Thread by @JaneBabb

Any one of the three of us would have been very happy with Twelve. Julia saw it as a burden - another thing to manage when she only wanted to write and swim and watch her rich children be educated and become accomplished. I suggested that I rent it. That worried her.

Elaine’s eldest rubbed her thumb up into the shaved hair on the back of my neck and down to the newly exposed skin below my hairline. For how much longer would she be tactile in her affection for me? A child. “We’ll still go in reading week though? The two of us. And not talk.”

I hugged her knees into me. “I don’t know, pet. Let’s see what she’ll do.” “But did you tell her.” “I told her.” We were in the snug off Elaine’s kitchen. Three messy sofas and the kind of coffee table that works well for board games or huge jigsaws or crossed feet.

Ciarán arrived in with wine. He kissed the top of my head and as always held a firm handful of my hair for a moment. When we were small he said I was thinking for him when he did that. When he needed clarity or remove he held it.Kindly. He never asked what thoughts I had for him.

“So. They gave Twelve to Julia? What’d she say?” He sat on the arm rest beside Anna. She looked up at him then over to me expectantly as if I may give a new answer now to a new asker. “It’s not convenient. Too far away. The kids are busy.” I scratched my foot. “She’ll see.”

A short burst of laughter from Ciarán. “She’ll see? Ah well. I haven’t been there for ages, I know. But I like to know that I can. That the kids can.” He put his hand gently on Anna’s head. “When are you off?” “Sunday. I’ll have a week to ski before term starts.”

“Are you enjoying it?” Anna thinks about this. She doesn’t do platitudes, at least not with us. “I am living and studying in Zurich. That’s amazing. I know it is. The first term was lonely. Character building and all - but I’m not so sure that feeling small is really useful.”

She senses our discomfort, smiles. “I’ll win it this term!” I want to hold her safe.“How?” “A new place is always easier after Christmas. You realise you haven’t lost home. Can bring it with you. Yesterday I stood at the top of Grafton St for a while. I’ll flex now, not adapt.”

I raise an eyebrow. She explains, “At first you listen and watch. You suss out the rules, the obvious ones and the subtle, quiet, rigid as hell ones. You contort yourself into them - or try to. It makes you very very tired. You are on all the time. Paying attention.“

“Here’s a story - At our first lecture on political systems the lecturer, a young professor, said something as a by the way, an on the out breath minor point. He was moving on to the main point but I put my hand up. He was immediately furious. I saw that. But couldn’t process it.

I had his eyes on me now and the attention of the whole huge lecture theatre.” She grinned, mostly to herself, “when I was just thinking about what he had said, I hadn’t noticed how full of other people the place was! My oblivious-to-everything-else listening, thinking buzz burst

but I couldn’t look up at my own hand now and say ‘oh! what’s that doing there?’ I had to ask the question. At least it was still there. At least I didn’t brain freeze.” A breath. “He didn’t deal with the substance. He only heard the challenge. He told me he was expert on this.”

Ciarán slid from the armrest onto the sofa, “What a gobshite!” Anna smiled. “Yes, but a gobshite with the power to cut me out. He literally did the whole ‘you are dead to me’ spiel - I just scraped a pass in his exam, an oral. I spoke in mean little doubting dry-mouth sentences.

All term I was a bit dazed. I pissed off a French visiting professor too. Same problem - I questioned his thinking.” I put so much worried energy into trying to grasp and play to what these guys expected and valued. “Accepting awestruck parrots”, scoffs Ciarán. Anna grins at him.

“You think if you understand the system you’ll be able to operate in it more efficiently. You’ll know how to tweak your learnt behaviours for this new place. When you feel lonely or tired, you think ‘Right. Come on. No self-pity. Catch yourself on.’ Trained to deal, you deal.”

If I were utilitarian, pragmatic even, maybe I would have just played the role, got the marks, moved on. But I have rebel blood going back a long way.” Her eyes still-winked. “I couldn’t suck up hierarchy. My default was to dissent somehow.

