That done awful things, and deserved to be locked up in the Joy, and deserves to be here now, in the old Bon Secours hospital.

Is that German, or what?

Did you ever see The Shootist with John Wayne? Gear fucking film. Old cowboy dying, and John Wayne dying too, in real life.

What in the name of Jaysus is real life, when it’s at home?

A bit of dark for Joe. Light again on Janet.

Janet   Joe’s ma, you know, she comes over to the house to speak to me. That’s how I knew he was getting out. I wouldn’t a’ known any other way.

She was a real Northsider, she didn’t like crossing the river, she didn’t feel safe, she thought the Southsiders carried diseases like the rats, and her only coming from the worst street in Summerhill, North fucking Summer Street, where they boil and eat their young. Her own father was mucker-out for Sammy the Jew, the rag and bone man, who had his premises there on Parnell Street, and if that’s not the filthiest job ever invented tell me what is. The smell from Sammy’s would a’ killed a horse, which wouldn’t a’ been the worst thing, since Sammy bought dead horses.

In them old days you could make a few bob from a dead horse, which just goes to show how useless we are in the present times.

You can only make money nowadays out a’ good things.

Joe’s ma was always talking against the Jews, even though there were none of them around any more, they were all gone on to Cleveland, Ohio, and living in mansions I am sure. It wasn’t just the Jews she didn’t care for, it was the Africans, and the Chinese, and the Romanians, and what have you. I heard her at it one day in the knicker department in Clery’s, gassing away to an old crony of hers – ‘They’ve tooken the best jobs off of the Irish and are only sponging off of the state.’

Her, whose son was a Midday Man and drawing the dole every week of his life.

So she crosses over O’Connell Bridge like a traveller crossing into a foreign territory. She was probably surprised there was no customs on the bridge, and that no one asked to see her passport.

She was a right determined little woman though. She was willing to risk the bit of foreign travel just for the pleasure of annoying the jaysus out of me.

The first thing in her way might have been my mam except she was out at her job cleaning the offices of that crowd along the canal that made cigarettes. Maybe they still do.

So I didn’t have nothing between me and the knock on the door. So I just open it.