*

Just then Tommy and Patricia pull up in this van … thing, and it’s painted green and white. He’s beeping the horn and waving to us as they pull in. That’s not a caravan, Mack says. That’s a fucking mobile home. Tommy gets out and leaves Patricia in the passenger seat. What do youse think of the caravan? he says to us. That’s not a fucking caravan, Mack says to him. That’s a mobile home. Don’t fucking split hairs with me, Tommy says. I’ll fucking split your lip if you turn up for a meeting with me again in a green-and-white mobile home, Mack says to him. Do you want to just write IRA On Tour on the side and be done with it? Tommy was starting to look a bit sheepish. I almost felt sorry for him. Give it a good coat of paint, I says to him. A caravan’s a caravan, I says, at least this way we don’t need to drag it round behind a car. Good for quick getaways and that. Exactly, Tommy says, that’s what I’m talking about. I’m out of here, Mack says. I got youse in on good report, he says to us, after your performance in Dundalk. Now don’t fuck it up. Get that caravan sorted and make sure youse are in Armagh next week, at the Keady campsite. Youse are going to move on the weapons. And youse better be on top form. Because the sketch is complicated. That’s what he says. Then he walks off. Oh, so it’s a caravan now, is it? Tommy says. Do you know he pishes on his hands? I says to him. That’s as bad as fucking Barney, he says.

*

This is me and Tommy in a caravan park in Armagh, and Barney was there too. The point is to look like tourists, Mack says to us, and in the name of the wee man we gave it our best shot. We sat outside the caravan – radio on, tops off – drinking cans of green that Pat had liberated from Safeways. Up the fucking Rebels, we says, and we gave it plenty. We played card games and we smoked and we listened to the old rock n roll. Dion and Lonnie Donegan and Elvis, that was all fine. But then this song comes on, some fucking harridan woman singing about pishing in a fucking river. It was the time of the punk rockers and Tommy was fucking fuming. I wouldn’t sit here and listen to that filth, he says to us, and he gets up and he turns the radio off in a rage. Can you imagine Como singing a song like that? Barney says to us. Never, Tommy says. Wouldn’t happen. Como never let a curse word pass his lips, Barney says. He was always a clean liver, he says. Tommy passes me a fag and I just about manage to get it lit in the wind what’s coming in from the ocean, must be. Plus he was a good Catholic, Barney says. Barney’s sitting on a deckchair in nothing but a pair of blue swimming trunks. I thought he was a Jew? I says to them. Fuck off, Barney says, Como was never a Jew. What about all them Jewish songs he sang? I says to them. That was just him reaching out to the other side, Tommy says. English wasn’t even his first language, Barney says. It was Italian. He would only speak the English in the songs. And in the TV shows. Otherwise it was fucking original Italian the whole ways. Nothing was off limits to Como. Even fucking English.