My classmates said it’s meritocracy-‘he’s the professor, he’s earned his status’. I’m like ‘he’s just had longer in the game. That doesn’t make him infallible. Doesn’t make him better than any of us.” She looks at me, almost aggressively for a second.

“How often does Papa Caesar say, ‘Nobody is above you, nobody is below you’?” I nod for her, and add, “And quote Feynman ‘when one teaches, two learn.’ Or something.” She sighs deeply and is still. She holds her toes in their opaque tights, curls them over her fingers. “Yes.”

“I suppose I could simply have been belligerent. Or have mocked his arrogance. But along with dissent I have another strong code. And it has served me well so far: Be a good girl.”
She was silent for a few long seconds, sipped the wine Ciarán had poured quietly while she spoke.

We were listening to her, hard. Our family does listen. Well, not Julia. Julia filled every space with loud, pragmatic getting-on-with-it.

“You said you knew he was furious but that you couldn’t process it?”
“Yeah. Here: at school, at home, in college, you’re taught to challenge or bypass things, be a wrecking ball or be water, but don’t accept the barriers. Question authority. Work stuff out from first principles.

That is what is valued here. That’s what you get the gold stars for. I wasn’t challenging these guys to be belligerent. I was challenging them to be good. I have mostly always been the good girl: don’t drink, don’t smoke, knees crossed, avoid risk, get the gold stars.

In that second with my hand raised and him glowering, with all the not-yet-friends’ eyes on me, I understood that the rules of how to be good were different now. But I did not yet know what the new rules were. That is a confusing and stressful space.” She smiles her sweet smile.

“Adaptable is usually sold as a good thing. Like you can stretch to meet new challenges. You are with or you’re ahead of the times. But what if you get so good at adapting that you don’t even question what you are adapting to or for whose good?

When you persist in adapting, you start to lose yourself.”

Mícheal, Anna’s brother has been wandering in and out with large headphones on, dancing in his own world, making snacks, smiling at us or waving from inside his sound bubble. Now he takes off one side, the left,

He holds it away from his ear. He looks us over briefly. “It’s an Ollivander thing. Ok, you need a bendy wand. A rigid one will snap for sure. But you can’t be pushed by some system or authority or be tempted by greed or fear not to use your own wand. No matter what’s going on.

You have to use your own wand - even if your core is unicorn and everyone around you has dragon heart string.” He nods decisively, replaces the left earphone, considers us seriously, grins, waves, leaves. We watch him go, look at each other, raise eyebrows and burst out laughing.

“Thanks Mícheál,” Anna shouted after him, waving, “Thanks for that. That was great. That solves everything. Thanks a mil. No seriously, thanks.” Her whole bright, young, shining chestnut face gleamed as she laughed.

“He is right of course, but...” Again she delivered one of her deep right-into-her-pelvis rib-cage-collapsing sighs. They made me want to cosset her, those sighs of hers. “You keep hearing that whole ‘be yourself’ thing.

The confusion comes when you realise that being challenging, being the dissenter, may not be “myself” either. I do it because of how I was trained in my system, in my context, in my culture to value that. So doing it still makes me a socially conditioned performing monkey.”

Anna smiles at us, reassuringly. ”It took me a while to work this out: lots of hiking and snowshoeing and rowing and sitting on the window seat in Twelve looking at the lake.” She is still. “Twelve always helps in the end.”

“You will be great.” Ciarán tells her, and she corrects her posture.

Elaine’s little fella came in from football. He yanked off scarves and jackets and a wooly hat and kicked off boots and wiped his nose on the back of his hand and messed up his hat hair fiercely so that it stood on end again in various directions, like his attention. “It’s cold.”

“Yes.” He squished in beside me, wiggling until there was room for his small bottom between my hip and and Anna. He looked at me intently, “Are you sad about Twelve?” “Yes.”“I’m not. I don’t need it.” “Oh?”

