The seven of them picked up their coats and their jackets, left the booth and started to make their way downstairs. The club was packed now with over a hundred young dancers, singing along to Sam Smith. ‘Look what you made me do… I’m dancing with a stranger!’ But before Thomas and Muireann could reach the dance floor, the figure of a young man appeared at the top of the stairs that led down to the toilets. It was hard to make him out clearly because of the epileptic lights, but Thomas could see that he was holding his stomach in both hands and that he was swaying from side to side, as if he were standing on the deck of a ship.

‘Oh Christ, that’s him, that’s the bowsie!’ said Darragh.

‘How in the name of Jesus did he get up there?’ said Breaslain, in a panicky voice. ‘I was sure I’d done him in!’

‘Well, go and give him a clatter and send him back down,’ Thomas told him. ‘That should finish him off.’

A rowdy knot of students were laughing and shoving each other at the bottom of the stairs, and before Breaslain could shoulder his way through them, the young drug-dealer had started to stagger towards the middle of the dance floor. His head was tilted right back and his knees were bent and he collided with three girls who were dancing together. They shouted at him and pushed him away, obviously thinking that he was drunk, but this knocked him completely off balance, and he was able to take only two more wobbling steps before he fell heavily sideways. He lost his grip on his sliced-open stomach and his insides spilled out in a slippery tangle, all across the floor.

‘Come on, Breaslain, forget it, and let’s get the hell out of here,’ said Thomas. The seven of them forced their way roughly through the crowd of students and headed for the Zombie Lounge’s front door. One of the bouncers said, ‘What’s the story, lads?’ but Thomas ignored him.

Up on the dance floor the music went on thumping and the strobe lights went on flashing and the dancers kept on dancing. They stepped around the young drug-dealer as he lay on his side and one or two of them kicked him. It wasn’t unusual for dancers to get so langered or so stoned that they collapsed and ended up unconscious on the floor. But then a tall blonde girl in high heels skidded sideways and almost fell over and when she looked down she realized that her heel had become snagged in a glistening beige coil of small intestine. The young drug-dealer’s bowels had been trampled and stamped on to the tune of ‘Dancing in the Dark’ and the floor all around him was footprinted with blood and faeces.