I’m going to tell them it was me. I make the decision. It’s a gamble. Mission accomplished, I’ll say. The dissidents are a bunch of fucking lying rats. I was there. I had a bagful of explosives on me. It was a mad coincidence, I says to myself. We’d both gone to hit it at the same time. Then on the news, they says it. They says it exactly like Miracle Baby says they would says it. No one died. The Europa is a mighty fortress. That was it. That’s what sealed it for me. This is how it is written. I called Tommy’s from a phone box. His ma answered. Have you heard about this thing at the Europa? she says to me. I have that, I says. Brave boys, she says to me. Brave boys. Aye, he was, I says to her. When Tommy gets in, tell him to come and pick me up from my ma’s house, I says to her, and I hang up the phone. I try to have a Tom Tit in the outside toilet but for some reason I just cannot go so as I go back up to my room and I sit down on the bed with the unexploded bomb underneath it and I watch Billy McNab’s weans, mockexecuting each other outside in the garden.

*

You get these turds, these turds off the telly, asking how is it possible, to kill, to maim, and to protect the killers afterward, to treat them as heroes, even, in their own communities. All in this fucking whining fucking voice. I want to say to them, it’s fucking elementary, my dear tosspot, have you never heard of loyalty? Have you no concept of friendship? Have you never had a family you would protect with your life? Do you not admire bravery? Have you never felt the calling of your own blood?

Thing is, we all know it. We all understand it just fine. But only when it’s our own side we’re talking about. Well, I’m from the other side, and I’m here to tell you it’s the fucking mirror image of your own. Except braver.

All we had was the fucking Green Books telling us what we did was legitimate. All we had was a bunch of criminal longhairs patting us on the back. You don’t go down the fucking Job Centre and they suggest a career in the IRA the way they do with the fucking British Army. They don’t erect war memorials or have a fucking national holiday for all the brave boys what died on the other side of the war.