*

We never made contact with Tommy again and, I mean, I wonder why, because we all says it was amazing, that it was just like Tommy, and it was obviously him. I mean, you can actually talk to people in heaven. You would think we would have made more use of that. But I came to understand something about the dead that is so true, and so simple. You know all that bollocks about the dead living on in our hearts? It’s all nonsense, my friend. The dead get further away every minute. Because they have nothing in common with the living anymore. It’s the dead that are their people now. I mean, they’ll come if you call them. But really, they can’t be bothered. Because they have left all worldly concerns behind. That’s why even miracles like speaking from beyond the grave have basically zero interest for them; to them it’s just a cheap trick.

*

And sometimes I would hear his voice, mostly singing, or I would think of his eyes, when Irish eyes are smiling, or I would picture one of his suits, in my mind, I would see a pair of his shoes, phantom shoes, right there in front of me, I was afflicted by his phantom shoes, and his muscular arms, and his smell, sometimes I would catch a sniff of his smell, Old Spice, from out of the air, and I would feel so sad and lost to despair because I came to realise, son, I came to realise that it was all just echoes, running down. That it was all just after-images, fading.

Being in the jail is much the same thing. Being in the jail is to enter The Dead Zone: The Place Of Endless Echoes. We crossed over as surely as the dead did, and just like them we lost interest in the world on the other side. Visits were denied us anyways, and of course some of The Boys talked about their missus or some wee bird they were banging, but it felt like just talk for show, just talk for show. Because really the jail was the world. And every second was life so intensely. Boys as united in their mission as the dead themselves. And when a prisoner would pass over it was as if we had willed his death through sheer force of solidarity. That we had said to him, die. That he had offered up his body to the miracle of the mass. Even when he had the shite beaten out him, even when he gives himself a heart attack through starvation, even when he was an emaciated skeleton lying in a pool of freezing water; he had gone further, in the name of all of us. I’ve never known meaning like it, and I don’t expect to again, until I take my place in the tombs of heaven, for nobody else to see, but the endless dead.

*

What’s your man Bobby Sands’s phone number?