Nine years ago, when I finally left Dublin, I started trying to live in my own present rather than everybody else’s past. I’d gone to Barcelona, intending it to be a place where life could defeat memory. Memory made me take drugs, made me drink, made me want to die. I’d intended to fall in love with life’s simple things: plane trees whose roots rucked up the pavements and left unsocketed cobblestones heaped there like black eggs; white rainy skies like blank pages; the parks’ banana and palm trees soaked in the humid rain-fog, the air seething with mute life, a perpetual now of ancient plant data unfolding into a future that would be the same as it ever was – all of that stuff. I’d fall for these joys so deeply that I’d fall out of love with the drink, with the drugs, with memory.

But a place can’t solve anyone’s problems, especially if it’s a real place. Life couldn’t defeat memory, not here, not while it was my life, especially not while I was the one living it. I’d found myself in one of those neighbourhoods that were getting mentioned in lifestyle supplements as ‘up and coming’ and affordable for a ‘young creative’. I had assumed that ‘young creative’ meant a broke artist or  musician – someone like  me – but it must have really meant someone in marketing, or computers: the same logic that had made Dublin unliveable. Cheap apartment blocks were shooting up all around, and the unseasonal rains – which made me feel like I’d had a year of non-stop winter – melted the muck-hills that had been dug up all over the place. It was starting to feel like I hadn’t left Dublin at all. I’d charge around the place on foot, pitting my tiny atom against the grid of the map until it felt like my hamstrings could snap. I’d count up the bones that birds hadn’t pecked meatless, try to get the numbers to add up to something meaningful in my head: wingbones, leg bones, rags of meat trodden black, shreds of cartilage, tiny batter-clad ribcages that looked to me like the tiny hulls of boats, and, now and then, that one lucky bone which had been plucked and stripped to a clean blue shine: a game I’d played in Dublin. Even the thick tubercular damp in my room smelled the same as my Dublin room, even the juddery football streams were the same, even the baking-soda odour of my own pants drying on the chair was the same.

The only thing that was new was the drugs. It was absurdly easy to buy heroin here. I’d go tottering around the sadder edges of the Barrio Gótico, brown gloomy streets where a canopy of washing swayed overhead and the windows burbled with TV stations in all the languages of the world. There were colonnades where men would lean with their backs to the sun-warmed pillars and give backward nods and little thumbs-ups, hissing ‘Hashish? Coca?’, and that’d be it, I’d just have to say ‘Y qué más?’ and the offer would not be long about coming.

I was living off some money that had been left to me by my maternal grandfather. His will had caused consternation in my family, and the money felt cursed to me. I’d had it sitting burning in my account since my grandfather’s death in 2002, when I’d been fourteen. I hadn’t touched it until I went on leave from my PhD course, shortly before getting out of Dublin. Now, I was trying to construct a way to end my own story in some kind of passive-aggressive suicide. I had the feeling that if I were to continue on, I’d just create another generation of pain. If I were to build a foundation on this cursed money, it would collapse around my ears. The money was hot, like burning coals that I needed to chuck out of my pockets. I intended to use the inheritance as fuel, to burn myself into escape velocity.

There was a guy who’d volunteered with me on the soup run back in Dublin, who’d disappeared for a while. He returned looking sheepish one week, and told me, in a low confidential voice, that he’d had a relapse, had had to get his head clear before he’d trust himself going outside with active drug users again.

—Did you feel awful? I asked. We were standing beside the Daniel O’Connell statue just up from the bridge. A cluster of people was around us, waiting for soup, sandwiches, whatever we had. Moments like these always felt like when there’s a rush on tables in a restaurant: it’s scary, but in an adrenal way, maybe the way ice-skaters feel when they’re speeding intricate laps of a rink. The terror of letting someone down ensures that you let nobody down.

—I do now, he said, putting the lid back on. —But that’s just pride. Ego. All the time I’d built up clean, down the jacks. Maybe I needed to lose it to lose the ego and do it right this time.

—Fair, I said, counting out plastic-wrapped sandwiches, handing them to my friend so he could pass them out to the woman’s kids.

—But at the time, my friend said, I felt fucking superb.

—How did you do it?

—Wrapped myself up in a blanket, crawled in a wardrobe. Huffed away through a jacks-roll tube off of foil.

—That doesn’t sound too scary, I said.

—Oh, it isn’t he said. —That’s the problem.

When he’d said that to me, it had felt like someone stamping my passport.

