All of the stories in Ronan’s 1996 collection are uncomfortable. ‘Kilbride’ concerns Helen, who still holds a candle for her ex-lover Michael, a man just fallen for a country and western singer named Michelle Kelly. Helen, now married with kids, resents her role in getting Michael together with Michelle, at what she had intended to be a joke of an evening in a flat-roofed pub in Kilbride. The story crackles with unreasonable desires, ugly snobbishness and uncomfortably recognisable behaviour, all amplified by the setting. Ronan usually dispenses with description of place swiftly in his stories, but in this one setting and character are intimately entwined. Michael is up ladders fixing windows in Michelle’s mother’s rackety house; Helen is weeping with derisive laughter at the purple and gold scallop-shaped sink in the new lover’s bathroom; the Starlite Lounge, where the lovers meet, is only redeemed in Helen’s eyes by having an older country pub attached to this vast modern extension. Class, lust and responsibilities are all illuminated here by descriptions of buildings and what they represent in our most heated and unreasonable moments.

First published in Scripsi, Australia. Collected in Handsome Men are Slightly Sunburnt, Hodder and Stoughton, 1996