‘No,’ I said. ‘This is my room and I need to find things.’

‘Hoor,’ muttered Helen and leant out of bed and began rummaging around in her bag.

‘Are you OK?’ Anna asked. She sounded surprised.

‘Fine,’ I said, shortly.

‘Here,’ said Helen, handing Anna a pair of sunglasses. ‘Put them on so we can go back to sleep.’

Helen put on a pair also and they lay in bed, wearing their sunglasses, looking like the Blues Brothers.

‘So,’ said Helen conversationally, ‘did you ride your man?’

‘Yes,’ I said shakily. Then paused. ‘And no.’

Helen raised an eyebrow from behind her shades. ‘Yes and no? Blowjobs?’

I shook my head. I was sorry I’d said anything because I didn’t want to talk about it.

‘Can I just remind you,’ Helen persisted, ‘that anal penetration does count as riding.’

‘Thank you, Helen.’

‘So was it?’

‘Was it what?’

‘Anal penetration?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you like it?’

‘I don’t mind it.’ I’d never actually done it but I wasn’t going to admit that to my much younger sister. I should have been telling her about such things. Not the other way round.

‘I swear by it,’ she murmured.

65

I cleared my mother’s purse of money, netting about a hundred and thirty quid. She must have just got her housekeeping. Then I blew the dust off her credit card and took that for good measure. I hesitated about stealing money from Anna but, as luck would have it, she only had eight pence in her little Madras pouch. Helen slept with her money under her pillow so there wasn’t any point trying to shake her down for anything.

I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was in the grip of such a strong compulsion that I couldn’t stop myself. I had to get my hands on some Valium and some coke. That was all I could think of. I was being torn apart by my mother’s terrible words and it was inconceivable that I stay with the pain.

I was hardly aware of the Dart journey into town. My blood was up, every atom in my body was screaming for chemicals and there wasn’t any force in the universe that could have talked me out of it. I had no idea where I’d buy drugs, but I sensed I had a better chance in town than hanging around at the end of my road in suburban Blackrock. I’d heard that Dublin had a bad drug problem. Naturally I was hopeful.

When I got off the train, I anxiously wondered where I should head for. Nightclubs were a great place to buy coke, but precious few were open at nine o’clock in the morning. A pub would be my likeliest bet. But where? Which one?

And why weren’t any of them open? I walked and walked, fear growing, need expanding.

It reminded me of one time when I’d been dying to go to the loo and nowhere was open. Running around the streets, looking for a bar or a cafe that might let me in. Becoming more and more desperate as the buildings shut their doors and closed their faces against me. Nowhere, literally nowhere, that could help. Once again, I experienced those same feelings of helplessness, frustration and unbearable, excruciating need.

To my stomach-chilling alarm, every pub I went to was shut.

Go home.

Go fuck yourself.

‘What time do the pubs open?’ I blurted at a man hurrying to work.

‘Half-ten,’ he answered, startled.

‘All of them?’ I croaked.

‘Yes.’ He nodded, giving me a funny look that in different circumstances would have made me cringe.

Wasn’t Ireland supposed to be a nation of pissheads? I thought in confusion. What kind of nation of pissheads has the pubs opening at half-past ten? When the day was nearly over?

If only Dublin had a red-light district. Why wasn’t I Dutch?

I pressed on into the back roads and, more by luck than judgement, found myself on a long street which appeared occasionally on the news as an example of deprivation and violence. About two people a year were shot in Dublin, usually on that very street. Apocryphal stories abounded about suburban, middle-class citizens who’d strayed there by mistake and were offered drugs one hundred and eighty-four times along a ten-yard stretch.

Bingo.

But you can never get a dealer when you need one. Maybe it was too early for them to be up. If only I had a letter of introduction from Wayne!

For ages I traipsed up and down past graffiti-covered blocks of flats. Crooked, wobbly pictures of giant syringes with a red cross through them and big ‘Pushers Out’ signs were painted onto every gable end. Which indicated I was in an area where lots of drugs were sold. But nobody approached me, wrestled me to the ground and forcibly injected me with heroin, the way news reports would have you believe happened constantly. (I had yet to meet a dealer who offered free samples and test-drives of their products, but they most definitely existed in tabloid-land.) Or perhaps I should find the local school where, of course, there would be busloads of dealers all loitering and hawking their wares, as if in a Moroccan souk.

I reckoned my chances of procuring drugs were highest around the few trendy, well-dressed youths I saw. But, when I tried to make meaningful eye-contact, they all turned away with a snigger and a blush.

I don’t fancy you, I wanted to scream. I only want to buy cocaine. All that talk about Dublin’s terrible drug problem, I thought in fury. The terrible problem is getting the fucking drugs!

Eventually, after I’d been scurrying up and down for a full hour, I forced myself to stop and wait. Just wait. Simply idle on a corner and look desperate with need.

People looked at me suspiciously. It was horrible. Everyone knew why I was there and their disgust was palpable.

To be less conspicuous, I sat down on a filthy flight of concrete steps outside a block of flats that looked like a war zone. But then a woman came out with several children and grimly told me ‘Get up.’ I did. Fear broke through the madness of my craving. The woman was hard, bitter and frightening and there were probably more like her. I’d heard about the vigilante groups they had in areas like this. And they did lots more than paint crooked syringes with red crosses through them on every gable end. People had been hospitalized after drug-related beatings. Not to mention the annual shootings.

A voice in my head urged me to leave, to go home. I felt dirty, embarrassed, ashamed and scalp-crawlingly scared. But frightened and all as I was to stay, I was more afraid to leave.