 

I’d got my first bag of heroin just downstairs, in the little bar that was at the bottom of my building. The bar had a Vietnamese name that’s lost to me, if I ever even had it. The walls were decked with photos that showed rags of fog tearing against pine-studded crags, terraced fields, winding mountain pathways, lonely cottages overlooking valleys. There was a courtyard of beige gravel and dead acacias out the back. This, I thought to myself, as I sat down with my sweating caña at one of the metal tables, was what Europe really felt like. I picked at a flake in the paint with my nail. I was sitting close enough to the door to see inside, to where an old TV was showing Barcelona pasting Getafe or someone like that. The young couple who ran the bar leaned on the copper, smoking and speaking in a language I didn’t recognize. After a while a man of around fifty shambled in the door, with a salute to the young couple. Even though it was a hot day, he was wearing a dirty rain-mac open over a white shirt that had begun to yellow. The man behind the bar shook his hand, while the woman just nodded, her arms folded, looking a little concerned. The man in the raincoat saw me in the courtyard and pointed, as though asking their permission to go through. The woman looked at the TV. Her boyfriend or husband nodded a little over-eagerly. I watched the man in the raincoat come towards me, issuing me the same salute.

—Buenas tardes, he said, as he neared my table. He had a bundle of scratch cards hanging from one hand. His pockets were stuffed with postcards that showed dribbly ink and watercolour pictures of the Sagrada Familia and the Casa Batlló and Parque Güell and so on, except there were long dribbly human faces growing out of all of the lines, and the ink in which they were drawn was so watery that the bright colours made me feel afraid of him.

—No hablo español, I said. This was untrue: I’m a quick learner, and I like languages. I just wanted to get rid of this guy who seemed to be some kind of hakwer. —Perdón.

—Oh, that’s quite alright, he answered in English that had a BBC sort of edge to it, and pulled out a chair. May I?

He had a tingling sound rising from him, a high tintinnabulation like when a lightbulb is about to burn out, and the noise almost had a smell, a mosquito smell: that’s how my head described it.

He sat down opposite me, but didn’t take off his coat. I could smell the sweat from him – that orangey sort of shut-in-all-day tang, the kind I recognised from my own pores.

—I don’t really want to buy these, though, I said, and pushed the scratch cards towards him. I’m not from Spain. So if I won I couldn’t claim them.

The raincoat man chuckled. —Oh, I’m not selling them.

The guy who ran the bar was approaching, carrying an espresso on a saucer. Raincoat Man collected it and thanked him, then thanked him again as the guy who ran the bar took a battered white envelope from under his arm and handed this over as well.

—Ah, qué maravilla, said Raincoat Man, wagging the envelope in thanks. It looked heavy.

Raincoat Man pulled the top off a sachet of sugar and poured it into his cup. He watched me watching him, smiling with one side of his mouth. The light was picking out flecks of grey in the spots he’d missed while shaving.

—Star Trek, he said.

—I don’t follow, chief.

—How I learned English, he said. From watching Star Trek.

—Cool. I lifted my glass. I felt a horrible doomed pressure landing on me. These were the only people I was ever going to meet. I’d begun my social life wanting to meet writers. Now I was just bouncing around with the dregs, the roaches, in the mesh of a gutter.

—Salud, he said. Or, should I say, sláinte.

—Oh, very good. Very good.

Raincoat Man picked up the scratch cards and fluttered them with the edge of his thumb, shaking his head.

—The forgeries get lazier every year. Look. He picked at the edge of the silver square that you were meant to scratch off. The whole square lifted off in one go. Cheap, cheap.

—Well spotted.

—Yes. He stroked the side of his neck as though it hurt, then sipped his coffee. You know, I’ve seen you.

—Oh yeah? I felt a sinking.

—Yes. Up on your balcony. He mimed sucking on a joint. A bit of this, no?

A clammy chill crept the back of my neck.

—I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just arrived.

He tutted and swatted the air with his hand.

—Oh, please, don’t give me these preliminaries. I’m not going to arrest you. I just want to save you a little money, that’s all. He reached into his raincoat pocket and dropped a small plastic bag of something that looked like dirt on the table. How much do you spend on marijuana per week? Roughly.

—Not a huge amount.

—But probably still too much. The notorious precio de extranjero, no?

—It is what it is.

—Yes, well. He nudged the bag towards me with the tip of one finger.

—Give me fifty for that, he said.

—I don’t really do powder drugs, I lied. I’d often snorted stuff at college parties without knowing really what it was.

He gave a one-shoulder shrug, his face suddenly sad. He tutted again, then took a scuffed laminate that showed his grinning face with the word POLICIA underneath and said, —Well, let’s make sure, shall we? With a little look around your home.

The chill on my neck turned to heat. The badge might be no more real than the scratch cards, but I couldn’t know that. I wanted to call him a cunt, but all I did was hold his gaze, shaking my head, and take out my wallet. I peeled off the fifty meant to do for that week’s food and forked it over between my index and middle fingers.

