*

Time for the show, let’s go. Moira and Wee Robin have kept us seats down the front. Mad Frank Marby’s wife Sheila is there as well. She looks like that serial killer, Rose West, but then he looks like fucking Fred, so as it’s a good match. I overhear her talking to Moira and Wee Robin. I didn’t get Disney at all when I was a wee girl, she says to them. Disney just went right over my head. What’s happening with the shop this weather? I says to Barney. Truth is, I hadn’t been in there in months. Nothing much, Barney says, going well. Beavis and Wee Robin run it fine. She’s selling all them tarot cards in there, and them Weegie boards, and them joss sticks. Who knew there was such a big market for the future in Belfast? he says. I thought they’d all given up on it long ago. Who would have thought you would turn out to be running a fucking hippy empire? I says to him. Sure, you’re like your man Richard Branston. Mind that time we contacted Tommy with the Weegie board? I says to Barney. Fucking classic Tommy, wasn’t it? he says to me. You could never get a fucking word of sense out that guy, even when he had shoes, and a body. Never tempted to do it again? I says to him. Never tempted to break out the tarot cards and see what the boy’s up to this weather? I don’t think he’s interested, Barney says, and he shrugs. I don’t think he could be fucked at all, he says. The dead don’t want a fucking thing to do with the living, that’s what I think. All these tarot cards and these fucking Weegie boards are like torture to them. They can’t even speak the lingo anymore. To them we might as well be Pakis.

But don’t you want to see if he’s alright? I says to him. Don’t you want to find out what it’s like in heaven? They’re good questions, Barney says to me, right enough, they’re good questions, but that’s my point. The dead can’t be fucked with all these daft words like heaven and hell. The dead are beyond all of that good-and-evil stuff. That’s Neatsy, by the way.

What?

This German bloke, Neatsy, who says that in the future all supermen will be beyond good and evil. In other words they won’t give a fuck. Wee Robin is well into him, that’s where the character of Superman comes from originally. I might have known he would be a fucking German, I says to him. But at least we know one thing, he says. Even the dead don’t lose their taste for Como.