He blew a tiny burst of air into my ear and pinched my cheek like a grandfather would a small child’s. “wiċċ ta 'xkupilja” he told me lovingly. Then he leaned back and took a deep breath. He rubbed his hair around. “Maybe Julia needs it”, he said. I considered him. So did Ciarán.

“What do you mean Luke?” “I don’t know.” He rubbed his hair around again. “She is not as happy as the rest of you.” We looked at each other. And burst out laughing. Cried laughing. Bent over and hurting laughing. “Sorry, love”, I managed. Luke shrugged peacefully. “No bother.”

We tried to stop laughing. “Ah but is she happy?” I mumbled. We are off again. Weeks of uncertainty go into our tear and snot laughter. Luke waited. “You three enjoy things. You let us enjoy things. Julia is always organising and telling about how good things are.”

“You” I told him seriously, “are a cuddle.” “Hmm.”

My sister Julia moved from Dublin to Paris when she was 18. She was tired then. She thought about studying in Kenya or Nigeria, or in Trinidad. She did not want to be too ordinary though, and Paris was elegant and so romantic.

Her unspoken thinking was that she would find just so many beautiful black people there that she would no longer be different, but not so many that she would not have the space still to be thought intriguing.

She came home for Christmas. She was exquisite. In the house she wore featherlight cotton scarves in deep pink and orange, with threads of gold and silver through them. She wore lipstick all the time-sometimes the exact colour of her lips, sometimes the fuchsia of her scarves.

She smelt of clementines and coriander. Dad said she was like pirate’s treasure. She spent all of her time with us. As far as I remember she did not once meet up with her school gang. She smoked Gitanes.

Obligatory, Dad explained, very lovingly deprecating. She read French novels and absurdist plays at which she laughed a little too loudly. Other than the cigarettes and the literary laughter she was awesomely composed.

Between Christmas and New Year’s we all went to Twelve. That may have been the last time all five of us were there together. No boyfriends, no girlfriends, no children, no rescuees. One night Ciarán, tenderly mocking her regal composure, knelt and kissed her turquoise ring.

When he got up and kissed the top of her head, she straightened her hair, pressing some tightly behind and under her ear. She never lifted her eyes from the text. Her expression never changed. The divine right of baby daughters, of baby sisters.

She kept that habit of straightening a single strand of hair behind her ear. She kept the regal composure. Between January and late August, Julia quite deliberately stripped away every other vaguely wonderous aspect of herself.

She lacked no confidence. She was beautiful and owned any room. She smiled warmly and brought new people into her orbit with apparent grace. Her classmates edged around each other to land a place in Julia’s study groups.

(Groups in which she participated, however formed and for whatever purpose were soon and always Julia’s group.)

She did not smoke Gitanes now. She wore lip gloss. Her uniform was a dark green or navy sweater with an extra one wrapped around her shoulders and neck like a scarf on colder days. She wore loafers and two small gold medals on a thin gold chain.

They lay on her chest just below the space between her collar bones. Two small circles - Ste Therese d’Avila and Our Lady, seeking to distract the world from Julia’s gorgeous breasts.

Tom, Elaine’s husband, let himself in the basement door. He put his keys and coins in a dish on the island and crossed into the room. He shook Ciarán’s hand. He kissed me and Anna and Luke. “Elaine home yet?” “Upstairs. She was working on her interview.” Tom nodded. “Mícheál?”

“Somewhere here” said Anna “How did you get on?” Tom smiled at her with his entirety. “Well I think love. Let’s see. I’ll start dinner.” “I’ll set the table” said Ciarán “I brought cheese.” “Sheridan’s?” “Yeah. Good and stinky.”

“I put it in the fridge” murmured Anna. Ciarán stiffened. Anna and I cracked up. “I’m joooooh-king!’’ He swatted at the air above her head. “Cheeky fecker.” Then to Tom, “Wine while you cook?” Tom nodded his thanks.