—Much obliged, said Raincoat Man, and pocketed the money. He drained his cup. Like I said, I saved you some money. He got to his feet, tapped beside the baggie, and then said, —Now put that away, and have a fine evening.

I looked at the baggie on the table for a moment, trying to figure out how I was supposed to feel. I figured I’d be in trouble if I saw this guy again. I had no idea if he was a type, or if he was bluffing, but it’d be the last time I went to that bar, I told myself, and that cooled the panic down a bit. But under those two feelings there was something else, a crawling, dark sort of a sensation, like something picking in and around the gaps between my ribs, and that was the part of me that was glad I’d spent fifty quid on a load of old mud that had probably been stepped on about a dozen times between Afghanistan and here. I had an excuse if I took it now. Buying it had been for the greater good, and now, if I got fucked up on it, I wouldn’t be drinking so much: so I’d be saving money, essentially, as the cop had said. I swept the little baggie into the inner pocket of my leather jacket with the palm of my hand. It was probably too warm to be wearing one, but I never felt the warmth anymore – I was too thin, too shaky. I watched the man go, his raincoat’s tails bouncing a little in the draught of his walking. The young woman behind the bar didn’t take her glare from his back, while her boyfriend exhaled heavily in relief and leaned on the copper countertop. I drank off my second beer and brought the two glasses back in.

—I’m really sorry, the man running the bar said.

—Who was that?

—It doesn’t matter, the young man said.

—A cop, the woman said. A bad one. Don’t think about him again.

—I’ll try, I said, then left, heading back upstairs to the apartment. I dropped the bag of heroin on the plastic table on the balcony and looked at it for a while, rubbing my mouth. Below, some teenagers were breakdancing to remixes of old classic soul songs while a glycerine-orange sun went down, igniting the windows. I went inside for my laptop, looked up ‘easy ways to take heroin’ on the Internet, and then got a sheet of foil from the drawer, a toilet-roll tube from the bin, and settled down with the fullest of the cigarette lighters that I kept buying and losing. The lighter hissed under the foil. I put on ‘Cortez the Killer’, turned up the speakers, and lowered my face to the toilet-roll tube and the toilet-roll tube to the heroin. My veins felt like they were full of rust-coloured smoke, with black flakes of cinders turning over and over.

A couple of weeks later, I injected for the first time. The landlord had informed me that somebody else was moving into the apartment, and I wanted to be calm and affable enough to receive her. She’d be tired. If she was moving here, she’d have a load of stuff with her, and would want to just drop anchor, figure things out calmly. It felt imperative to me that she find a friendly face at the door. This would require drugs. I was, by that point, on my fourth or fifth baggie, and there wasn’t much left in it – I wouldn’t get  enough out of smoking it. This combination of circumstances – the new tenant, and my meagre supply – was force majeure. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t even my desire. I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice, so I couldn’t get in trouble with myself over it. With a theatrical sigh I sat down on the bed, peeled off my sock, and got out a syrette from the pack of twenty-four that I’d picked up at the pharmacy. This had posed me no problems: I could be a tourist whose aged mother had diabetes. I could have diabetes myself.

The little ritual of the syringe and the needle required patience. It required mastery over the tingle of excitement that made me want to huff down fat lines of it all in one go. I needed to surf the anxiety, breathe, time every gesture like I was about to perform transubstantiation. I took an old Nescafé jar filled with cool boiled water from the fridge. I washed my hands. I wiped down my spoon. I uncapped the syrette, looked down the tip. It looked like a little tunnel. It made me think of underground rivers carrying me down and out of myself. With the syrette I drew up a little water and let it dribble onto the powder, then swabbed the syrette’s blunt end to mix. I’d nicked a large spoon from a cantina, washed and washed and washed it until it wasn’t even blemished anymore. From a tourist shop I’d picked up a large lighter shaped like a blowtorch. This I now ignited under the spoon. The mix filled the needle. It was cosmic-latte colour. I tightened the belt, wiped a swab that I’d microwaved over the veins of my wrist, so that the heat would make the veins stand out more. I chose one that branched into the palm of my hand and slowly inched the needle in. The nick and the long, slow sting blurred into a warm wave of pressure that welled into the tips of my fingers. I could feel the vein’s pathway through my skin light up. The wave rolled backwards, spread across my palm, and then the dose sped through me, and I felt myself scatter in little vanishing yellow photons. A long ragged groan escaped me. I heard small deep clicks in my body as the tension melted and my body seemed to lose its outline, becoming a pulsation in a void. This was the nowhere place nothing else could ever get me to. I felt an all-over body shiver, a geyser rearing five hundred feet into the air, and, when the geyser dropped, breaking, back towards my body, everything was different there, my head a globe of fog that pulsed with light, my blood a fizz, the tight elastics of my tendons and muscles all baggy and unstrung, loosened into peace. It no longer scared me to be in my body.

