I didn’t say any of this at his funeral or at the little party at our house afterwards. In fact, I didn’t say anything at all. I drank a bottle of red wine all by myself and ended up vomiting on the floor by Dad’s desk where he’d died. Mum found me there and slapped me across the face. She said I’d ruined it. I wasn’t sure if she meant the rug or Dad’s memory, but either way I was pretty sure that he’d fucked both of them up all by himself.

I’m not just heaping all the hate on my dad here. I was a horrible person. I was the worst possible daughter. They gave me everything and I rarely said thank you. Or if I said it, I don’t think I ever meant it. I don’t actually think that I knew what it meant. ‘Thank you’ is a sign of appreciation. Mum and Dad continually told me about the starving babies in Africa, as if that was a way to make me appreciate anything. Looking back on it, I realise the best way to make me appreciate anything was probably not to have given me everything.

We lived in a seven thousand square foot, six-bedroom contemporary mansion with a swimming pool and tennis court and a private beach in Killiney, County Dublin, in Ireland. My room was on the opposite side of the house to my parents’ and it had a balcony overlooking the beach that I don’t think I ever looked out at. It had an en suite with a shower and Jacuzzi bath, with a plasma TV-TileVision, to be precise-in the wall above the bath. I’d a wardrobe full of designer handbags, a computer, a PlayStation and a four-poster bed. Lucky me.

Now another truth: I was a nightmare daughter. I was rude, I answered back, I expected everything and, even worse, I thought I deserved everything just because everybody else I knew had them. It didn’t occur to me for one moment that they didn’t particularly deserve them either.

I figured out a way to escape my bedroom at night and sneak outside to meet with my friends; a climb from my bedroom balcony and down the piping, onto the roof of the swimming pool, then a few easy steps to the ground. There was an area on our private beach where my friends and I went drinking. The girls mostly drank Dolly Mixtures: the contents of our parents’ drinks cabinets all in one plastic bottle. That way if we took a few inches from each bottle they wouldn’t suspect anything. The guys drank whatever cider they could get their hands on. They also had whichever girl they could get their hands on. That person was mostly me. There was a boy, Fiachrá, who I stole from my best friend Zoey, whose dad was a famous actor and so-I’ll be honest-just because of that I used to let him put his hand up myskirt for about a half-hour every night. I figured that one day I’d get to meet his dad. But I never did.

My parents felt it was important for me to see the world and how other people live. They kept telling me how fortunate I was living in my big house by the sea, and so to help me appreciate the world, we spent our summers in our villa in Marbella, Christmas in our Verbier chalet and Easter in the New York Ritz, on a shopping trip. There was a pink convertible Mini Cooper with my name on it waiting for me for my seventeenth birthday, and a friend of my dad’s, who had a recording studio, was waiting to hear me sing and possibly sign me up. Though after I felt his hand on my arse, I never wanted to spend a moment alone in a room with him. Not even to be famous.

Mum and Dad attended charity functions throughout the year. Mum would spend more money on her dresses than the tables cost, and twice a year she’d pass on the impulse buys she never wore to her sister-in-law, Rosaleen, who lived down in the country-in case Rosaleen ever felt the need to milk cows in a Pucci sundress.

I know now-now that we’re out of the world we once lived in-that we weren’t very nice people. I think somewhere beneath the nonresponsive surface of my mother that she knows it too. We weren’t evil people, we just weren’t nice. We didn’t offer anything to anybody in the world but we took an awful lot.

But, we didn’t deserve this.

Before, I’d never think of tomorrow. I lived in the now. I wanted this now, I wanted that now. The last time I saw my father I shouted at him and told him I hated him and then I slammed the door in his face. I never took a step back, or a step outside of my little world to think about what on earth I was doing or saying, and how it was hurting anybody else. I told Dad I never wanted to see him again, and I never did. I never thought about the next day or about the possibility that they would be my final words to him and that that would be my final moment with him. That’s a lot to have to deal with. I have a lot to forgive myself for. It’s taking time.

But now, because of Dad’s death and because of the thing I have yet to share with you, I have no choice but to think of tomorrow and all the people that tomorrow affects. Now, I’m glad when I wake up in the morning that there is one.

I lost my dad. He lost his tomorrows and I lost all the tomorrows with him. You could say that now, I appreciate them when they come. Now, I want to make them the best they can possibly be.

In order for ants to find the safest route to food, one goes out on its own. When that lone ant has found the path, it leaves a chemical trail for the others to follow. When you stamp on a line of ants or, less psychotically, if you interfere in their chemical trail in any way, it drives them crazy. The ones that have been left behind crawl around frantically in panic, trying to regain the trail. I like watching them at first totally disoriented, running around bumping into one another while trying to figure out which way to go, then regrouping, reorganising, and eventually crossing the pathway back in their straight line as if nothing had ever happened.

Their panic reminds me of Mum and I. Somebody broke our line, took out our leader, ruined our trail and our lives descended into utter chaos. I think-I hope-that with time, we’ll find the right way to go again. It takes one to lead the rest. I think, seeing as Mum is sitting this one out, that it’s up to me to go out front alone.

I was watching a bluebottle yesterday. In an effort to escape the living room, he kept flying against the window, hitting his head against the glass over and over. Then he stopped launching himself at it like a missile and stuck to one little windowpane, buzzing about like he was having a panic attack. It was frustrating to watch, especially because if he’d just flown up a little bit higher towards the top of the window, he’d have been free. But he just kept doing the same thing over and over again. I could imagine his frustration of being able to see the trees, the flowers, the sky, yet not being able to get to them. I tried to help him a few times, to guide him towards the open window, but he flew away from me around the room. He’d eventually come back to the same window and I could almost hear him: ‘Well, this is the way I came in…’

I wonder if my watching him from the armchair is what it’s like to be God, if there is a God. He sits back and sees the big picture, just as I could see that if the bluebottle just moved up the window to the top, then he’d be free. He wasn’t really trapped at all, he was just looking in the wrong place. I wonder if God can see a way out for me and Mum. If I can see the open window for the fly, God can see the tomorrows for me and Mum. That idea brings me comfort. Well, it did, until I left the room and returned a few hours later to see a dead bluebottle on the windowsill. It may not have been him, but still…Then, to show you where my mind is right now, I started crying…Then I got mad at God because in my head the death of that bluebottle meant Mum and I might never find our way out of this mess. What good is it being so far back you can see everything and yet not do anything to help?