He had seen the odd car slowing as it passed the ruin, the driver eying him, but he never returned their cautious nods of greeting. Once he had thought of calling out to them: Yes, it’s Jamesy Bourke, all right, back to set things right at last. You can tell the whole bloody world that too, damn you! He thought back to the fear which had seized him just two days ago when he had started throwing the pills into the fire. Each day now, he committed the day’s ration of seven pills to the fire. The first time he had done it, his hand had reached out reflexively to save the melting pills from the embers, as though that part of him knew better than what his mind had decided.

But now the images that came to him had become clearer than ever. In spite of his fears, the pictures that sometimes exploded in his mind had not been the ones he had had back in the cell, the ones he remembered with a vague but overwhelming dread. Wonder drugs, they called them, but he had known all along they were used to keep you stupid too. For a moment he saw in the steady rain the face of the social worker who visited weekly in his shiny Volkswagen, faking cheer and sympathy on that pink, unlined face behind the glasses. He had come to hate that face too. It belonged to another one he had to surrender to if he was to keep alive his chance of getting his life back. You run a very grave risk-he heard the words again against the slowly waving bushes that still rooted by the ruin which was also the ruin of his life-a very great risk of relapse if you don’t maintain the treatment. Grave, relapse. Fuck him.

All that remained were the stones and the slab which had made up the floor of the cottage. Sort of like a grave but no one tended it. Jane was buried out in Canada. Murty Maher, the farmer who had rented the place to Jane, had bulldozed the walls after the fire. Bad luck on the house no doubt, and Maher had kept away from the place ever since.