to be soppy about it, I could say that was the moment when I knew that he was right. What he had said. That day. ‘You’d better be mighty careful, Katherine Kavanagh.’
    But I wasn’t careful. My door was open wide and here he was, traipsing all over my lovely cream carpet in his steel toe-capped, mucky boots. And instead of telling him to get out, or at least have the decency to take off his shoes, and getting busy with the Shake n’ Vac, I just let it go. I let everything go. I might as well have gone to the roof garden at the top of the apartment block and roared at the top of my voice, ‘I LOVE YOU.’
    That’s how bad it was.

 
    The next day, Faith says, ‘Where are you going?’
    I say, ‘To the library.’
    ‘Is Damo going with you?’
    ‘Yeah.’ Which is pretty funny when you think about it, because Damo isn’t a member of the library. I don’t think he’s ever been inside it.
    But Faith won’t let me go to the library on my own on account of the two roads, even though there’s a zebra crossing on one of them and traffic lights on the other.
    I run out of the door in case Faith thinks of something else to ask me.
    The post office isn’t that far from the library and you still have to cross two roads but neither of them has a zebra crossing. I stand beside a mam and a dad and their two kids. One of them is strapped in a buggy, all wrapped up. You can’t really see the kid but I reckon it’s a