That’s when I realise we’re being watched. Barney, I says to him, see that car parked down the road a bit, can you make it out? Barney looks in the mirror. Aye, I can see it, he says. That car was here the other day when we were here. Two people sitting in the front, just like we are. The fucking peelers, Barney says. Got to be. By the way, I gave your man Davy a doing, I says to him. I forgot to tell you that. I gave him a complete fucking pasting when I saw him beating up Kathy in a park. Quite fucking right, Barney says to me. Cunt had it coming to him. Nice one, Sammy, you wee fucking belter. Aye, but that’s not my point, I says to Barney, my point is that maybe they’re onto me because of that, I says to him. Maybe they think they’ve been rumbled. Maybe they think that I’ve figured out what they’re up to. We need to assume that we’re being watched, and at all times. What I’m saying is maybe we can’t just blaze in and kill them right off. Barney looks visibly disappointed. We peel off as fast as we can and we lose the car that’s following us. Then we abandon the stake-out altogether.

*

The only thing I remember about my grandfather, the only time I can see him in my mind’s eye, is when me and my ma visited him in the plots to hear that he was dying, on a summer’s day. He’s getting news from the doctor, my ma says to me (I’m just a wee wean at this point), we’ll go and we’ll meet him at the plots, she says. I mind walking up there, up this narrow path between the hedges, and the rocks in the ground, and the stones, and I could hear him from far off, from way down the bottom of the hill, coughing his lungs out, this horrible, tearing cough, and he was chopping wood up there, we could hear the axe going down and the cough and the axe going down again. And my ma goes over to him, she goes over there to touch him, but he looks at her in a way that pushes her away, a look that meant that she couldn’t come to him, and he just kept at it, the axe coming down, the paralysing cough, the axe coming down again, and my ma says to me, it’s a pointless cough, that’s the worst of it, and she shakes her head and she looks away but she never cried and I remember thinking, it’s chopping wood that’s pointless, Ma, it’s visiting your da in the plots that’s pointless, it’s a summer’s day in July that has no point at all.

*