When I was nineteen, I moved back into my mum’s house. It was the winter of 1999. I had just been discharged from a six-week stint in a psychiatric hospital, into a rainy Dublin car park with a box of Lithium in my pocket and a warning that I would spend most of my life in and out of the dank corridors and airless rooms of Irish mental health facilities.
(Excuse me if I tell this story badly. I’ve never written a word of it before. For a decade after it happened, I barely ever spoke of it, for the shame. When I told a long ago girlfriend, she thought I was joking. I pretended that I was and never mentioned it to her again.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I was nineteen and back living in rural Ireland. A place I had spent most of my previous years dreaming of escaping. I had dropped out of university. My friends had moved on. I spent my days watching daytime TV, chewing endless sweets in a vain attempt to rid my mouth of the dull, metallic taste left by the drugs.
