You could have fun with him, mind. Sing us a song about the IRA, we says to him, sing us a song about the struggle, and he knew them all. He’d come chiming in, giving it all the history you like, songs about the Bogside and Bloody Sunday. Tommy began teaching him Como. You want to have heard this wee retard murdering ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’. Just thinking about it makes me nostalgic for the days when you used to have village idiots wandering about the place, what happened to that?

But the point is what happened with Miracle Baby. He became our man. He had access to everybody, inner-circle stuff, and gangsters, and even the British Army. Who else but a fucking retard would go up to armed soldiers in the street and try to engage them in conversation? Everybody knew him and everybody thought he was harmless. The only person what took him serious was Tommy. And he saw how he could use him. Not in a cynical way, because he genuinely liked the wee fella, but the point is this: Tommy was listening when nobody else was.

*

No one saw us leaving the garage with this massive arms stash in the back and a painting of Mickey Mouse on the side of our caravan. I began to think that Mickey was our lucky ghost, that he was making us invisible. We drove back to the caravan park and sweated through a few days, waiting for the law, or the Ra, or who knows, worse, to swoop, but we’d whacked the middleman and we’d severed the connection and the only people that could join the dots between us and the killing now were Jimmy’s ma, who was mental, and Tommy’s da, who was debatable.

Tommy calls him from a phone box down the road from the campsite. Jimmy Smalls is dead, he says to him. Ah fuck, his da says, and here’s me sitting with a bottle of Bushmills for him as well. This is what passed for sympathy with Tommy’s da. Still, there was the question of the guy on the phone. Who had Smalls been calling? We sat outside the caravan and debated, debated, debated. What if it’s one of they set-ups? Barney says. What if it was Mack that was on the blower? I thought he had a point. But Tommy says it makes no sense. Naw, he says. Jimmy Smalls was selling those arms and had been for ages, selling them to all comers, he says to us, why would he suddenly phone a guy high up in the Ra and blow his own cover? What if it was your man Danny McGonigle? I says to him. After all, it was McGonigle he was selling them on to. Why don’t we just fucking kill Danny McGonigle to be on the safe side? Barney says to us. Where’ll it end? I says to him. Then who do we kill after we kill him to shut the next one up? Oh, there’ll be no next one, Barney says, and all the time he’s hoking away at his ear with a cotton bud and this fucking bud would come off and disappear inside his ear and get stuck in there and we’d have to use a fucking hairpin or a bent paperclip to hoke it back out. No cunt likes Danny McGonigle, Barney says to us, no cunt would bat their fucking lamps. In fact they’d be dancing in the streets. Either way, Tommy says to us, for now we go ahead with the masquerade of burying these arms in shite, and of digging them all the way back up again.