“Can you cut my hair? It’s only a trim...”

TUBES, buses, taxis and planes have returned me home safely from Geneva to west Cork.

I walk into my kitchen, glad to be back.

I haven’t seen my teenage daughters for five days and they greet me now with smiles like sunbeams. I’ve bought them each a silver ring with a heart on it, from a French shop full of candy stripes and rose prints, a world of sparkle and strawberries that reminded me of them. I give them their rings. They’re delighted.

I watch them float around the kitchen like butterflies, buttering toast and making tea. I sit at the kitchen table. I notice pink tulips in a vase on the dresser. “Who bought those?” I ask. “We did with Dad, on our way back from school,” they say. I’m charmed.

The girls chat and flutter, chat and flutter, scrubbed and fragrant after showers.

Geneva feels very far away. It’s good to be home, I think, as the girls drift away into the sitting room. Everything is sugar and spice and all things nice in my house.

“Can you cut my hair?” my daughter shouts from the sitting room an hour later, where she has been watching Hotter Than My Daughter and eating a banana.

“What? Now?” I say, as she comes into the kitchen. It’s late. I want to be scrubbed and fragrant and go to bed. She explains it’s just a trim she wants.

“I hate cutting hair,” I say, “it makes me nervous.” “You’ll be fine,” she says, “it’s only a straight line.”

I don’t think I’ll be fine but say, “sit there” and “how much do you want me to take off?”

She shows me. I comb and cut… comb and cut. I wonder for a split second if I might have taken off half an inch too much.

Hotter Than My Daughter has finished and my other daughter wafts in to the kitchen, where she watches me cutting. I don’t want her to watch me. She might upset everyone by saying the wrong thing, like ‘that’s quite short’.

“That’s quite short,” she says.

My hairdressing client jerks on the chair. “WHAT have you DONE?” she says. I say, nothing, it’s fine and don’t move or the line will be jagged. I finish cutting and wonder fleetingly whether she’ll notice that half an inch but I’m pleased. It’s a straight line and I can go to bed.

She flits to the mirror and stands in front of it.

“I have a BOB,” she says. There is ice in her voice. I say I didn’t do it on purpose but there is ice in my veins. “It’s a BOB,” she repeats, “you’ve given me a BOB. A BOB. How could you do that?”

My other daughter says: “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s not a bob, I think it’s nice. You don’t even notice it.” Her sister believes there is a subtext in this statement and whirls round from the mirror. “Are you trying to annoy me?” she says.

Her tone is waspish. But maybe she’s right about the subtext. How can I know? I’ve been away and my wits, normally as sharp as a boning knife, are blunted. Sisterly affection is a delicate infrastructure. I don’t know what might have happened to undermine its foundations in my absence. Either might have borrowed the other’s shoes without asking, for example, or hogged the laptop. Maybe there is a subtext. I have to choose quickly. Subtext? Or no subtext?

“Don’t be waspish,” I say.

She gives me a look like shrapnel. “You’ve cut my hair in a BOB,” she says, “and now you’re taking HER side.”

I repeat the not on purpose rationale but I feel like I’m an actor struggling with a clunky script. How can I have got so rusty in five days?

I’m disorientated; what’s happened to the sugar and spice and all things nice?

I dispatch them to their rooms loudly and not with any kind of dignified restraint. They resist in the same manner but finally the kitchen is empty.

I sit down. My mind concertinas back to years ago, when I cut my son’s fringe while he ate a cheese sandwich and tapped out a guitar riff on the table. Afterwards, we both looked in the mirror at the same time. It was a shocking job. I felt a hot flush of panic. He looked like the disturbed medieval monk from the film, Name of the Rose. He thought he looked like a “geek”. I said sorry. He said: “It’s ok, I’ll go to the barber’s tomorrow” and made himself another cheese sandwich.

I stare into my teacup and make unhelpful comparisons. Girls, girls, girls, I think… Beauteous, wondrous creatures that float like butterflies and sting like bees.