I got this awful fucking rash on me arm, this was a year ago must have been, and then on me other arm, and then all over me stomach and me chest. I looked like some ould apple some ould one in Moore Street would be trying to sell ya, putting it under a few shiny apples at the top of the pile. Which is a talent. You know. Black bruises. So I go to the Accident and Emergency and I swear to Jesus, I see a young coloured doctor – after about two hundred hours, you know – and when he sees me red and black marks, he steps back like I had the fucking plague. He has this big panicky look on his face. I sorta knew then I was in big fucking trouble.

‘What’s up, Doc?’ I says, you know, the way you would.

‘We’ll have to take a blood-test,’ he says, like he might a’ said, might as well dig a hole for you straight away, his voice was that fucking weird.

So he gets a little nurse to put on the stretchy gloves and she takes some blood.

Looked all right to me. Red as it ever was.

Where they brung it I don’t know, but I had a message about six weeks after, to be coming in to talk to them.

Well, fuck, I tell you, that was a bad day.

I was like a child all that day I don’t mind telling ya.

I may a’ been a bad bastard but I was very fond a’ life.

Very.

Weeping, ya know?

But, leavin’ that aside.

Where the fuck was I? Oh, yeh, me plan. I was just getting out a prison, wasn’t I? Was that summer of ’96? You’d think I’d know for sure, a thing like that. Where are we now? Is it fucking ’99? Sometimes the ould head is just – swimming. But.

I do remember that the day I got outa prison I went straight to Burger King in O’Connell Street and ate a Whopper – with cheese. I had been promising meself that.

Then I went home to the ma like you do. She kept talking the whole time about me boys and how she wanted to see me boys, and that your woman, as she called Janet, had no right to keep them away from me, and I said, but ma, that’s what she wants, that’s what Janet wants, and anyway.

But of course I was missing the boys meself, Jack and little Macker, and I woulda given me eye teeth to see them. You want to be kissing your childer, you know? You can’t help it. You do be dreaming of them, of their faces, and what they might be saying. So I was dying to see them. Because it was me life, me life before.

And to see Janet.

Just to see her. Look at her. After them years apart.