Luckily, he’d been doing all this through a guy name of Jimmy Smalls, who in turn was passing them on to a guy name of Danny McGonigle, who was the fella doing the actual deal in the first place. So that although the trail was messy, at least Tommy’s da wasn’t the first point of contact. But still, this left us with several fucking headaches.

Headache number one: it made me look like a plum after my big speech where I laid it on thick about him being a hero of the revolution or whatever the fuck it was what I said.

Second headache: Mack knew exactly what the size of the arms stash was supposed to be. There was going to be questions when half of it turned out to be unaccounted for.

Headache number three: (and this might have been wild speculation on my part but) my big paranoid fear back then was that Mack knew where the stash was the whole time. That he knew what had happened to it and that he was playing every one of us along as part of, I don’t know, a loyalty test, or a way of flushing out old corrupt remnants of the IRA, like Tommy’s da, or some covert scheme or other.

The point is we were fucked if we did and fucked if we didn’t. And did is better than didn’t. In my book, anyroads. And this might teach you something about Tommy. He went ahead and he bought that caravan. He got Barney in without telling him the full story. He went through with the whole deal of moving us down to Armagh to this caravan park in the middle of fucking nowhere. All the time knowing full well that the entire set-up was a ruse and that it was his own da’s backhanded scheming (let’s face it) that we were going to have to go through the masquerade of unravelling.

*

That was a word Tommy taught me. That word called masquerade. He was the first person I ever heard use it. He found this mad painting of a fox lying in the woods in a car boot sale. He was convinced it was worth money. He shows it to Barney and Barney says to him, a dead fox, eh? The fox isn’t dead, Tommy says to him, what are you talking about? That fox is fucking dead alright, Barney says. It’s just sleeping, Tommy says. Tommy’s getting all sentimental about this fucking wild fox lying in the fucking woods. It’s dead, Barney says to him. It’s a dead fucking fox, lying in the woods, dead. It’s just sleeping, Tommy says. The fox is just lying there sleeping. And Barney says to him, the fox is fucking dead. Do you think he could have got that close to it if it had only been sleeping? And Tommy says to him, you mugs know nothing about art. And you know nothing about foxes, neither. That fox is just sleeping, he says. That painting is what you call a masquerade.