‘Sometimes a trauma can occur when the person is too young to remember. Other times there genuinely isn’t any trauma, just excuses and justifications.’

‘How’s that now?’

‘Addicts are great at hard-luck stories—their parents didn’t love them enough or their boss doesn’t value them or their wife isn’t grateful—and that’s why they have to drink or use. But, Dennis, you’d drink even if you had no excuse. All that matters here is that you’re an alcoholic and you need to get well.’

He looked crestfallen. In a small voice he said, ‘I don’t want to be an alcoholic.’

I nodded. I knew. ‘Dennis? When you used to find your father passed out, looking like he was dead? What did that do to you?’

He dropped his head. ‘How do I know?’ he muttered. ‘You’re the expert.’

‘I’d imagine being a little boy of six or seven discovering his daddy and thinking he had died would have been devastating.’

His head remained bowed. Then he cast a furious look at me. ‘’Twas,’ he choked, his eyes wet. ‘’Twas.’

He curled inwards, making himself smaller. Roughly rubbing his face with his hands, he became a little boy before my eyes.

Well, that was easy, a lot easier than I’d expected.

I let him cry. He had a lifetime’s worth to catch up on.

*

‘There are probably worse crimes I’ve committed.’ It was Giles’s last session in group and he was in giddy good form. ‘But this memory is the worst I can think of.’ In a fruity voice, he asked, ‘Are you ready, children? Then let us begin. One night, after a right old time of it, I thought I was having a heart attack, so I went to Emergency. I wanted an ECG. The picture in my head is me standing in the waiting room, yelling at all the sick and injured people, “I am having a cardiac arrest! I! Giles Freyne! And you know who I am!” ’

‘Holy fuck,’ Chalkie muttered. ‘Morto for you, bud.’

‘The security guards were trying to catch me but I was sprinting around the place, whisking open the curtains around the cubicles. At one, I told the woman in the bed to get out, that I needed it. Then I said I had a gun.’

‘And had you?’ Chalkie asked.

‘Where would I get a gun?’

‘No? Okay. As you were.’

‘I tried to pull the drip out from the woman’s arm,’ Giles said. ‘Then the police came and arrested me. I told them I’d gone to school with the minister for justice and they’d be directing traffic for the rest of their careers. That’s the sort of thing’, he said, ‘I want never to repeat.’

‘You don’t have to,’ Trassa said. ‘So long as you go to your meetings and aftercare.’