And I got a bit of time in the Joy for my trouble.

Then I got a letter from Janet.

I thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t been able to linger.

I did.

What a world.

Light on Janet.

Janet   And then I didn’t hear a blessed word from him, for a good while. I knew he was off the heroin though, because a friend told me.

Which was good.

I mean, I never wanted to see him again, but it’s very hard to get off that drug.

I liked to think of him clean, you know.

That drug thing is so fucked up. So I was glad Joe got off it.

There was Joe the best part of seven year out of me life, but, you can’t get completely away, you know – he’s in your childers’ faces. I’m looking at their faces, Jack as may be, and Joe’s in there, like a face in a shop window, kind a’ floating. Oh Jesus, yeh. I wanted to put as much distance as I could between meself and Joe, but he was always there, in the faces of Jack and little Macker, wasn’t he? Maybe I didn’t always like that. I didn’t like that he was always so close by, in his childers’ faces. There were times, especially all them years he was in the Joy, and when me da was dead and everything seemed fucked up, I might a’ shot Joe with a gun if I seen him in the street. But I couldn’t a’ seen him in the street. Because he was banged up a’ course. Which was just as well.

Because he took everything away from me for a long time, and everything away from Jack and Macker, and everything away from himself.

Didn’t he?

We didn’t have much of a life maybe but it was a Dublin life, and every Dublin life is a life worth living, let me tell you. He might a’ settled a bit, maybe scoped out a job somewhere. Everything in the country is getting that bit better. He might a’ been working now. We’d be as old as we are and that’s still young, in these days. We might a’ been like those couples that have come through thick and thin, fighting the world. That’s the secret. Fight the world, but not each other. You know? Fisticuffs, by all fucking means, but not against each other. That’s the golden rule. If you break that, your future is gone. You’re dead. It’s all over.