I mind when Tommy was in hospital, this is back when we was teenagers, when we had only just met, and he had an irregular heart. We had been out for a bevvy, nothing too heavy, but as we’re leaving this bar he starts acting funny and the sweat is all running down his forehead and he falls to the floor, like that. At first everybody thinks he’s coming the cunt. Get up, you chancing wee cunt, Wee Steve-O says to him, but once we realised it was for real I get him round to my ma’s house and I ring an ambulance. He’s lying there on the couch, and I’ll never forget it, he just keeps belching, just belching, again and again, it was horrifying. But an ambulance comes, and we get him to the hospital, and he starts to recover. The doctors are all trying to get to the bottom of it. I visit him in the ward and I says to him, what did the doctor say was up with you? And he just says to me, come on, he says, god knows what these doctors think, he says to me, as if to say why the fuck would anyone even ask this kind of question. We’re in the lap of the gods here, he says to me, like there was really no way of actually finding out what was up with you in a hospital. I saw him with the doctors and the nurses and as soon as they arrived on the ward he would start cracking jokes or he would take the hand of one of these wee nurses and start singing to her or he would tell some fucking made-up story about him growing up in the Ardoyne and I says to him, fucking speak to these people, I says, find out what’s wrong with you, I says, find out what they’re going to do about it. But it was like if he couldn’t seduce everybody, then even his heart wasn’t worth asking after. And he would get angry if you questioned him about it. What’s the diagnosis? I says to him. Mugs like you just don’t understand, he says to me. Mugs like you just don’t get it, he says. Mugs like you, meaning everybody what was actually normal. He had his ma climbing the walls. But secretly I think his da was pleased with the performance. I mean, his da never came to visit him in the hospital but when I would report back to the curtain you could tell he was lying there thinking, that’s my boy. And when he gets out he ends up banging one of the wee nurses. I mean, he might have been carrying a ticking time bomb inside him, you know, but fucking … mission accomplished.