 

Towards evening, the doorbell rang. I looked at my wrist. The mark looked like a little mosquito bite. Nobody would notice, especially if I wore a watch, which I probably never would remember to, so I dabbed on disinfectant cream that smelled like the one my mother would put on my scraped knees when I was small, and capped the gob with a circular little beige plaster.

I took the spare keys from the hook, opened the door, and saw a woman a little older than me standing there wearing a pink sweater that matched the massive Samsonite she was hauling. She seemed to jerk back from me a little. I didn’t blame her. I had run for the door, given myself a bad dose of the spins, and now I was swaying while I waited for them to fade. Weird shapes like blown sand were moving around the sides of my vision.

—I, she said. I’m supposed to move in here?

—Well hello there, I said. The fluffs on her sweater looked like they were moving in slow, blown skeins, like sand being chased into manes by wind.

—You. You going to let me in?

—Oh. Yeah. Here. Let me drag that.

—Thank you. Her accent sounded American. As I took the handle I saw that she had a snake tattooed on the back of her hand, a nose-ring, and a dyed blonde bob wrapped in a headscarf, and she was wearing a long beige trenchcoat with a big wool scarf, even though it was warm out there.

The effort of interacting with her gave me white headrush needles that flocked my vision.

—Do you need to sit down? she said.

—Oh yeah, that’d be brilliant. I flopped onto the edge of her bed. Jesus Christ.

—Let me get you some water, she said, and went up the hall to the kitchen.

—I should show you around, I said, weakly, as she returned with a brimming San Miguel glass that I’d nicked from a pub.

—You should sit there for a bit, I think.

—Yeah. I suppose. How are you anyway?

—Fine. Long flight. She sat down on the office chair by the desk.

—Yeah? From where?

—Mexico, she said.

—Ah. That’s class. I’d love to go there. Do you mind if I smoke?

—If you let me have one.

—Yeah, alright. I fiddled the box out of my coat pocket. You from Mexico, so?

She nodded.

—I’m here for a conference. Geology.

—Badass.

—Family tradition, she said, with a shrug, then told me about her father working for Pemex, how she’d go on trips with him up to Saltillo, in the north, how they’d gone walking through a canyon one Sunday, how she’d seen big crags stained all over with little white flecks of calcite that looked like writing, how she’d looked deep into the splits within the grey rock, how her Dad had told her that they were looking back through millions of years to when they’d all formed, how on top of the rocks were cactus with neon orange swirls running through the colours of their needles, and purple flowers blooming out the top of them, and how her father had said how the minerals in the water they took in gave their flesh and their needles and their flowers those colours, how this meant that nothing really disappeared, only changed. She had been thinking about this the whole way across to the far side of the canyon, to the lip on the other side, from which they’d looked down at what her father had told her was the vast floor of a long-gone sea. She had felt the stone mountains blurring into the reefs of which they were the remains, had heard the sound of wind singing in the wires like gulls, had felt the frail howl of far-off cars running through her sternum, making it shake, like the cars were an orchestra. Heat shimmered orange above the overpasses, like a slow, cool fire.

I sat there looking at my feet. I felt as though I hadn’t seen anything in my life. The closest I’d come was the night I’d robbed a bottle of whiskey out of the security booth back in college and gone marching across the red hide of kelp that coated the sand of the beach beyond Ringsend. Hearing Helen talk, I felt it all again: the salt smell in my nose, so strong that it hurt to breathe, and the curing scald of the Green Spot as I  continued up the strand, heading for what looked to me like cliffs but was probably only a bank of rocks.

I swayed on the cliffs, feeling their dark outlines resolve into soundwaves beneath my feet. I saw history and geology as sound for a moment, the million-year crashings and rendings that had brought us here, and the destructions ahead, the ones that would leave these shapes hanging in nowhere as a swirling echo of dust and water-vapour. It should have put my pain in perspective, this sort of thing, but it only added to it. The wind made swallowtails of my greatcoat and chased the tassels of my scarf ticklishly against my cheek. I could see boats, poignant dabs of yellow on the sea’s gulfing black. Solid rocks of pain lay under the water, I felt sure, and I wondered if I couldn’t drain myself out maybe, get to those rocks, slowly start to bore them away.

