As you start to come off the scag you can’t believe what your former mates begin to look like. I mean, you start to see them as they are. Ghosts. Skinnied up and that dead man look in the face. And the funny thing is, you suddenly start to feel things, and one of the things you feel is a love for them, a sort a’ desire to help them maybe, but you can’t help them. That’s funny, isn’t it?

And, despite what people will tell ya, you really can get off the scag with the methadone, if you want.

You can.

It musta been in that time when I was obliged to be using that I got the virus off some cunt’s needle.

And now here I am.

Light on Janet.

Janet   So, I didn’t hear from Joe for a good while after he got out. I knew he was out because people I knew and that knew him, seen him.

But of course I was living on the southside and he never roved out that way. I had heard long since he was using drugs so I was very glad not to be seeing him, and that he didn’t try and see the boys. We were getting on just grand without him.

‘Using drugs.’ I just said it like it was a normal bit of news. Holy God. Joe. Full a’ surprises. Joe Brady, that was afraid to take an aspirin when he had a cold. When the fucking District Nurse came to weigh Billy when he was a babby, and took a sample a’ blood from his heel – or what did she do, stuck a needle into it for some fucking reason – Joe fainted. Not one of nature’s junkies, Joe, he must a’ worked at it. I don’t know what that made me think when I heard it. I think it made me feel quite brutal, as in, good fucking riddance.

I was angry with him.

I had me memories of the good times with him and I often thought of them times, I still do, but I was definitely glad not to see him then.

You know.

Like all the times we used to go swimming at the Shelly Banks, when the kids were small, even before they were born. Joe and me and the kids, on the Ringsend bus.

You remember the old buses?

The conductor had a big leather bag like an elephant’s scrotum, you know – isn’t that a great word, I only learned that word off a doctor when little Macker had a swellin’ there years ago – and he’d jingle his shillins and his pennies in it. ‘Fares, please!’ he’d shout, and there’s none a’ that now.

You’d think in the old days that things like that would be for ever.