*

and I lie there, like a little baby, until the lights come up, and a pair of friendly punks drag me outside for air, gasping, in my lungs, for air. The five of us walk home in a daze. An armoured car follows us part of the way. They’re looking for us to start something. But we’re somewhere else entirely. I thought Saint Patrick kicked all the snakes out of Ireland? Tommy says to me. I thought he told them to beat it?

*

Me: Is Christ Jayzus a Catholic?

McManus:

Tommy: Course he’s a Tim, don’t be so fucking stupid.

Me: How do you mean, of course? How is he not a Protestant?

Tommy: If he was a Hun, then we’d know all about it.

Me: How’s that?

Tommy: If Jayzus was a Hun, then he’d hate the look of his own coupon.

McManus:

Me: How do you work that one out?

Tommy: That’s what the Protestants want. They want Jayzus out the picture, basically, so why would your man Christ Jayzus go about telling everybody that he was a Protestant? That would be like me going about saying I was a lesbian.

McManus:

Me:

Tommy: Listen, Huns come out of Tims, the way women come out of men.

Me: What? Men come out of women, what are you talking about?

Tommy: The first man does not come out the first woman, that would be impossible, because who infertilised the woman, so as they had to create the first woman using a spare rib from Adam’s body, only he didn’t know anything about all of this, at this point, to him a rib wasn’t even a rib, so as he was oblivious.

Me: You’d think if you were putting together a woman you’d use something a bit more attractive than a fucking spare rib, like a nice fleshy part of your hoop or the blue pupil out one of your lamps or a bit of long dark hair, even. How comes a rib?

McManus:

Tommy: What the fuck is all these questions about? Because that builds a place for the heart, that’s what Catholics believe, have you never heard of the heart of immaculate deception?

Me: Conception.

Tommy: Besides, Jayzus is probably a Zoro-as-trian, in reality.

Me: Zorro, what? Zorro-ism?

Tommy: Zoro-as-trian-ism. That is the belief what Jayzus had his own teaching what is not in The Bible.

Me: Where the fuck are you getting all of this dubious shite from?

Tommy: Reader’s Digest.

McManus:

Me: And what was Jayzus’s secret teaching all about?

Tommy: We’ll never know for sure, they are lost in caves and in secret temples and in the winds of time, somewhere around the Dead Sea, probably. But we can take a guess.

Me: Like?