Tom cooking was a family ritual. We followed him into the kitchen, sat up on stools at the island. He set up a Beatles playlist on Spotify, then ran upstairs to take his suit off. We heard him gently open the door to Elaine’s study, imagined him winking at her, not disturbing her

He ran back down the stairs and into the kitchen with smiles and sorrys. “Throw us the apron there Anna.” The house is Elaine’s - bold dark colours, sumptuous fabrics, Art Deco fittings, huge paintings mostly abstract. The kitchen is Tom’s.

“So?” asked Anna. Her father gave me green beans, a small wooden chopping board and a sharp knife. He was moving quickly. He passed her lemons to zest and juice. He gave us no verbal instructions. We somehow kind of knew what he wanted - or he just worked with what we gave him.

Ciarán topped up our wine glasses. Luke helped him set the table. “Dad?” said Anna “Talk man.” Tom peeled potatoes. “Look” he said, “it’s a slowly slowly situation. We’ll get there. Well, we’ll get somewhere anyway.”

He smiled. Anna said nothing, waited. “It’s funny.” He looked up. “Funny peculiar I mean. It’s frustrating. People who were in my class you know? who did jurisprudence and criminology and constitutional. Who talked about it all. They don’t see it as relevant to them in any way.”

“What’s not relevant to who?” asked Mícheál coming in and leaning on my shoulder. “To whom” I said (couldn’t not). “Yeah, yeah: to whom?”, he asked his dad. “The rule of law. To lawyers” Tom waited. He knew Mícheál would take a few beats before he asked, “The what now?”

“Last night you got undressed and out your clothes in the laundry basket?” “Yeah” said Mícheál “I always do”. “Yes. Well, I decided tonight that I am fed up of you not putting it straight into the machine so I am docking you a fortnight’s pocke money.” “What?” Mícheál scrunched

his face in disbelief. “That’s stupid!” Tom shrugged and concentrated on making tinfoil packages for the fish. Mícheál searched our faces for allies. “What about Anna and Luke?” “What about them?” “Are they not getting pocket money either?“ “Why wouldn’t they?” asked Tom.

“They just throw their stuff on the floor!” he yelled. Quite calmly Tom responded “The rules do not apply to them.” Mícheál was fit to be tied. “You’re kidding me.” He was roaring at Tom now. Tom put everything down and looked intently at Mícheál. “Sorry love.

It would be crazy if I could make up random rules today and say that you broke them yesterday before the rule even existed. And it would be mad if the rules here applied only to you. And if I, the lawmaker, could decide if you broke it. Sorry. I wanted you to feel the rule of law

It’s way too abstract to explain properly. And too important not to get.” Mícheál started breathing evenly again. “What the..? Jesus Dad. Seriously? Why does this family have to be so clapped”

When Michael Julius Daly was thirteen years old he climbed a soursop tree to reach one piece of well-ripe fruit right at the top to give it to a pretty and unimpressed girl. The tree was young and not nearly strong enough for his compact body. He fell.

He lay on the ground looking up at the tree and he marveled. What weight he wondered was he. What weight he wondered had the branch been before he clumsily ripped it down. What he wondered would have happened had the branch been shorter, or thicker.

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He ran home to his mother who turned to listen to him and then wiping her hands said ”I don’t know anything about that. Let’s find out.” So the washing was abandoned and they walked to the house of Mrs. Bonneamie who had a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

His days then became more hurried. He hustled in the mornings to get homework and chores done. He waited out the slow rhythms of learning set lessons through the school hours. He belted his way from school to those encyclopedias and explored there until his mother braved the dark

to come and take him on home.
Six months later and he was making his own way home. It took him longer alone. He watched the stars. He counted the beats between waves. He considered at what angle the wind must hit the sea island cotton to cause it to hush hush hush the night.

