*

Son, did I tell you there was a big picture of your man Mickey Mouse on the side of the caravan? Tommy found it in a skip and fell in love with it. Repainted the van and stuck it on the side. He loved his cartoons on a Saturday morning. This is a piece of art, he says to us, and then he says that he was going to subscribe to the Reader’s Digest as soon as he has enough money. This is what we should be doing, he says, we should be furthering ourselves. I don’t know how he was getting into all this stuff about reading and about art and stuff. For an uneducated Irishman it made no sense.

*

Right, so as there were two plans. The first was Mack’s. The arms, according to us, were buried in a field behind a sewage works near the border and so as we could dig them up without arousing suspicion, Mack’s idea was that we were to fill the caravan with blocks of peat, which we would then claim we were going around digging up for the fire and the most they would do is chase us off and call us a bunch of halyins. The second was ours and it coincided nicely with Mack’s. It was that we would buy all this peat, dig a big fuck-off hole in the ground, dump the arms down into it, fill the hole with peat, dig it all back up again, lay claim to the arms in the name of the Free State, and everybody wins. Only first we had to get the arms off Jimmy Smalls, who in reality had them in a garage in Milford.

*

Jimmy Smalls lived alone with his ma and when we turned up she was making him his crispy pancakes, and sure I love those things, so I do, and she took a few more out the packet and stuck them in the oven, just for us, so as we ate these fucking dynamite wee crispy pancakes and all the while his ma’s oblivious, completely clueless, but Jimmy knows something is up. He’s chewing all slow like a mad old bull on its last meal and scratching his leg underneath the table and looking up at us with his head down.

Now Jimmy Smalls had a big lump on his coupon. He had been jumped by a gang of Huns when he was coming home from school one day and this egg-shaped lump on his forehead had risen up and had never gone away. Him and his sister Denise were both picked on bad when they was young. Tommy’s da says people used to call her Disease Smalls. Ha ha, that was a good one.

So Barney’s looking at this fucking lump on Jimmy Smalls’s head and glancing over to me and winking and I know he’s going to say something. He puts his fork down and he says to Mrs Smalls, sure Mrs Smalls, would you have any vegetables to go with this choice wee crispy pancake?