Further up along the coast, on a spit of rock, I could see cormorants – most dozing, some diving, lit up by the lights of some kind of warehouse behind a fence from them. Those birds’ eyes had a fierce gleam to them, focused only on the dive, on the cold, on the rear and splash of the water, wings flaring deep. I toasted them from the rocks. They were so much braver than me. It was only cowardice holding me back from the edge. Sometimes I’d lift my foot into the void. I did it now. Standing on one foot, above the shimmering water, I took another big slug of the Green Spot, tottered, heard a sob break from my throat, saw a brief frame from Alvin and the Chipmunks where one of them falls off a pier and into deep blue water, scrabbling for his glasses. He says aloud, My glasses and the words go up in a cloud of bubbles. I assume he survived. I don’t remember how. I caught my footing, flattened myself to the outcrop with all the fossils. I didn’t really want to die. I was just setting up the circumstances in which I might die by accident, so as to avoid having to do it to myself. I didn’t really want it. I stumbled, heard my own moan of disappointment and shock, heard how stupid and pathetic I sounded, imagined the dumb look on my face when people pulled me green and fish-nibbled out of the sea whatever number of days after I was reported missing.

—Fuck, man, my English is going to sleep, Helen said. You want to show me where the coffee is?

—Oh, shit, I said. Yeah. I let a couple of seconds pass until the headrush faded, then told her to follow me to the kitchen. I went right to the fridge, took out a can for myself, remembered my manners, reached in for a second, offered it to Helen.

—Oh, that’s OK, she said, holding a hand up. I don’t do that anymore.

—That’s cool, I said, and started to mess around with the percolator until it was making the right kind of guzzling noise. I rubbed my breastbone. The gargle and snore of it sounded the way my breathing did some mornings, that slow, laboured suction like a soaked pair of bellows going in and out. The carafe started to fill. I said to Helen that her English was better than mine even when she was jetlagged and she laughed and said she’d gone out with a gringa, some embassy brat who’d been to international schools, never learned Spanish, couldn’t even say her name right: and so she’d just said her name was Helen instead of putting up with the way their accents bent her real name out of shape. And then she’d gone to the States to finish university, because she’d been living in Monterrey during the city’s bad years. The noise and lights of police helicopters would wake her up in early mornings. One morning, getting a bus, she’d looked up, seen parts of bodies hanging from the overpass. Sometimes she’d sit down at her work bench and a lab partner might come in with his face looking like a smushed-up strawberry from the cops beating the shit out of him.

—You want to live when you’re young, she said. You want to live, whatever age you are. But everywhere I turned, no matter the time of day, no matter where I was, no matter who I was with, I was just seeing the violence everywhere.

I watched the coffee brim to the surface.

—Shit, I said.

—Yeah, she said. She poked at her nose-ring. Real shit.

I flicked the switch off, poured her a cup, handed it across. Standing there, listening to her, my coat on over my underpants like it was a bathrobe, the nap of it still soaked from last night’s rain, I felt small, like mine was pretend chaos, pretend suffering, pretend intensity. There was a dark thrum of something that was not quite envy going through my blood. It could have been admiration, or maybe I just felt intimidated, but there was a hot beat to it that made the outline of my body feel shaky. I felt like a bucket of loose ends, some of them spilling over the sides: the books I hadn’t been able to write, the poems I’d given up on mid-draft, the songs I’d half-learned to play on the guitar before just noodling around on the fretboard, waltzing slowly out of time, getting bored, leaving it down.

—We could go for a walk or something, Helen said, rubbing her eyes. I’m trying to fight jetlag. They say you shouldn’t sleep. You can show me around a bit.

—Yeah, why not, I said. Although I’d say you know this place as well as I do.

—I just got here.

—Ah, I never remember where I end up.

She was looking at me steadily.

—Is it a bit out of control?

—What?

—The. She gave a chin-jut at the can I was drinking from. I felt a draught ripple hard over my skin, like a plane was taking off right in front of me.

—I saw the little bag, she said. On your table. And little bags. Plural. On the floor.

I felt like the floor was about to open under my feet. That was me out on my ear.

—Don’t worry, Helen said. It’s OK. It’ll take more than that to faze me.

She reached into her pocket, took out keys that hung from a black keyring that had a gold circle on it, with the letters ‘NA’ embossed at the centre.

—Oh, I said.

—I’ve got like seven years off everything like that, she said.

—But you’re like my age.

—It got bad very young. She pocketed the keys. So, you know, if it gets bad, you can ask me anything, it’s cool.

—And you’re OK being around all that?

—OK, no, she said. Like, I’d prefer not to see it. But honestly you could snort lines of it off my forearm and I don’t think I’d feel tempted, no, not at this stage.

—That’s badass, I said. Wow.

She gave me a little shrug.

—It is what it is, she said.

—And what was your. You know.

—Drug of choice? She shook her head as she took the cup from my hand. I don’t reminisce about that sort of thing.

—Ah. OK. Got it.

