But I came to understand that Tommy was right, in the end, that at the heart of the struggle, at the centre of The Calamity (which really is the centre of the world), there is a network of basements and bunkers, of outhouses and barns and dugouts, of dungeons and safe houses, of flats and tower blocks and back rooms and annexes, of working men’s clubs and council houses and squats, of abandoned mansions and boarded-up shops, in Lisburn and Bangor and Ballymena and Coleraine, in Claudy and Fintona and Birmingham, and in that London too, and in Belfast and Dublin, all lit up with strip lights and with halogen lamps and with dark corridors leading off, and with (secret) trapdoors and with mysterious stairwells, and tunnels running back and snaking off, tunnels that go deep into the earth, back to the beginning of Ireland, which is the beginning of human history, which is bare two thousand year, and which is where secret crowds gather, still, to watch as Christ Jayzus, as the engine of time, shops up (or what looks like Christ Jayzus, all lit up in pain, and in suffering), to watch as what looks like it might, still, be a human being, but which later will be unidentifiable, which later will look more like the carcass of an animal, a poor cow with tattoos and with black hair and with bright-red nipples, is coloured, as a broken snake with bright-red razored nipples, is raised up, and its blind eyes, taped shut, and bound, and beaten with golf clubs, and its nails pulled out, and its teeth smashed in, and broken sticks forced into its earholes, is a painting, and its orifices opened up and invaded, and its face ejaculated on, is art, and its names forgotten, and its faces misremembered, is a dream of colour, bright, and unworded, all in the cause of trying to keep the future alive, like monks praying in caves, or illuminates on top of rocks, in the desert, this terrible need to put suffering on a pedestal, this cult of pain, is Holy.

Part Four: A Word Set Teeth into Silence

By the time we get back to Belfast there’s a war on. Not that one, son, another one. An internal war, is what you call it. The Boys had taken out two members of the FSV, two brothers, the McNultys, for running their mouths off and for claiming that the Europa hit was their own and for deflecting attention from the IRA, and they had been whacked at their home by two Ra boys, Shorty Temper – he’s dead now, legend – and Rab McSpoons. I hear they even brought them a trout.