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home again to their husbands, who preferred TV, or the pub. Some of the actors had changed on the big screen since the old days, and there was a lot more of what Mrs Donelly called ‘sexy talk’, which covered talk about both sex and violence, but the stories were pretty much the same as they had been back in the 1950s and 1960s. *
    Mrs Donelly wondered sometimes if being in the cinema was a bit like what it was going to be like being dead – watching other people’s lives unfold and everything always working out for the best. She hoped so.
    It was in the cinema that she’d first discovered the lump, a few months ago. She knew what it was straightaway. She was reaching across to get a handful of Pat’s popcorn and it was the angle of the reach that did it – her right arm stretching across to the left, hand outstretched. She wished she hadn’t now. She’d rather not have known. She wished she’d never reached for the popcorn. She’d never really approved of Pat’s popcorn anyway: she thought cinema popcorn was a waste of money. For years she’d been trying to persuade Pat to make her own at home and take it to the pictures in some Tupperware hidden in her handbag. But Pat said the popcorn was all part of the fun: Pat did not believe in stinting, even though she was a Protestant. Unlike Mrs Donelly, Pat was not the kind of person who set out on an adventure with a wrap of sandwiches. Pat was the kind of person who believed that on life’s journey you could always find a little place that would happily do some sandwiches for you. Mrs Donelly, having been on holiday several times to the Isle of Man with four children, knew this not to be the case, but she didn’t say anything.
    Mrs Donelly had not told Pat about the lump. She was starting the chemo the week after Christmas. They’d decided not to tell anyone. They weren’t going to tell the children for a bit. They didn’t want to spoil Christmas.
    While Mrs Donelly was at her emergency council committee meeting, Mr Donelly was out in the Christmas Eve sleet, walkingthe dog. He walks with her for about two hours every day, come rain or shine. After raising four children, Mr Donelly does not view a dog as a burden: on the contrary, he says, a dog, after children, is a pleasure. It’s a breeze. The worst a dog can do is bite and shit, and not usually at the same time, and a dog never asks you for money, and also you don’t have to wipe a dog’s arse, although the council would’ve liked you to: any attempt to get dog owners to poop-scoop in the People’s Park or to keep a dog on a leash was viewed with scorn by Mr Donelly. He regarded councillors as meddlers, on the whole, apart from his wife, of course, who was simply well-meaning. The whole point of having a dog, according to Mr Donelly, was that you could let it run around and shit anywhere: in a town where even the slightest misdemeanour could find you on the inside pages of the
Impartial Recorder,
dogs represented the wild side, the acceptable face of the animal in man, the beast inside, your only opportunity to act like a lord of misrule and to demonstrate to the rest of the world exactly what you thought of it: rubbish. Allowing your dog to cock its leg on a few council flowers was a means of self-expression for Mr Donelly, and clearly better than running amok around town mooning at police officers, breaking windows, fighting, scratching cars, stealing lawnmowers and bicycles, and weeing in shop doorways, which is what most of the town seemed to prefer to do these days to let off steam. Why the council couldn’t have focused more of their attention on that, rather than persecuting innocent dog owners, he did not know. *
    Mr Donelly had several times explained to his friend Davey Quinn – Davey Senior – his theory of the therapeutic effects of dog owning and he had even gone so far as to suggest giving pets to hardened