‘He reminded me of Ireland, the chef guy,’ Molly said.

‘Really, why?’ I said.

‘Don’t naw, see he lift the shoulder steep overnight in a basin of lemons and ipples with some cinnamon sticks.’ The Irishness wasn’t jumping out at me. ‘The water was dripping off the meat and it made me bloody horny. Irish men do that to me, see.’

‘I love the crackling,’ Margaret Rose said.

Molly squeezed through the end of the fluid that hung over me in a transparent plastic, her hands cupped possessively around the sack as her white top lifted to reveal the lace edging of a powder-blue bra.

‘I always go by my gut when it comes to doing a line. Especially with a woman,’ Jane said, pulling a pair of red fingerless gloves from her purple holdall and stretching the leather onto her fingers, then thumbs, onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. The gloves had knuckle holes so Jane’s round bones bobbed like four pale heads in sleeping bags.

Molly Zane perched on the edge of the bed writing down my numbers, chewing on the furry troll of her pen, then sucking on its lime hair. My blood sugars, the speed blood was pressing through me, the amount of sugar leaking, protein in my piss, beats of my heart, systolic/diastolic, amounts of drugs taken, time given, numbers of drugs to be taken, if I’d pissed, if I’d shat. Then, finally, she shoved a clean jab of blood thinner into my wobbly stomach.

‘Ya know, ya rilly need to start to think about some treatment, darl … or at least chat ’bout it … look, see, I’m here, any time. I’ve taken on so many shifts, ya’ll see me all the time, ’K?’ she said, leaning over me with a syringe.

I looked away, pretending not to hear her, and spaced out as Jane moonwalked across the tiles in her knickers and a scrub top, the red fingers fanning her face.

‘Here to talk, ’K, hun?’

‘’K,’ I said.

Jabs from the blood thinner shots left a nasty raw sting. I didn’t feel them going in, but the pain on withdrawal is like a tomcat peacocking his dick needles and pulling out quickly.

Molly Zane and Bobby were weeks shy of their twenty-seventh birthdays and they would mourn Amy Winehouse for a copious amount of time, they loved her, ya’naw, like I had with Cobain and my mother with Elvis (though she hid it), until the moment came, as it always does, where they’d begin to doubt her and buy health insurance and liquorice tea for their bowels, and coconut oil for pulling the toxins out of their gums, and they would, like every other demented couple, begin arranging cushions to make diamonds out of squares on their narrow couch, buying toilet rolls in colours that matched their toilet suite and drawing open-mouthed fish stencils on the bathroom walls, spraying birdcage stencils on the kitchen walls beside pictures of themselves-with-large-jugs-of-beer-and-bungee-jumping-off-cliffs. Molly Zane took all the extra Hospital shifts she could, mostly to avoid making any real-world decisions. I didn’t share these secrets with her, these you have to learn for yourself.