Darcey McGonigle didn’t do birthdays. These days, she didn’t see the point.

It had been different, of course, when she was a little girl and birthdays were all about noisy parties with forbidden food like sucky sweets and brightly coloured fizzy drinks. Those birthdays had come with satisfyingly exciting boxes wrapped in special paper tied with coloured ribbon, and possibly even a trip to the cinema where more junk food was allowed ‘just for today’. Those birthdays had been fun and magical.

But now all a birthday did was remind her that she was another year older and that somehow her life hadn’t turned out like she’d expected back when she’d strutted around the place feeling like a fairy princess for the day. (Her princess phase had lasted for less than a year during which she’d worn pink dresses and allowed her mother to use pretty clips, ribbons and slides in her wavy blonde hair. After that, she’d decided that fairy princesses were passé, had cut her hair herself with a nail scissors - much to her mother’s horror - and had refused to wear dresses ever again. She’d eventually given in on the dresses, of course, but she didn’t do pink anymore.)

Obviously, she thought, as she stepped under the shower, gasped, and rapidly turned the dial to hot from the sub-zero temperature it she’d somehow left it at the day before, nobody’s life turned out exactly the way they expected. She wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that the things she’d wished for on various other birthdays - being a famous singer (10th); growing bigger boobs (14th); finding Mr Right (various ever since her 15th - but not one she’d had in the last couple of years); she wasn’t stupid enough to imagine that any of these things would all just happen. She was also realistic enough to know that what she’d wanted when she was ten or twenty or even thirty would necessarily be the same as she wanted now. But, on the morning of her thirty-fourth birthday (which somehow she couldn’t help thinking sounded scarily older than thirty-three) she had the nagging feeling that time had somehow speeded up on her and that she still hadn’t changed into a grown up who knew what she really wanted from life. Nothing, absolutely nothing, had panned out the way she’d originally planned. Which didn’t have to be a bad thing, she supposed, as she drizzled honey and almond shower wash over her shoulders, but it would be so much better if, just once, she could make a plan and see it all work out. It was all very well to accept that she couldn’t sing and that her boobs had remained a neat but uninspiring 34B and even that she probably hadn’t found Mr Right, but it would be nice to achieve something from her childhood wish list.

Bloody birthdays, she muttered after she got out of the shower, dressed and spent ages taming the kinks that still plagued her hair; wrestling with her dryer, her GHD and copious quantities of anti-frizz serum to achieve her objective - birthdays are just an excuse for multinational companies to rip us off by selling overpriced cards with crap rhymes and to make us feel guilty for just being ordinary.

And so she didn’t bother to check the mailbox in the hall of her apartment building for birthday cards on her way to work but breezed past it without even glancing in its direction. (There wouldn’t have been much point in checking anyway. The postman rarely arrived before she left.)

Besides, she already knew that she’d receive four cards to mark the occasion: one from her mother; usually a ‘For my Daughter’ special with flowers, ribbons and a badly-scanning sentimental verse - unlike Darcey, Minette loved celebrating birthdays!; one from the twins (an old fashioned sepia type card if Tish had bought it; a cartoon feature if it had been Amelie’s turn to choose - the twins, older than her by a year, always sent their cards as a pair); a generic ‘Happy Birthday’ card from her father with the date inscribed on the inside - as if she didn’t know what the date was - and finally a ‘To My Goddaughter’ card from, Nerys, her mother’s best friend, who would include a lottery scratch card with it and a message that if it came up trumps Darcey was to spend the money entirely on something frivolous for herself. Darcey always felt touched by the card and gift implying that she needed the money to spend entirely on herself. No matter how often Darcey told Nerys that she was financially independent (although that independence came with her very own breath-taking mortgage and much utilised credit card), Nerys would adopt her most sympathetic tone and tell her that every woman could do with money of her own, especially when she didn’t have anyone to look after her anymore. Darcey always gritted her teeth at that but said nothing. So far the total haul from all of Nerys’s scratch cards had only amounted to a fiver - which Darcey had naturally enough spent on more scratch cards, although not one of them had delivered anything in return. That didn’t really surprise her. She wasn’t a person who won draws or raffles or matched lottery numbers and so she didn’t really expect her numbers to come up. That was why she didn’t bother with wish lists of things she’d do if she won the lottery. She’d grown out of lottery win wish lists in the same way as she’d grown out of birthdays.

