Without fear or looking I can roll a cigarette – but the act of walking to a shop when I have no tobacco has become a very sad, held-back thing.

All those bright packets and the faces of the many in the shop, all the clicking of irritated limbs when someone steps in front of you at a checkout is old. Real old.

I see now that when D and I ripped off the hippy girls in a house vast years ago we were right and wrong in most respects.

Removed from a bar in Cavan. Interpretive dance was still in its inland infancy and a new problem for the bar people there and we pleaded our case but were slung into the snow humped street.
Alright, we said, our friends would finish the gig and we would get in the car and everything would clamp its jaws, go home and to bed.

They did leave with equipment but that was ten minutes after us and we were disinherited. We were to have no lift they said, drove off with V signs out of the dirty van windows and we got into a phone booth in the strange street and held each other. Lately we had been at odds with each other so I felt oddly moved.
D did not.
He kept a tirade about death and snow going and smoked Silk Cut with fury.

Cavan town late at night is the same as every Irish town, just buildings and things that went on in them over a desperate double-century. To see them in winter is and always will be on the wrong side of melancholy.
Yes, there is a Chinese restaurant.
No, there is no soul or hope.
There was a few quids worth of speed and dope and we used the former roughly between embraces in the booth. The weather huffed like God trapped in a freezer for years let out to gasp at windows.

Close to the side entrance of the pub was where I left a bottle of despair-vodka some hours before the gig – I have always planned ahead.

Never wanting to leave the phone box I gave D the directions to the booze and after hardly a step outside he fell in the snow and I was in hysterics and inconsolable until he got up and faced the box. His face was always a thing that women loved but now it had little speckles of tears, snow and blood.
Much better for me to view it like that. His fear of the outdoors stank the place.

Even now, the joy of seeing someone hurt badly in front of me is too much. I log all these things and when I feel blue I replay again and again.

Minutes passed, D came back.
He had fifteen punts, I had five. His father was a car dealer; mine worked at a filling station at that same garage in Monaghan.
It was a lot colder on the street come three a.m and the booth didn’t seem like home anymore so we got rid of enough speed to keep our hearts running all night.
D started to cry, it was awful and we were getting frozen bit by bit.

Way off down the glacier street there was a light and we walked, wrapped up and staggering, swigging that downmarket filth vod. When we got down there it turned out to be a chips place just closing and we knocked on the door like maniacs. An old woman came out and said she would phone the Guards.

Over everything was a gradual nightmare of flying ice and shadows looked warmer in its closeness. In the space between home and the hatefulness of small town Ireland we sat down in the snow by the door.
Beaten. Gone. Whipped and hirsute.

The bottle kept passing and a huge animal wind looked mighty, coming snow chased down through Cavan and its boast of a lake for every year. It danced up our jeans, whorebreath chill and we didn’t see them coming, shouting from a house on the other side.
Two hippies. Women hippies. Hippies.

Coats were heaped on us and we walked stiffly across the road to a tie-dyed place where the dead had the wall space. Morrison and all those cunts were there. A big fire was going and they had whiskey and dope. I still wonder if we hadn’t got long hair would they have left us to the Wendigo ripping down Cavan Street?
I would have eaten D when he died and had plans already to toast his lips with a Zippo before they arrived.

We were happy and after we shared the end of the speed and some good long pulls on their ornamental hippie pipe, D made the beast with two backs with one and I the other. It doesn’t seem real and for the most part I spouted Kavanagh and lasted four minutes, if that.

I remember jerking off in the bathroom some hours later having had a quiet hit off the dope we didn’t admit to. I could see a face but it looked like my dead aunt and a whole host of sexless primary school teachers I had known.
Came in the sink and can’t recall if I rinsed.

D eventually got up and seemed sweaty and rushed about leaving the girl he was with. Caz or Nancy or Sinead or Fuck-knows was still passed out on the floor beside me.

He grabbed the whiskey, a few slices of bread and we left and began hitchhiking.
Hours passed. We couldn’t even speak.
An artic monsoon slicing and some level of regret, I mean, we could never go back there and they were kind people. At least only 80% of that guy still stands upright in me.

Cold was still what it meant to be alive but we made it to Castleblaney for eleven a.m.
Going in through his apartment door he showed me the half-ounce he had stolen.
“Ah, that’s fucked up D, stick on saucerful of secrets you cunt”