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him a twenty, got fuck all back, and moved to a corner with a long wooden table – thought,
Good, I’ll line it with empties
.
    My hands had a slight tremble, but nothing too noticeable. I lifted the Jay, downed half, said, ‘Welcome home.’ Then I downed half the poor pint in one gulp and sat back. Let the magic begin, dark as it wished.
    That first drink, you hear various responses. Most say the terrible guilt, the loss of sobriety, followed by the
if only
– if only they hadn’t taken it. I felt like I’d finally let out my breath. For years, I’d been holding it and now . . . exhale . . . glorious. This was followed by false moments of exhilaration; I understood them for what they were and knew too that the reckoning would be ferocious, worse perhaps than before, but those first few minutes as the whiskey began to light a fire in my stomach felt worth it.
    Ride the whirlwind, reap the wrath.
    There is a certain peace – of the satanic variety, sure – but having given up the battle, it was done. No more aching, the struggle was over.
    A guy approached, looked at me, went, ‘Jack?’
    It was Caz, a Romanian who’d been in Galway for nigh on a decade. He spoke English with an Irish lilt and knew more about the goings on in the city than any cop. Information was his ace and the more lurid, the better. We had a give-and-take relationship. Igave – usually twenty euro – and he took whatever he deemed the freight to be.
    When the government deportations were at their most extreme, he always managed to evade the net, and now with the economy in threatened meltdown more non-nationals were due for the boot But he was dressed in a flash leather jacket and crisp new jeans, and smelt of expensive cologne. Maybe he could give me twenty euro.
    He said, ‘Jesus, you’re drinking.’
    He’d managed to adopt the Irish habit of swearing without sounding as if he meant it – no mean achievement. I gave him my granite look, which translates as
So?
    Caz was way too wary to get into a confrontation with me. It was how he’d survived Galway for ten years. He shrugged. ‘I just heard you’d been off it . . . a while.’
    I finished the pint, said, ‘And now I amn’t off it.’ I took out two twenties, handed them over, said, ‘Get us a round.’
    One twenty went into his pocket as he headed for the counter. He didn’t need to ask for my order. I heard him call the barman a bollix and figured we’d get decent-drawn pints.
    We did.
    He didn’t offer any change, raised his pint, touched mine, said, ‘
Slainte
.’
    â€˜
Slainte amach
.’
    The added
amach
is reserved for close friends, implying warmth, and the Jay had given me the warmth.
    Caz, foam lining his mouth, asked, ‘Hear about the swamps?’
    You have to be real old Galway to name them that. The swamps are a playing field close to Nimmo’s pier.
    I shook my head.
    â€˜Found arsenic in it and in three of the houses near by. The arsenic had been there for years, poisoning the poor bastards who lived there.’
    I wasn’t surprised. Horrified, sure, but surprised, no. They’d discovered asbestos in homes in Boher-more, and the number of birth abnormalities, not to mention a huge increase in Down syndrome, confirmed my belief that one way or another, the city officials were responsible. In the papers a professor of biology was saying that the virus currently in the water had been there for a decade!
    I said, ‘Speaking of poison, you know anything about gay-bashers?’
    He looked to his left, fleetingly, enough to let me know he was going to lie, so I added, ‘Don’t fuck with me, mate. You know better, so let’s not screw around.’
    He smiled, drank some of his pint, then rubbedhis thumb and forefinger together. I took out another twenty, held it on the table under my Jay, waited.
    He took a