I didn’t like the idea of Jenny being alone in the flat when I worked late, despite the fact that she said that she didn’t mind. For her, there was something about all that quiet time, the calmness, the all-encompassing sense of being content with your own company. I didn’t agree with her, I was never completely happy on my own. I was propelled by fear and I was afraid of my memories of Brian. How I knew early on about his potential. He had that type of personality, warm, modest, ambivalent about his good looks. People often commented on his empathy, his kindness, how he let me win our penalty shoot-out games because even as a child he understood my love for football, completely got how important it was for me that I was good at it. It was as if he wanted to show me that I could excel.

And the black biker jacket that I bought him for his sixteenth birthday present, I used up all my savings on it. It wasn’t new, I’d bought it in a vintage shop in Temple Bar – thirty quid, probably owned by somebody who was dead and their wardrobe had been cleared out following their demise, perhaps weeks after or maybe months. Those sorts of details probably weren’t important but they mattered to me. How was I to envisage that Brian would be wearing that same jacket on the night he was run over by the car and left for dead? I felt as though I had bought him his shroud early on in life. I had bought him his death costume.

Those thoughts of Brian would come back and then the loneliness would creep up on me, the way the power of alcohol in a gin could seep greedily into my bloodstream and those were the times when I was self-congratulatory about being sure to have a bottle to hand to fuel those very times when I wanted very much to introduce that feeling into my body. I had seen heroin addicts at play on the Quays hanging around dealing and scoring, morning or afternoon or evening. The disconnected facial expression on the addict, the soul-searching, the dismay, the forgotten babies in buggies, the hooded hysteria of the crazed ‘athletes’ in their leisurewear pacing, pacing.