—You ever been to Mexico?

—Me? No. I wish. You’re lucky you’re getting me while I’m tired. I’d be pumping you with questions about the place otherwise. I do this to everyone I meet from there.

—You should go. Helen eased herself back against the counter.

—Yeah. Maybe. I squinted at the percolator. The coffee looked good. It might pull me out of the glue of my own tiredness. But my stomach felt like it had holes burned in it. For a long time I’d thought that I’d discovered a secret to happiness by just reducing all of my concerns to these questions of velocity, heroin versus coffee versus alcohol versus cocaine versus acid versus weed versus whatever it was that was in the stuff we called MDMA, reducing whatever self I had to long streamers of particles shooting through the void, and managing their flow. But it was getting really boring, and also sort of confusing. I rubbed my eyes hard, like I wanted to smush them with my knuckles, and groaned.

—What happened to you? She was squinting at me, but with a sort of a neutral curiosity.

I was holding a cup of coffee that I didn’t remember pouring. I watched the bubbles spin and pop. I wanted to tell Helen how my mother had shoved me out of her body with such tremendous force that she buckled her own back into a big ‘S’ shape. I wanted to tell Helen that my birth had brought on thyroid problems for my mother, and post-partum depression. I wanted to tell Helen that I didn’t blame my mother for resenting me over it. I wanted to tell Helen how I felt as thought I’d been sped out of that womb too fast, so that I wound up feeling that the womb had never had trustworthy walls, and neither did the world, and so now I just needed to get that feeling to happen whatever way was available.

But I didn’t say that.

We were walking from the kitchen back into her room. She unzipped her bag. She hadn’t brought much, and all of it looked carefully folded. A smell of fabric softener bloomed out. She crouched before a drawer, dropped in a bale of T-shirts.

I was rubbing my upper arms like I was cold, or itchy: my nerves couldn’t decide. With a yogic smoothness Helen rolled up from where she was hunkering before the drawers, dusted off her hands, and said, —Walk?

I thought about it for a second, heaved myself up off the office chair I’d let myself fall into, then heard and felt a sigh rise out of me.

—Yeah, go on then, I said.

 

Somehow it was evening already. The last of the rainclouds had burned off, leaving a brownish sky. We walked towards the sea. Now and again Helen put her hand on my shoulder and drew me back, saying, —You’re running.

—I’m crap at weekends, I said. I don’t know how to slow down.

Ale-coloured sea-fog was rolling in over the pier. Couples and families and dogs were doing their thing. It should have been nice. It was nice. But I was barely noticing any of it. I had that tight anxiety like a ball under my ribs. It was stopping me enjoying any of this. I needed something to loosen it up. Every yawk of every gull, every skirl of car-brakes, every kid’s sudden laugh, they seemed to turn into white spikes in the centre of my brain.

She squinted at the horizon. Clouds like fiery wool were slowly rolling together into the beginning of a storm. We’d found our way to a little café near the end of a pier. A family of four was sitting near us, quietly working through plates of chips. Now and then the two boys – blond, fourish, sixish – would look over at us, and then look away.

—And do you know anyone in Mexico? Helen said.

—You’re really keen on me going there, aren’t you, I said.

—I’m a massive patriot when I’m not living there, it’s true.

—That’s concerning.

—No, but it’s just, I know someone who’s opened an English school. And he’s not a total basket-case. So. I can send an email.

—Huh, I said. I felt a tension go out of my back.

—It’s in a beautiful neighbourhood, she said. Lots of plants.

—I saw these pictures once, I said. In one of these old encyclopedias that my Grandad had. It was just this load of men and women climbing up immense branches through a canopy of big green leaves. And there were Spanish people riding on top of the branches, pushing down with lances. But the leaves were shielding some of the men and women below. They were like shields, somehow. And there was this huge sky of pure light, a big yellow nowhere. I think. And people on a cliff, pointing towards the sun.

—Oh, I know that one, she said. Rivera. Yeah. It’s in Cuernavaca. In Cortés’s old house.

—A basic reference, I assume. This is silly.

—No, no, it’s really good. Everybody likes those murals. Because they’re really good.

I drank my Valpolicella, I looked at the sea. The waiter brought the bill, an apologetic look on his face.

—We’re changing shifts, he said. I’ve to wrap up.

—Yeah, that’s alright, I said, and slid my card out of my wallet.

—Thanks. Let me get the terminal.

He slipped off again, back towards the restaurant.