He wondered if there might be some sentient something which connected it all. If nature had structured it, it would all be neat and possible to categorize, no? But the randomness? Did science do random things? God, who had so many different personalities, seemed unlikely.

On some nights his mother was bombarded by his observations and his still-to-investigate questions. “Mama listen!” and she listened. On some nights he pulled up to the table, sat and ate without saying a word, except to say thank you before he kissed her head. She smiled at that.

Elaine came down now, scanning the atmosphere, assessing where we each was with the news. She had some internal graph on which she would plot us all. She could give a Tedtalk on the unique and entirely predictable trajectory of each member of the family along the grief axis.

“Has Dad called?”
“No.”
“I suppose there’ll not be any explanation. And Julia?”
“I said we would call her later when we are all here.”
“We are all here,” said Luke.
“All here and fed,” mediated Tom, tea-towel over his shoulder, apron on.

“And Sylvie and the girls are only coming later. Right Ciarán?” “Mmm, about nine I’d say. Claire has a debate. She wouldn’t let me come. She says I am banned since I made 4 points of information to the other side at the semi-final.”
“Oh Jesus,” laughed Anna, face in her hands.

Ciarán grinned at her and at each of us. Mr. Bí Gan Fhíos Don Dlí, the quiet one, the never-bring-attention-to-yourself one, but to help his girls? Suddenly he was the loudest person in the room. That killed Elaine and me - made us adore our big brother even more.

“Dishwasher boys now, ‘mon,” said Tom and he nodded towards the open dishwasher. “But I set the table!”, cried Luke. Mícheál winked at him. Luke frowned, then grinned back. In unison then: “oh is it just because we’re black?!” Tom closed his eyes, shook his head, said nothing.

This was the boys’ latest running joke. Every time he asked them to do a job. Sometimes deadpan he said “Yes. Yes it is.” Mícheál would facepalm: “Dad! Look. You can’t say that.” It was funny in a in-the-family-funny kind of way. Tom knew how hard it would have been to explain it

He knew that the irony would be missed. He knew that if he recounted these private jokes, it would give some eejits license to make actually racist comments from actually racist feelings. He knew that it would make most people uncomfortable, unsure. It made him uncomfortable.

The boys were funny. They sensed the issues. They knew that even their liberal middle class world was not post-racist. They sensed when they were used to claim that it was. They also knew that here they were fairly certain to be safe from racial injustice.

They knew that the stories from the US and France and Britain were not their stories. They got that there was no black Irish culture sufficient to tell their experience so that it was always tempting to adopt as universal the stories told from those bigger places.

They sensed too that though those stories were not theirs, they could not turn their backs on them. These kids had been raised on Roald Dahl and Swift and Edmund Burke. They ridiculed people who pretended that they were suffering when they weren’t - they knew the difference

between claiming as yours the suffering of others and owning joint responsibility for finding solutions injustice. They could not have articulated any of this. Their jokes did that for them. Their jokes were clear and for the most part fairly true.

Tom loved that they had the ease to test them out loud, on the safe audience of home. But every now and then the “you’re the only white one in this family” banter got old. He had voiced that one time and of course Elaine ate him. She was right. He didn’t argue with that.

Home was the only place in their young world where his kids were the majority. He could grant them the respite of making fun of their Dad - make him the odd ball. That didn’t stop it feeling lonely sometimes. Even if it was childish of him to feel that way.

Sometimes maybe the boys’ jokes fell on the wrong side of some line. Tom knew that there was so much he did not see, would never see. He used the boys jokes not to make light of the thing but to start conversations that they would otherwise avoid. He had a recurring worry:

out and out discrimination and injustice caught attention, fueled moral outrage, but social evolution depended on being as fiercely intolerant of all the little barbs as you were of the huge blatant injustices.

He was angered by the “there are bigger fish to fry” attitude that let those little barbs be overlooked, denied, accepted. That’s-Just-The-Way-It-Is had kept slavery going, had kept girls uneducated, had kept people in their place. It kept meanness and systemic limitation going.

