I’m supposed to be meeting Niall Heaney and I don’t want to keep him waiting. I can pretend, as I wrap my scarf around my neck and throw my phone into my bag, that this is just like any other story I’ve covered. I’m going to do some research. That is all. I won’t be alone. Niall will be with me. I will be fine.

I know I will be fine.

Chapter Forty-Four

Declan

The light on the electric box is flashing again. Declan has been doing his best to leave the heating off as much as possible, but it has been bitterly cold. Much colder than it normally is at this time of year. He hopes it warms up, or at least stays dry, on Thursday for the big Halloween parade.

Declan will do what he always does and watch the fireworks from the top of Creggan. He has to keep busy on Halloween night. Every year he has found the day impossibly hard. He would hide away if he could, but he’s not good left alone with just his thoughts at this time of year. He has to be busy. Or drunk. Or preferably both. He might just get high, too. Obliterate his reality with whatever he can.

He gets up – his thirst driving him from his bed to the kitchen of his one-bedroomed flat so he can fill a pint glass with water from the tap.

He was smoking last night. The smell of grass still hangs in the air, the taste still in his mouth. He probably smoked more than he should’ve, and this stuff was strong. A couple of drags and he could feel himself slipping away to somewhere where he didn’t have to care about anything or anyone. It was a good place to be.

He’d put on the radio, some dance music station that promised to play ‘all the hits of yesteryear’. Dance music from the Nineties and early Noughties had invaded his head. Songs from his childhood, his youth, his sneaking into nightclubs when he shouldn’t even have been out of the house. Watching Trainspotting when he was twelve in a mate’s house on a VHS and not really understanding it but knowing that everyone thought it was really cool. That was when drugs were bad.

He’d tried to believe that, but despite the horrors of that movie, he still felt a glimmer of jealousy and longing when Ewan McGregor slipped into an unconscious state to the strains of ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed. It had seemed quite blissful to begin with. Imagine what it would be like to escape the horrors in your head … To disappear for just a while from this existence. His twelve-year-old brain took a while to realise that an overdose was being played out in front of his eyes.