Anorexia of the soul. Would I ever even have thought of exactly those self-pitying words, if I hadn’t drunk in so much daytime television? I watched it a lot of the time now, especially the chat shows. They drifted before me, an endless string of enormously fat people, bulimics with bad perms, shameless adulterers, weeping adulterees, feckless spendthrifts, part-time prostitutes, busted drunks and heartbroken gamblers. I applauded them all, every one, the whole limping chorus line of flawed humanity.

The American shows were the best by far. There, at least, they were all going to hell in flamboyant style, spurting out fierce jets of accusation. They were pouring the energy that built the American dream into wreaking the American nightmare. I admired that. Here at home, I was just fading into the soft Irish mud as the rain fell on me.

Take Kimberley, for example, a blowsy, bleached blonde with a mouth that raced in several directions at once, most of them ill-advised. She was fighting for the affections of Charlie, her philandering boyfriend with a long, rodenty face. But Charlie was in love with the misnamed Chastity, a sixteen-year-old minx.

Then Kimberley explained that she intended to stick by Charlie ‘because of stuff that happened in our childhoods that we’re both having a tough time getting over’. But the audience were hollering and chanting with their prissy, pleased little mouths. And then one of them stood up, a smug woman in an appliquéd top, and said triumphantly, ‘I just wonder what trailer park y’all came out of!’

Everyone laughed and yahooed. For a split second, Kimberley’s face collapsed in genuine dismay. I fell back on the sofa and started to weep, the tears soaking my face and neck.

It was then that I realised I really had to get out of the house.

6

Mr Murdie was a short man, with sharp eyes that had totted up a million bar bills and a stainless steel brain that never failed – ping! – to calculate exactly the right change. If a cannibal had killed and eaten Mr Murdie, he would probably have detected an unusual flavour permeating the leathery meat, for as Mr Murdie had spent his entire working life steeped in the nicotine fug of Belfast bars, his flesh had almost certainly been deeply and satisfactorily smoked, like a mackerel hung above a wood fire.