And - he wanted the boys to know that their experience was not the only possible, was not the probable black Irish experience. What Mícheál disparagingly called “liberal mumbo-jumbo” was bubble-wrap for them.

Tom was all for sellotaping it firmly around them.

When they visited his Mam and played on the road they were grand. They were not black there, they were Tom’s kids. They might have tougher skins and more cutting jokes if they had grown up in some other part of the country, some other part of the city.

At night Tom panicked. His belly knotted. He had to get out of bed and march around. He had not prepared them. Oh God.
There were gorgeous days spent with them. Like the day they took the train and cycled back through farms and woods and along the lake and had velvety ice cream.

They played the trains across Europe game, ate pizza from boxes on the floor. They sang. His boys let him hug them and kiss them and tuck them into bed. And he went to bed and felt the perfume of Elaine and couldn’t believe any of the bliss. He was so thrilled.
Then he panicked.

Luke and Mícheál put away the dishes, whipping each other and their dad with twisted tea towels. Mícheál pain-roared and fell enormously to the floor via a clutched-at kitchen island. “You hit me! He hit me!” Tom swiped at him. He buckled and roared again. Luke watched in giggles

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Elaine, Ciarán and I took our glasses, a bowl of olives, a bag of kettle crisps and moved to the table. We sat in silence for a few moments, breathing, as if waiting for a particular moment when we would all of a sudden be ready for everything that was happening.

They each knew that they each were having different thoughts, feelings, ranges of feelings. They each knew how hard it would be to stay their own thoughts and intense emotions while they heard from each other, listened to each other. So they waited and breathed - to prepare.

I watched them both. I was aware of Anna too , still sitting on her stool by the kitchen counter looking over at us, uncertain if she should join us or stay where she was with her dad and the boys. I was bracing myself, I saw - preparing to field everybody else’s worries.

“Wait. Sorry. Give me a sec.” I brought my wine with me and ran up the stairs to the bathroom on the first floor. I shut the door, pulled across the polished brass bolt. Brasso was a therapist for Elaine. She loved that stuff, the process: “It gets worse before it gets better!”

I sat on the side of the bath sipping wine. I stood up. I looked at myself in the mirror - stared at myself. I sat down again. Got up. “Right, where are you in this?” The fear had slithered in now and was starting slowly to wind itself around my belly - constricting.

I wasn’t just the messenger. This was happening to me. Breathe! “Ok, well done. Good girl. Let the fear in. Down from your shoulders. That’s it. Down from your head. Breathe it down to your belly. Feel it, acknowledge it. Tell it that you see it.” “Hello fear, I see you.”

“Good girl!” Dad’s voice - kind, proud. “Good girl, you tell that fear that you see it!”
Elaine turned as I walked back in and she straightened up - full attention. “Right” she said to Ciarán, “Maeve first.”

And I crumpled. Onto the floor, child’s pose, huddled up into myself, my pain, my fear, my loneliness. I rocked. I wailed. I keened. I took Elaine’s hand and squeezed it too tight, and my brother and sister waited and heard me in silent, careful attention.

Dad said dealing with fear was being an exorcist. Gather it up, surround it, call it - “Hiy fear, come here!”. Take a cannonball of a breathe and - Ffeck the fear out the door. “Go!”, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It wasn’t all bad, fear. It could get you from a to b on an old bicycle as well as it could paralyze you. You had to look at it, examine it, know it. “What’s up fear?”
This time, on Elaine’s kitchen floor, it was a new born baby. Vulnerable, inordinately powerful, to be minded.

Luke brought me tissues and a glass of water. He rubbed my back and kissed my head. He patted me. And retreated. “I am scared.”, I said. “Yes”, said Ciarán. Elaine held my hand.

“Beginnings are hard says the Talmud.” I went through a Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevas Singer phase in school. I copied that sentence onto the front page of many diaries when I was fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. It sounded right. I never once heeded it though. I didn’t understand it.

