When they have you in there, in the Joy, for a good stretch like I been, you get to think an awful lot. Yes, sir. For the first while you’re just the same as you ever were, thinking the world had it in for you, and was out to get you, just you in particular. Set up that way, you know, by whoever, God, or whatever.

The fucking inner city they call it, like it was something inside something, something hidden inside, or safe inside, I don’t fucking know. But the place where I come from is all raw in the wind, outside with fucking knobs on, nothing fucking inner about it, it’s as out as you can get, like the North Pole.

And your emotions, you know, like the counsellors say in there, your emotions are just the thoughts and suchlike of the fella that’s always outside, freezing, like an animal yourself, one of them polar bears like you’d see anytime in the zoo. You know in your heart of hearts that what the big fellas, I mean, the politicians, really want to do, is get rid of you, just clean all the shite out of Dublin, like the shite in the Liffey, and have a nice clean fucking perfect Dublin, so clean and so perfect the fucking salmon will climb up the river walls and walk about, happy as Larry.

So for the first bit that’s how you’re thinking. For the first year even maybe. And then you’re thinking, how did I get into this fucking nightmare?

And that’s when you really would want strong drugs.

Because a whole heap of stuff comes down on your head, like when you break into a ceiling in an old house, and all this ould shite and dust comes down on your head from the attics, you know, if you’re doing demolition work on the buildings. Not that I ever done a gear job like that.

And that’s if you’re lucky. Because if that stuff never strikes you, you just go on the way you were, being a stupid bollocks, and using, and all the rest.

And I do wonder sometimes what being alive is for, I mean they call it the gift of life, and when I’m looking at some of me mates, I’m wondering what sort of fucking gift it is. I mean, God gives you the gift of life, and there might be a fella sitting in a cell there in Mountjoy, quietly getting the gear into himself, and his head locking back, and he’s calming down, and feeling kinda okay again, and then he’s at it again a few hours later, the poor bollocks, I mean, that’s it, the whole thing for some of them lads, and I don’t blame them, but, how can you call that the gift of life?