I WAS LIVING in a caravan a few miles outside Gort. It was set up on breeze blocks in the yard of an old farmhouse. There were big nervous dogs outside, chained. Their breathing caught hard with the cold of the winter and the way the wind shuddered along their flanks was wretched to behold. I lay there in the night, as the dogs howled misery at the darkness, and I doted over a picture of my daughter, May-Anne, as she had been back in the summertime. I hadn’t seen her in eight months and I missed her so badly. I was keeping myself well hidden. Things had gone wrong in Cork and then they went wronger again. I had been involved with bringing some of the brown crack in that was said to be causing people to have strokes and was said to have caused the end altogether of a prostitute lad on Douglas Street. Everybody was looking for me. There was no option for a finish only to hop on a bus and then it was all black skies and bogger towns and Gort, finally, and Evan the Head waited for me there, in the ever-falling rain, and he had his bent smile on.

‘Here’s another one I got to weasel you out of,’ he said. ‘And me without the arse o’ me fuckin’ kecks, ’ay?’

He jerked a thumb at a scabby Fiesta that wore no plates and we climbed into it and we took off through the rain, January, and we drove past wet fields and stone walls and he asked me no questions at all. He said it was often the way that a fella needed a place and he would be glad to help me out. He said that I was his friend after all and he softened the word in his mouth – friend – in a way that I found troubling. It was the softness that named the price of the word. He said things could as easily be the other way around and maybe someday I would be there to help him out. We turned down a crooked boreen that ran between fields left to reeds and there were no people anywhere to be seen. We came to the farmhouse and the smile on the Head’s face twisted even more so.

I never promised you a rose garden, he said.