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smell of animal.
    The dog had been bad again.
    On the far side of the loft an elderly woman with white hair was sitting at one end of a sofa with a little red dog on her lap. At the other end of the sofa was a fresh wet stain that would now be there for ever.
    Mrs Murphy was watching TV with the sound turned off, which was always her custom when my daughter Scout was sleeping.
    Without moving his tennis ball-sized head from his front paws, the red dog – Stan was his name – rolled his huge round eyes up to look at me. You could see the whites of his bulging eyes around the blackness, as though the sockets were too small to contain such a pair of headlamps.
    He caught my eye and quickly looked away.
    ‘Mrs Murphy,’ I said, ‘you’ve had so much work again.’
    ‘Don’t worry none,’ she said, scratching the dog behind his ears, her soft accent sounding as if she had never left County Cork a lifetime ago. ‘Stan’s still little. And the good news is that Scout ate her dinner. Some of it, anyway. She doesn’t eat much, does she? There’s nothing of her.’
    I nodded and went off to look in on my daughter.
    Scout was five years old and still slept in the baby fashion with her hands held up in loose fists by the side of her head, like a tiny weightlifter. The light was on in her room, although she must have been sleeping for hours.
    She had slept with the light on ever since we lost her mother.
    I picked up a school sweater from the floor, folded it and placed it on the back of a chair where Mrs Murphy had tomorrow’s school uniform all neatly folded and waiting. I hesitated, wanting to turn off her light. She couldn’t keep it on for ever. But in the end, I didn’t have the nerve.
    Mrs Murphy was putting on her coat.
    ‘It will get better,’ she told me.
    I woke before dawn.
    I always woke before dawn.
    In the dreaming period of sleep, the lightest phase of sleep, REM sleep, I surfaced, waking on my side of the double bed, the left side, chased from my rest by yesterday’s coffee and my dreams of the dead.
    I was always right there waiting for the day before the day ever had a chance to begin.
    Turning off my alarm before it had the chance to ring, I slipped out of bed without making a sound. I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom, got down on my hands and knees and quickly pumped out twenty-five press-ups. Then I sipped the water by my bedside, looking out of the window at the October sky – six in the morning and still black over the nearby dome of St Paul’s Cathedral.
    I got down and did twenty-five more press-ups, slower and more deliberate this time, thinking about technique. I gave myself a minute’s break then did twenty-five more, starting to feel it now, my arms shaking with the build-up of lactic acid in the muscles. I stayed on the ground, found my breath and forced out the final twenty-five – an act of will, not strength.
    I padded quietly to the kitchen, anxious not to wake daughter or dog, but hearing Stan breathing in the dark, a snorting, snuffling sound coming out of a nose that did not really resemble anything up to the difficult task of breathing. I stood there listening to him, enjoying the sound. He was wiped out after another busy night destroying our home. Then he stirred at my presence, the large ears falling across his face like silky curtains, the soulful eyes blinking open and glittering behind his lavish ears. And then he was awake too, staring at me through the bars of his cage, hopeful of an early release.
    I got him out. Held him against my chest. Stan pressing a nose like a squashed prune against my fingers, sniffing them with interest.
    Stan had been with us for a month (it felt much longer) – my present to Scout on her fifth birthday. I had found the breeder online, collected Stan on the day he turned eight weeks old, and carried him into the loft with a blanket over his head like a guilty man heading for the high court.
    Every time I thought I had made a