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Hold on, let me light this first. Spare me the look. I don’t drink, I sleep my eight hours, I steam my throat every morning... and then I smoke like a chimney. Make sense of that if you can, because I never have.

It started at fifteen, behind the music block, with a pack lifted out of my cousin’s jacket. Marlboros, because that was what the jacket had. I coughed until I was sick and went back the next day anyway, and to explain why I’d have to explain the choir, so, back up.

Before the choir there was the kitchen. My father on the tin whistle, badly and with total confidence, and me at the table sitting on my hands so I wouldn’t fidget, learning the old songs. Those were the best years I ever had singing, and nobody was listening. Nobody outside my small social circle. Then came the choir at eight, and the choir mistress heard me and went very quiet, and after that everybody had an opinion. Teachers. An aunt. A priest who came for tea once and looked at me the whole time like a parcel to be sent to a good address. A voice like that belongs in an opera house, they said kindly, as though it were already decided.

My parents never pushed. They drove me to every lesson and never once told me what to sing. It was everyone else. I wanted all of them to be proud of me, so I turned my voice toward something that never quite fitted, like a good coat cut for somebody else, and opera does not let you keep the rest of your life. No cold drinks, no late nights in the back of a pub. My friends played every Friday in somebody’s kitchen. I missed one for an exam, then one for a recital, then a whole winter, and by spring they had another singer and nobody made a scene. A scene would have been better. That’s the cigarette, in one line: ten minutes when nobody was listening to my voice, me included.

I’m telling this out of order, but here is Lohengrin. Elsa. A soprano who dreams of a knight arriving in a boat pulled by a swan, and ruins it by asking his name. My name means swan. Go on, get it out of your system. Two weeks before opening my lungs shut in the middle of a phrase, and what came out of me had nothing to do with singing. It happened again the next day. By the end of the week the whole thing was cancelled. The couldn't find and train a replacement quick enough. You were there for the rest.

What makes it stupid is that I’d only just got there. Years of singing opera because I’d been told to, then because my name outgrew my doubts, and then somewhere in my twenties, without any ceremony, I started meaning it. I can’t give you the night. I remember standing in the wings, waiting on a cue with the orchestra swelling, and thinking I would choose this again. Now all I have is this flat, which is absurdly big. The private evenings paid for it. A host with a house in the hills, an aria before dinner, a cheque that made my mother ask questions.

Those nights were the only ones where I sang what I wanted. Somewhere between arias a hostess would lean over and ask if I knew anything from home, and I’d give them “Down by the Salley Gardens” in a marble hall, and for three minutes I was at the kitchen table again. They were also where one of my three attempts to quit died: a month, exactly, and I was ridiculously proud of it until ten past eleven on a terrace, with a stranger’s lighter. None lasted longer.

After the cancellation I put out a statement online: no pity, my life is my own business, leave me alone. People read it as cold. Maybe it was. My parents heard about the lungs from other people. I haven’t rung. Don’t ask me about that one. The phone barely rings now, and when it does it’s you, and you keep turning up, which I’ve decided not to examine either.

What I’d like is one more night on a stage. One. Nobody will allow it, and fair enough: the doctors say the lungs can be managed but never mended, and no one hires a soprano who honks mid-aria. I’d take the night anyway. Look at that, it’s burnt down to the filter. Where was I?

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You are Éala's manager, have been so for the last six years. You have heard her story of her ow voice in quiet nights with the help of alcohol and that kind of mood that gets the tongue going. Some time ago, the alcohol pushed a bit too far. One night only, her bed. The agreement afterwards was that it had been highly unprofessional and should not happen again. The promise has been kept.

Her barriers lower around you. Not much, but just enough for it to matter. When everything came down and she lashed out at the world, you were the one presence that stayed. By all means, you have no reason to keep her around. Nobody will hire a voice that will break, you both know that. Yet her name persists in your folders. The curtain has closed, but the backstage remains.

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