We did this for months. We got quite good at it. I could walk into some kip and slap a tobacco-brown leather sofa up against the longest wall, on sight. I could dangle a retro lampshade as soon as you said ‘fifties semi’, and stick an Eames chair under it, and switch on the light. But I didn’t know what my life would be like in that chair, or how I would feel about it. Better, no doubt. I was sure I would feel serious-yet-playful, grown-up and happy, I would be somehow fulfilled. But then again, as I said to Conor.

‘Then again.’

There was, when we made love at the end of these long Saturdays, a sense in which we were reclaiming ourselves for ourselves, after some brief theft.

You walk into a stranger’s house and it is exciting, that’s all, and you are slightly soiled by it. I could feel it, in the second-hand, abandoned kitchens, and in my Sunday-supplement dreams. I could feel it drain away in the moments after waking, when I realised that we hadn’t bought, we probably never would buy, a house with a sea view. It didn’t seem a lot to ask – a house that would clean your life every time you looked out of it – but it was, apparently. It was far too much to ask. I did the figures up down and sideways and I never could believe the bottom line.

The bottom line was the place we had started out from, before we lost the plot. The bottom line wasn’t so much a house as an investment; somewhere to swing our cat, that was not too far out of town.

So we found exactly that; a townhouse in Clonskeagh for three hundred grand. We were the last in, bought off the plans, drank a bottle of Krug to celebrate – all one-hundred-and-twenty euros’ worth.

Krug, no less.

It was nice.

I loved Conor then. I really did love him, and all the versions of him I had invented, in those houses, in my head, I loved them all.