Think about it: Barney’s proposing that two fucking Irish rebel gangsters strip naked and climb into a Mickey Mouse caravan with a massive illegal arms stash in the back on the fucking main street of a town in bandit country. Fuck this, Tommy says, and he whips his shoes off and he tosses them under a hedge. Shirt, trousers and socks to follow. I do the exact same. Now wipe your hands, Barney says to us, like he’s our ma, and we both bend down and wipe our hands in the grass. Curtains are twitching, we’re standing there basically bollock naked in the street, but Barney finally lets us in and we go skidding off. We’re both sitting in the back in nothing but a pair of Y-fronts, looking at each other, like that. Bring on the gay disco, I says to them. But no cunt’s laughing.

That’s when it occurs to me. Wait a minute, I says to Tommy, why are we going to all the trouble of digging a hole and burying the arms just to dig them back up again? Tommy looks at me with a vacant expression. He still hasn’t clicked. With Jimmy Smalls out the picture, and the guy at the petrol station dead, there’s no sinner to say otherwise, I says to him. Why don’t we just say that we dug them up and here they are? Do you think anybody’s going to go looking for a hole? Tommy looks at me for a minute or so. I’m waiting for the penny to drop, although he might just kill me, there’s that too. But then he bursts out laughing. We both do. This is like a bad fucking Irish joke, he says to me, and he shakes his head. Barney shouts back from up the front. If youse want to make it authentic, he says to us, youse could always stick the guns up your arse before you hand them over. That was the punchline, right there.

*

Now, see, I’ve thought about that word for years, that word called masquerade. It comes from the times where the kings and queens of this world would go to their balls in disguise and mix it with the common people with the help of a mask, so as the person you met, you had no idea if they were a pauper, a king or a knave. Everybody, for a single night, could forget their identity. What a relief, I hear you say, but what the fuck does that have to do with a fox asleep, or dead, by a tree?