So these are some of the thoughts that begin to strike you, like, after that first little while when nothing strikes you.

And then the guilt comes down with all the rest, that’s the third fucking phase, the fucking lousy feeling that it was all your own doing, it was you got yourself into this lousy fucking hole, and no one else.

And then in my case I’m thinking of her, I’m thinking of the most beautiful girl in the whole world, the fucking star of my life, you know, I’m thinking of Janet. And what I done. What I done to her, roaring and shouting and scaring her, and what I done after what I done to her.

And then I’m fucking raking and tearing at myself, at me own heart, I tell you, no one could really tell you what that feels like, unless you’re after feeling it for yourself.

No one.

Janet, she was like someone in the films, someone you’d see at the pictures in O’Connell Street.

I’d be sitting beside her at the pictures as a matter of fact in the old days looking up at the screen at some young one in Hollywood, and thinking, I’ve someone just as fucking lovely sitting right beside me. Why wouldn’t I think that?

When we was making love and she’d sit on top of me like, her breasts would sort of fall longer than they seemed most times, they got slimmer and pointier, pointing at me you know. Choosing me, it looked like. Electing me, like in an election.

And that used to make me crazy, crazy.

And then she’d be dressing in the morning and pulling on her jeans, over her lovely backside, and then some gear top I’d nicked for her in Arnott’s on top of that, and I swear to the good God, to the good Jesus, there was not another like her. I never seen no one like her anyhow. I was always glad I went and married her, I was always astonished she had agreed to marry me.

(His wedding ring.) I mean, a woman like that.

When she was a girl going about, you knew she never was going to end up like some of the others, you sort of knew.

Her mother was lovely-looking too, I think her whole family musta been like a family of film stars, they were that good-looking.