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?

Eight Nothing,

Eight Nothing,

Nothing Two,

Eight.

*

I come in near the end of the first hunger strike. I mind attending mass in H3 one Sunday morning and seeing men what looked like they were a hundred year old. Brothers bent double, led in by their twin, shrouds wrapped tight around the two of them, in Bible time. Other men touching their pale white skin. Touching the white skin pulled tight round their faces, and looking in their dark eyes, and weeping there too. The first hunger strike was led by a man name of The Dark: Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes. He was like Tommy. One of these Irish guys what look like fucking negroes. That’s what they called him: Darkie or The Dark. But everything takes on new meaning in The Place Of Endless Echoes.