The Music Club was a recent addition and it was still at that early stage of trying to define itself. It seemed to lack style to me, as if it had no thought-out agenda. The backdrop to the bar consisted of black sheets hammered to the walls. The bar manager looked like he wanted to be a television presenter. The other staff with their face piercings cleaned floors and polished glasses, all the while trying to get noticed.

We went into the venue and there was a DJ on the decks and the crowd were giving it everything, mesmerized. It was beautiful to look at – the trance. We hung around the back seats of the venue and enjoyed the music. It felt good. I felt normal again because I’d been spending far too much of my time worrying about Jenny and about Jerome. I told Andy that I was waiting for Jenny to come to me. Andy told me to relax about it.

She would come.

There was a scuffle in the middle of the dance floor. I could make out two girls having a go at each other. I’d had enough of drunk people for one night after working, so I told Andy that I was going to call it a night. He knocked back his drink and we left the club.

I lay in bed later slowly curling my hands into fists and then uncurling them, and I thought about what Andy had said to me about jealousy. I didn’t have the right to be jealous. I’d only had Jenny that one time. She wasn’t mine, not yet. What I was experiencing was envy.

5. She Came to Me

June 1995

A couple of weeks later I was working at the Crown. It was pissing rain outside and the evening was moving along steadily. A few builders from the site beside the Stag’s Head came in with a thirst on them. Myself and Andy knew them, so we had a bit of craic. There was a smell of gravy in the air from the lunchtime carvery. It was our lull before the office crowd bit in. I had my head in the glass dishwasher when I heard my name being called. I looked up. Jenny was standing there and she was a picture.

It was so good to see her. I tried not to let myself hope too much. But I couldn’t control hope, no one can control hope, or expectation. It was like I had an inherent sense of our destiny and I attempted to play it cool as I asked her what she was doing in the pub.

She had something to tell me, she had left Jerome.