The digits of my card were dusty with heroin. I wet my finger, dabbed it up, flipped the card over, found more embedded in the backs of the numbers, then swabbed my gums with the loaded finger. I sat back, took a swig of wine, let the loosening feeling spread through me. A last ripple of blue was visible in the air. It was my favourite colour, that faded, washed-out cyan. I knew that colour from sitting at the back of English class, my homework done, staring dazed out at the cool rinsed blue of the air above the Black Abbey. The hull of a rising plane glinted down at me, from the top of a cotton-thick vapour-trail. It looked like the ripper my mother would use to cut across the seams of her sewing work: usually the sleeves of my school jumper, which I’d worry with my fingers and gnaw with my teeth. That colour went a long way back in my head, to that moment with the encyclopedias in my Grandad’s house. There was more to it than the colours, but I didn’t want to tell Helen the rest.

I don’t remember where everybody was on the evening that I found the books, but I can guess: my grandfather upstairs asleep, my father hacking away at the bush of yellow roses, my mother stretched out on the sun-chair, swaying herself back and forth with her toe, trying to focus on the book open in front of her. I’d found a book on her dresser, beside some tablets in a brown bottle, the cover blue, showing a chalk outline of a curvy nude woman whose hair mapped the shapes of her hips. This book said that it was necessary for a person with the thyroid problem my mother had to rest a lot, so I had to be quiet a lot, and my father had to be out of the house a lot. I’d grown bored with being the only one who had to stay inside, in this tank of headachey light.

The rooms had that rice-paper smell of shut-in dust. I can see myself clearly as I was on that evening: skinny, nine, my knees up past my shoulders, my face cupped in my hands, like a little gargoyle. My eyes moved over the cords in the carpet, over the chintzy nap and tassels of the couches and armchairs, and then over the walls, a framed Sgt. Pepper sleeve with its faded morning blue, photos of the uncles whose names I wasn’t allowed to mention in front of anybody, a stained-glass window whose green and red and purple plates framed George Best pumping the air with both his fists, and a pencil sketch by my mother of Oliver Plunkett, his flowing hair and thin beard making him look a bit like a girl but also somehow more like a man than either my father or grandfather looked. All of it saddened me. I felt too young to be near so many old things. I looked over at the bookshelf by the TV, saw a row of encyclopedias with frayed cloth covers, the little lattices of the weave showing through, but enough of the blue still lingered for me to feel like the peaceful blue of the Sgt. Pepper sleeve had dripped into these books somehow. I pulled one out, felt a book knock my fingers, saw a paperback whose black cover showed a goat’s skull wearing reins on it, tea-dark patches showing through the seams and the torn corners. My mother had told me never to touch that one: it had belonged to my uncle, the one I hadn’t seen since he’d explained the word jubilant to me one day, his voice so deep and tarry that it had almost sounded to me like the heart of a tree speaking. I pushed it back into the dark gap left by the encyclopedia I’d pulled out. The corners of the encyclopedia had softened, and the cloth was fraying.

My mother and father were talking at the same time when they came in. They were loud, but didn’t sound angry. When I looked up my father threw a packet of crisps at me. I checked the label on the crisps to see if they had the little inked sprig of a leaf that meant they were vegetarian. My father sat into the armchair behind where I was on the floor so I could lean back against his shins, jouncing his feet rhythmically against the small of my back. He turned on the TV. A song blared out, an urgent, clanging guitar and a woman’s breathy voice.

—God, my mother said. Ice clinked in her wine-glass. You remember that one?

—I do, yeah, my Da said, scratching his eyebrow, watching the screen. There was a World Cup match on that night.

—Blondie, isn’t it, he said.

My mother sucked in and huffed out a long breath and said, —Hop the ball, won’t you, Paul, once in a way.

My father frowned. Another ad started. Trumpets whined, drums clattered, and I could nearly smell the frying at the restaurants on the screen, nearly smell the flares. My body ached for elsewhere. Now a train was blurring at high speed past hospitals and graveyards and fountains and hillsides, heading towards the great spaceship glitter of a stadium where everyone was howling, alive, eyes huge and giddy, like horses that have realized at one and the same time both that they must bolt and cannot bolt. It felt too much. I looked down at the book, turned the page. I ran my finger over the oil-shine of the word MEXICO printed in bold across the image, like a label for the source of that huge, delirious colour and feeling rippling through me. Every molecule was in ebullition, atoms zipping through nowhere. There was a leaf-cool to the greens on the page. It calmed me a bit. I turned the page, saw the words MEXICO CITY in a caption under a skyline of glassy towers that appeared to be moving towards me through steam.

The ads ended, the speakers changed to the noise of crowds, and I heard a referee’s whistle, while my mother uncrossed her legs, crossed them again on the other side, and said, —Here we go – another hour and a half I won’t get back, while my father huffed out another heavy breath.

—What? my mother said.

