xxxxxHe became a silversmith after he was old enough to emancipate himself away from his parents' careers of squatting and dealing pot. The craftsman he was apprenticed to mentored him, and gave him actual care and attention, as well as a professorial view to his belated education. When he'd made his masterwork and started getting actual money, however, it was far easier to find a string of girlfriends by following the CND crowd protesting up and down the country.
From that it was one bad night's drinking to end up shacked up with an IRA firebrand, and another bad night in Dublin to end up getting smuggled to the US until "it all dies down." That was 1991, and looking back, the time when he stopped getting proper nights of sleep.
He tried starting afresh in the US -- slipping into work in a mining town without really thinking about it -- but it didn't last. Before long instead of hard work and night classes it was drug deals and bar fights and ever shorter relationships.
It was the incident with the dynamite that scared him straight in 1998, and he moved across the country and fell into work in a manufacturing plant. It was easy again, until whatever strength he was using to keep out of trouble ran out, and then it was smuggling and breaking kneecaps and sneaking out the door at daybreak.
He denied it was him falling asleep with a cigarette that caused the fire that gutted the clubhouse in 2009, at least until he had to run across country again and change his name. Blacksmithing and away from civilisation suited him fine, for a long time at least. Until the itch came to head to the city, and he was never one to argue with his itches.
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