Everybody is stood there, silenced. Then the wee punk, he says to us: youse are all going about it the wrong way. He’s walking out the door with his fucking drum kit strapped to his back at this point. And what’s your fucking strategy, Mr No Future? Barney says to him. My strategy is fucking infiltration, he says to us. My strategy is the fucking Trojan Horse. And I think of Kathy, and invisibility, and superpowers, and once again, for a moment, before it’s pulled from underneath me, I see myself, with certainty, in the future, and I know that when the times comes, I’ll be ready.

*

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.