Because when I’m dead I don’t want to be thinking of everything still, unless I have one thought in me head as I lie, the thought of Janet. And I’d love when she’s an old, old woman and dies herself, God rest her, for her to come in beside me wherever I might be put, but.

So, that was me plan, you see.

Hello.

Me plan was to go to Ringsend to the stonecutters there and get a little stone done out with Billy’s name on it, and the date he died, and maybe put on it, ‘Mourned by his Mam and Da’, you know? The way they do.

The way normal people would, with money to do it.

Because I had the bit of money, I had the bit of money I took off the poor French boy, that I stuffed in me cacks before the cops nicked us.

Sacred money, it was, that I kept safe all the years of prison in me shoes. Like a fucking secret. I suppose that was an achievement in me life, as such, because, when you go into the slammer, the screws strip and shave you, and have a gawk down your throat, and a gander up your arse, and all the rest, but they never looked in me shoes. The flukiness of that. Some lads will tell you, you could smuggle an elephant into the Joy, but the screws are fairly vigilant. Mind you, if you get a bit of bad scag, you do be seeing elephants. But.

There musta been some Higher Power watching over that money.

To be honest now, at first I didn’t know what I would do with it. You’d think maybe I would a’ bought some gear with it, because the Joy is just a fucking junkies’ paradise, there’s more scag in the Joy than sugar.

But, I didn’t.

I wouldn’t let meself.

I mean, I bought scag alright, but not with that money. That money was fucking sacred.

The first thing of course I had to do before I could do the real first thing, was to do something about me habit. In Dublin, which I am told is now one of the richest cities in Europe, you don’t just decide one day to get into a fucking programme and get yourself cleaned up. No, you have to fucking wait months and months to get into a fucking programme, so in the meantime you’re still obliged to be on the ould heroin like, and do all the things you have to do to get it.

And then my name must a’ come up on a list, and I went to Pearse Street like you do, with the other girls and boys, like it was school, and got hooked up for the methadone, you know.