She walked briskly out of her glass and steel apartment building close to Dublin’s Grand Canal Dock and crossed the road in order to walk in the morning sunshine. She’d bought the apartment in one of the city’s currently fashionable locations two years earlier and she loved it, despite the scary mortgage and even though her mother thought it was far too cold and impersonal while the twins chided her that she was shutting herself away by living on the fifth floor of the tall, thin block. (And all three of them suggested that she’d be better off back home in Galway these days than living in the stress-inducing cauldron that Dublin city had become).

It had been the purchase of the apartment which had led to the astronomical credit card bills too. She hadn’t realised just how much money she’d end up spending on (mainly unused) gadgets for the tiny kitchen or the perfect light for the living room or the scatter cushions and plumped up pillows for her king-sized bed. But she knew that one day she’d come out from under the blanket of debt (she did, after all and much to her own surprise, have a well-paying job!) and she loved living in Dublin, a mere five minute walk to the Dart station and a short hop by train to her office in the Financial Services Centre.

Normally Darcey arrived at the undistinguished office building before seven-thirty each day but on the morning of her birthday she was late. This was because almost as soon as the commuters at Grand Canal Dock got onto the train the driver announced - rather too cheerfully Darcey thought - that due to a mechanical fault they wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. Darcey didn’t hang around for the trains to start running again and the inevitable scrum that would ensue as everyone tried to pile on, but walked to Grand Canal Street and looked for a cab instead even though she knew that, theoretically at least, it might have been nearly as quick to walk. But she was wearing her pencil thin black suit and her killer-heel LK Bennet suede boots and walking more than a few hundred metres at a time was simply not an option.

There weren’t any cabs. She paced along the road as gingerly as the killer-heels would allow, wondering why it was that there were always cabs when you didn’t want them and never ones when you did. If I get a blister, she thought, I will sue Iarnrod Eireann and their damn mechanical faults! As she allowed herself the mental image of her day in court against the train company she suddenly spotted a yellow cab sign and waved frantically, managing to nab the taxi ahead of a disgruntled fellow passenger who glared at her as she smiled sweetly at him and closed the door, glad that now she wouldn’t be too late for work.

Late, of course, was relative. She didn’t actually have to be in by seven-thirty. But everyone who did well at Global Finance was in the office early and, even though she wasn’t a morning person, she felt it was important to be there too. Darcey was the Business Development Manager of the financial services company which managed its international business out of the centre. Tish and Amelie teasingly called her their high-flyer sister. That was complete nonsense, of course. She wasn’t really a high-flyer. Her job was interesting but, she told them, it sounded far more important than it was. Really it was all about being nice to people. And anyone could do that.

Despite getting the cab, the snarling morning traffic - made worse by a burst water pipe on Pearse street - meant that it was nearly forty minutes after leaving her apartment instead of the usual twenty before she jabbed at the lift call button in the marble lobby of the Global Finance building. She sipped on her takeaway coffee, waiting for the kick from the caffeine coursing through her veins to lift her non-morning persona into someone who could be nice to people despite the hour. Even though she really wasn’t ready for niceness and actually found it hard to talk sensibly until she’d downed her first coffee of the morning, she smiled in greeting at more of Global’s employees as they joined her in front of the lifts, all of them with waxed coffee cups in their hands. (Global had coffee vending machines on every floor but the general consensus, which Darcey agreed with utterly, was that the coffee was sludge and that it was much better to get a takeaway from the Italian barrista on the corner.)

They smiled back at her. Darcey was well-liked by her colleagues even though many of them were in awe of her ridiculously high IQ and everyone knew that Peter Henson, the Managing Director, was a bit scared of her himself. But she never made an issue of her IQ (she’d once commented ruefully that intelligence was entirely different to common sense), she was easy to work for and she never bawled anyone out for a mistake even if they deserved it. (Although many people thought that her patient acceptance of the fact that they were less than perfect was bad enough.)