So what’s the game? Mad Frank Marby says it again. We roll up at The Celt’s Head, McNulty says. That’s where they all drink on a Friday night, he says. We roll up there and we cause havoc. Everybody is looking at each other and beaming. This is what walking in the air is all about. But there’s somebody we need to take back with us alive, Mack says. He goes by the name of Danny Whitaker and he’s a bad bastard.

*

The week running up to the attack on The Celt’s Head was idyllic in my mind because things were all back to normal and for a week we were caught up in the old routine. All living together at the stinky call house. Turning over a shop or robbing a bank in the morning. In the afternoon maybe we’d do a float, see if we couldn’t take out some soldiers. Plant a bomb somewhere, set a booby trap. Then in the evening maybe a firefight or two. Happy days.

It was a privilege and a terror to be working with a guy like Mad Frank Marby. He literally did not give a fuck. One night when we were driving back from a fairly successful float – two soldiers shot, one fatally, we later found out – I get to talking to him about your man Del Brogan. Pat Allardyce is with us in the car.

It’s a shame about your man Del Brogan, Allardyce says. Fuck your man Del Brogan, Mad Frank Marby says, he was a fucking fruit merchant. I heard he got poisoned, Pat Allardyce says, I heard that somebody spiked his drink, that’s what they’re saying. Bollocks, I says to the two of them, it was a heart attack. He was hitting it too hard. I heard he was coked out his tits (of course I had heard no such thing but fuck him). It’s the fucking Curse of Como, if you ask me, Mad Frank Marby says. What are you talking about? Pat Allardyce says to him. There’s a Curse of Como? He fucking took Como’s name in vain, Mad Frank Marby says. Isn’t that right, Sammy? he says to me and he winks. Right in front of our fucking face he did it too, he says. Disrespectful cunt. That’s fucking right, I says to Pat Allardyce, he was trying to maintain that Como took a drink. Bollocks, Pat Allardyce says, that’s fucking libellous. Exactly, Mad Frank Marby says, and then the wee cunt walks onstage with a half of whiskey thinking he’s doing it just like Como and – bam – God’s fucking red right hand comes roaring through the clouds and fuck you; takes him right out the game. Wee shitehawk. God’s like that, fucking leaning down through the clouds and letting it be known. One singer, one song, you irreligious cunt.