But I push through to the back and there are boxes stacked to the ceiling and in the boxes there is the stash of your best dreams. Rifles and handguns and fucking anti-tank mines and grenades, you name it. I push my way back through this horrible fucking silent crowd but by this time I am so elated, I’m so high, that I kiss one of the baldy chicks right on the lips. I don’t give a fuck.

I run back round to the garage, where Tommy is still holding the guy down by the hair. It’s all there, I says to him, let’s move it, and Tommy takes a cushion off the chair and puts it over the guy’s head and empties three shots into his skull. Then he winks at me.

We cut a path through the cold, staring dummies. Barney’s freaked out but Tommy’s intrigued. We load the caravan with the weapons and we’re out of there in twelve minute flat. I says to Tommy, imagine all the silent fucking dummies, all missing limbs and with their heads all baldy, locked up in fucking empty rooms, right now, just standing there in the dark, saying nothing, just staring into each other … Does that not gives you a shiver? Naw, Tommy says to me, and he laughs, that just reminds me of my childhood, he says, and we roar off, triumphant, into the black fucking night of 1970s Northern Ireland, the best decade what ever lived.

*

Tommy had a friend name of Miracle Baby. He said he was a good conversationalist, which was ridiculous, cause of the kid was a retard. Something had happened to him while he was being born, his umbilical got caught round his throat and not enough oxygen went to his brain. He was in the local paper, the headline says Miracle Baby, the name stuck. He would wander round the streets because his own family couldn’t give a flying toss and he would talk to people over their hedges and people would feel sorry for him and bung him a few bob or offer him a biscuit. But Tommy actually spent time talking to the lad. I says to him once, excuse me but what the fuck is it that you and this Miracle Baby talk about? He’s into every trick, Tommy says, he knows everything what’s going on. Tommy actually had him working for him, he had him helping out in his da’s garden. I say garden, but really it was a mound of black scorched earth where some eejit had set fire to a car, and about three daffodils. Now Miracle Baby is in there, digging out flower beds and building a very fucking rudimentary rock garden, it has to be said.