Elaine was on the floor beside me now crouched at eye-level. Her eyes held me - green, clear, intense, flecked with Apollo’s gold. “Maeve, you have been here before. You have wanted to run. Babybellyful, pain, the promise of awful beauty, you have wanted to turn your back on it.

You are in transition. That is all. You are seeing only the end now. There is a beginning too.” I shake my head into her eyes. Frantically. Rejecting it all. “I don’t want a beginning. I want to be where I was.” “Yes. And this beginning is here now.”

Ask, they say, don’t tell.

Elaine had watched me labour. Elaine had laboured. She knew beyond theory and research that at this moment you tell. No “poor thing.” No “I will take the pain”. At this moment you are firm and certain and utterly convinced: “You are here. This is happening. You can. You will.”

Down into the belly of Hades’ underworld to find Asklepion and woe his healing - a serpent of change. Skin discarded rebirth is constant. Puke-inducing fear is constant. And in between, outrageous beauty like the soft exquisite tininess of Luke’s hand when he holds mine.

Tom made a friendly production of stretching out on the floor in front of me. His forehead almost touching mine, his apron all gathered up awkwardly at his waist, tea towel clutched in his right hand even as he reached his little finger out tenderly to touch my balled up hand.

“Hey?”, he said softly.
”Hey Mr. Cunningham.” I managed in response.
“May I serve dinner now or are you still busy falling apart?”
I laid my hand on his cheek and held it there for a moment, thanking him.

I wiped my nose on his tea towel. He pretended to pretend not to grimace. I swatted him with it. He smiled at me and raised his eyebrows to ask how I am and to say that however I am is ok with him.

“Why do you call Dad Mr Cunningham?”, asked Luke pouring me water.
“It’s an old......When he started going out with Elaine, I was 12. He called me Scout.”
“Why?”
I shrugged, looked the question over to Tom.

“The whole family baffled me. They were honest. I had understood honesty as mean, direct. The Dalys were honest in some kind, helpful, wanting to understand way. I found that fascinating.. And especially little Scout there.” He nodded towards me. “She disarmed me completely.”

Luke shook his head.
“Insanity runs in our family.”, said Mícheál.
“It practically gallops.”, added Luke and they high five. “Hey that’s our line!”, shouted Elaine and I. It was. That and other two handers for siblings whose father is a fan of Cary Grant and the Marx Bros

Mícheál brought a huge, deep bowl of salad from the kitchen and put it at one end of the long, deliberately worn out table. Over years Elaine had gathered up old French silver, strong and plain, none of it matching, and white plates with sometimes chipped scalloped edges.

The laid table was on 50-something south-Dublin trend with smokey grey Littala glasses and softest cotton silver-threaded napkins on the bare wood, serving dishes from Avoca and Dutch or Danish blue bowls.

Ciarán had set out two glass balls full with tumbling-over-the-edges flowers: rich purple, raspberry and pale pink with dark green leaves and tiny freesia splashes of sunshine yellow. I sat on the side looking out on the garden. Full-length fourth-wall windows brought nature in.

This is luxury now. Nature is a scarce resource. To have it at your home, to breath it from your dining table, is twenty-first century wealth. A neighbour selling her apartment, looking for a house in the same area, told me how much my garden was worth. Just the garden.

Buying and nurturing our own green space is how we assuage the fear that little Thunberg girl evokes.“I have my garden”, I said, out of the blue to the others who looked at me briefly as acknowledgement and went back to sipping wine or bringing dishes in from the kitchen.

“So what did he say?”, asked Elaine. “Dad.”
“He’s researching.” I was curt - angry at him for leaving so abruptly but territorial about my anger. To share it betrayed the bond with him that permits the anger. My anger at him is mine. It is as sacrosanct as any romantic intimacy.

Each of us had our own anger at him, I suppose. Our common anger was a fourth.

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