Places are supposed to look smaller when you go back to them, but my road just looked schizoid. A couple of the houses had had nifty little makeovers involving double glazing and amusing faux-antique pastel paint; most of them hadn’t. Number 16 looked like it was on its last legs: the roof was in tatters, there was a pile of bricks and a dead wheelbarrow by the front steps, and at some point in the last twenty years someone had set the door on fire. In Number 8, a window on the first floor was lit up, gold and cozy and dangerous as hell.

Carmel and Shay and I came along straight after my parents got married, one a year, just like you’d expect in the land of the contraband condom. Kevin was almost five years later, once my parents got their breath back, and Jackie was five years after that, presumably in one of the brief moments when they didn’t hate each other’s guts. We had the first floor of Number 8, four rooms: girls’ room, boys’ room, kitchen, front room—the toilet was in a shed down the back of the garden, and you washed in a tin bath in the kitchen. These days Ma and Da have all that space to themselves.

I see Jackie every few weeks and she keeps me up to speed, depending on your definition of the term. She feels I need to know every detail of everyone’s life, while I feel I need to know if someone dies, so it took us a while to find that happy medium. When I walked back into Faithful Place, I knew that Carmel had four kids and an arse like the 77A bus, Shay was living upstairs from our parents and working in the same bike shop he left school for, Kevin was selling flat-screen TVs and had a new girlfriend every month, Da had done something unclear to his back, and Ma was still Ma. Jackie, to round out the picture, is a hairdresser and lives with this guy Gavin who she says she might marry someday. If she had been following orders, which I doubted, the others knew sweet fuck-all about me.

The hall door was unlocked, so was the flat door. No one leaves doors open in Dublin any more. Jackie, tactfully, had arranged things so I could make my entrance my own way. There were voices coming from the front room; short sentences, long pauses.

“Howyis,” I said, in the doorway.

A ripple of cups going down, heads turning. My ma’s snappy black eyes and five bright-blue pairs exactly like mine, all staring at me.

“Hide the heroin,” Shay said. He was leaning against the window with his hands in his pockets; he’d watched me coming down the road. “It’s the pigs.”