Sometime after 1:45AM

It all felt wonderful. It felt wonderful at the end of the night to be strolling home drunk, with someone on your arm or in your company that you could fuck and forget, walking home in the safety of the streetlights and the bright, inhospitable Right-Folks!-Time-to-drink-up-and-go-gentlemen-please! lighting of the closing bars along the Golden Mile. Couples kissed on street corners, groped down dark alleys. Men and women pissed close by. We met Catholic friends, and we found ourselves in a cabal. We met Protestant friends, and we found ourselves in cahoots. People fought in the bars, people fought in the streets, and still others fought in the lines at take-away restaurants. There were the seas of puke, food and empty beer bottles to make the streets treacherous to your drunken foot. People chased other people, the one hoping to lose the other in the thousands-strong throng of bodies spewed out by the bars and the clubs, the crowd unceremonious and clumsy, potent, capricious and pugnacious. We had no need or intention of getting involved - strangers were killing other strangers, and why should we give a damn? - so we walked home over the dead bodies to drink another beer and to wait on others returning from wherever they had ended up. There were never enough beds for the bodies dragged to our home those nights, and many nights people - strangers, often - fucked on the hallway floor outside of my bedroom door, on the far side of my bullet-proof wardrobe. Most nights I slept through those moaned and sighed wishes and wants, those panted desires, those Protestant behaviours.