He’d been looking pale; he’d been falling asleep in front of the telly, like an old man. Anaemia. Iron was all he needed. So he bought himself a carton of grapefruit juice-he knew the kids would never touch it-and he went into a chemist on his way home from work, for iron tablets. He regretted it when the woman behind the counter looked at him over her specs and asked him if they were for his wife.

— We share them, he said.

She wasn’t moving.

— I’d need to see a letter from your GP, she said.

— For iron?

— Yes.

He bought condoms and throat lozenges, and left. By the time he got home he knew his iron theory was shite and he’d pushed the grapefruit juice into a hedge, with the condoms. The kids were right; grapefruit juice was disgusting. There was nothing wrong with him, except he wanted to drink blood.

He had kids. That was the point. A boy and a girl. He had a family, a wife he loved, a job he tolerated. He worked in one of the banks, not high enough up to qualify for one of the mad bonuses they’d been handing out in the boom days, but high enough to have his family held hostage while he went to the bank with one of the bad guys and opened the safe-although that event had never occurred. The point was, he was normal. He was a forty-one-year-old heterosexual man who lived in Dublin and enjoyed the occasional pint with his friends-Guinness, loads of iron-played a game of indoor football once a week in a leaking school hall, had sex with his wife often enough to qualify as regularly, just about, and would like to have had sex with other women, many other women, but it was just a thought, never a real ambition or anything urgent or mad. He was normal.

He took a fillet steak into the gents’ toilet at work, demolished it, and tried to flush the plastic bag down the toilet. But it stayed there like a parachute, on top of the water. He fished it out and put it in his pocket.