Still, ­duty-­bound as a poet, Bobby diligently wondered about mortality and the volitional ending of a life: specif­ically your own. He figured that you did not want to kill yourself because you felt bad, because if you felt bad you perforce retained access to a spectrum of emotional feeling on which was located the possibility of one day again, however provisionally, feeling good. You wanted to kill yourself, Bobby suspected, only when the access to any feeling at all, whether good or bad, was completely eroded, when you found yourself, as many poor souls did, mired upon an undifferentiatedly flat and horizonless plane of Unfeeling, bereft of access to any avenue of actual or potential emotional excitation. It was not Feeling that killed but the final and irremediable withdrawal of it. Bobby had read the literature. This state, he knew, was called anhedonia.

Moving through the moulting trees, Bobby saw the ­beige-­coloured brutalist slab of the shopping centre climb into the skyline. His dealer he knew only by her first name, Becky. She was a convent schoolgirl and camogie player. She often brought her stick and gear bag with her and sold little ­ten-­spots of reliably mediocre weed in a corner of the car park most afternoons. A small coven of teammates tended to tag along, hanging back in mute judgement, no doubt, of Becky’s clientele.

Bobby pounded across the car park and instantly discerned Becky in her green uniform, another person with her. Empty plastic bags stirred in the breeze. They lifted and settled, flinched like dying nerves as Bobby tramped on them: the sky itself was the colour of a shopping bag. A rat, a sliver of dark muscle, darted across the concrete and vanished into the crumbling base of a low stone wall.

The other person was a man with a baby strapped like a bomb to his chest in an ­impressive-­looking harness. Becky’s ­camán-­wielding cohort lounged on the stone wall, observing the exchange with studied wrath. Bobby held up between a couple of cars. He watched the transaction. Becky giggled, discreetly palmed the man a baggie as she pulled a funny face and patted the baby on the head. The harnessed baby’s loose limbs waggled and its head bobbled disinterestedly around. Bobby thought of a trussed crab unaware it is about to be boiled alive. He picked his nose, unseated a gratifyingly intact clump of dried matter, palpated it between his fingers, and flicked it away. The ­man – youngish, with shaved blond ­hair – walked across the car park and placed first the child and then himself into a gleaming hypertrophied Land Rover. Bobby now approached.

‘All right, Becky.’

Becky grimaced and flexed the wings of her nose. ‘The usual, Bob?’

‘Becky, can I ­ask—’

‘No.’

‘Can I ask is Becky your real name?’

‘Why would Becky not be my real name?’