—I didn’t say anything. My father’s voice was tired. He watched them kick off, but I could tell he wasn’t able to really watch. It was England against Argentina. I had on the bootleg Michael Owen Liverpool jersey they had gotten me on holidays. The TV was on really loud. My mother was rotating a finger and thumb against her temples.

—I’d love that to be me, I said, watching Michael Owen receive the ball on the far left and sprint towards the box.

—Yes, well, that won’t be happening, my mother said, in a voice that made me think of a stapler pressing down, just that clipped, final sound, leaving holes that never went away. I felt like a ball had slapped me in the belly and knocked all the air out of me. The picture on the screen didn’t go blurry, but I wasn’t able to look at it properly now: it was an image of embarrassment. I was too stunned to make any noise. But I still wanted to pretend. That’s what the TV was for.

—Jesus, Ber, my Da said.

—It won’t happen, she said, quietly this time. She took her hand away from her head and rested her temple against the corner of the armchair. You’d have to be making waves by now if you were going to get that far.

I could feel my mouth pulling down at the corners. It’s not that I wanted to cry, I just didn’t have a choice. My Da shook his head.

—Tell me I’m wrong, she said to him, then turned towards me. Her eyes moved over me coldly, watching the hurt spread through my face. The only thing holding the tears back was my own shock at the sting in my body and my eyes. Anyway, you don’t want to be around those people. Footballers. Successful people. They’re all arseholes. Every single one.

—Ah, God, Ber, and teaching him bad language on top of it?

—Be quiet, she said, then closed her eyes and rested her head on her hand, her elbow propped on the armrest. They’re psychopaths. Denis Irwin. Roy Keane. Fucking psychopaths. Why would you want a psychopath. They’re just what happens when the people who pick on you in school get big and get paid.

My Da huffed in and out again and said, —OK, Ber. OK.

My mother was depressed for most of my early life. For a couple of years of it, she raised my sister and me more or less alone, as my father worked in England for her brother’s company. She’d queue up to buy VHSes so she could tape the cartoons for my sister and me, under these horrible Kilkenny afternoons where the buildings and the clouds are the same tint and weight. She’d do that even when she’d rather have been anywhere else.

Now I just had to wait out the stinging that had my body feeling emptied out. It was like after you got a kick or a box in the nuts and you had that sick feeling in your tummy afterwards. There was nothing you could do, you couldn’t rub it away or get the magic sponge, you could only wait. The hurt in what my Ma had said had gone through my ears rather than hitting my skin but the way to get past that pain was the same as if it was a belt or a box or whatever, you just had to wait long enough and it went away. I sucked in a deep breath and felt my chest shudder, looked down at the page and ran my finger over the green of the leaves in the photo, tried to feel their cool flow into me, pushing back the hot threat of tears. The green made me think of the ruined quarry two fields over from our house. There was a tunnel feeling to the way the trees arched together. There was a clump of nettles there. My mother was convinced it was a mass grave, because nettles fed on the calcium that leaks out of bones when they split underground. She’d point to the purple flowers with the woody stems that had spread through the grass like a little lick of fire, feeding on the potash from explosions. She could say anything, really, and I’d never know if I believed it, but I always felt a sort of a draught moving through my chest when she got heavy like that, as though a lorry had just sped past me at close range.

David Beckham had just kicked Simeone in the back of the calf and my Da was shaking his head. The crying feeling had gone now. I dropped my head, let the last of the pain beat itself quiet inside me, looked down through the encyclopedia pictures, right into Mexico, diving into the colours  before me: a humid river-smell of underground rock rising from the pictures of the statues, the stun of light cutting in from above and cleaning my head empty, that faded morning blue over the dancing shapes of Diego Rivera’s Teatro de los Insurgentes mural, light winking on banana-farmers’ machetes like the picture was made of metal rather than ink on paper. That green, that blue: those colours had already become an escape. I knew I had to go there, even if the real place looked nothing like the pictures. Something was waking up inside me. I needed to make space for whatever it was, because it was trying to live through me.

I heard Helen’s feet crunch across the gravel. The waiter was on his way back with the terminal.

—If you pay for this you’re in trouble, Helen said, lunging for her handbag.

—C’mon, you only had a water. Don’t be silly. I slid the card into the terminal, tapped in my PIN.

—Well, you have no choice then, Helen said, tapping on her phone.

—What?

—I’m emailing that friend with the school, she said.

I pocketed my wallet and followed her out of the garden of the bar, towards the lights that were switching on one by one along the curve of the waterfront. I saw an unlit pier jutting out into the sea, a black rectangle surrounded by the sea’s bigger blackness. Then its lights came on, too, little white beads that pulsed into the dark, and we kept on walking.

To read the rest of Dublin Review 86, you may purchase the issue here.