Okay, so as one day I’m out shopping, in the town, and I pick up this LP, Como, The Early Years. And this stuff sounds like Barney has a cotton wool bud stuck in his ear. The quality is murder, but the songs are top-notch. He sings all of the songs on there, ‘Girl of My Dreams’, ‘Faithful Forever’, ‘Till the End of Time’, a whole lifetime of songs. But then there’s this other song there too, like a ghost song, come out of the past, and of course you know about ghosts, how they have cold hands, and I feel these cold hands on my head, pulling me awake, holding me under, and this voice comes in, only it’s stuck, in the sound, in the clicking and scratching, but then these words, coming out of the background, these words, coming clear as light: I’ll meet you at the masquerade.

I can feel the cold hands of the ghost, like a snake sliding down and coiling round my wild Irish heart. Ah fuck, I says to myself as Como’s voice starts coming to me, and it’s like he’s trying and he’s trying till he’s come in, into the room, like a daemon or a spirit, and he’s using what he can to come through, and that’s when I realise; it’s not Como singing anymore, it’s Tommy come in, in the voice of Como. Twelve o’clock is chiming, he’s singing, it’s Tommy’s come in, and his voice is coming through the air, I see him with his arms outstretched, and I smell him, that manly smell, his precious eyes, brimming over, as he turns and he points to the moon in the night-time sky, and now it is no longer something up above us. If you unmask your heart, he sings, I’ll love you, love you. Midnight, shadows fade, he sings, no one’s left at the masquerade. Everything is through, dear, but my love for you, dear, lives on. And he holds that one last note forever.

*

But everything goes well. We hand over the arms to Mack, we get our first holiday in a caravan park, plus we’re local heroes with The Boys. Tommy’s da is off the historical hook, Mack doesn’t even ask us about the weapons that were unaccounted for, plus he gives us three massive bags of grass for a present – that’s grass as in marijuana – and even I’m starting to think that Tommy was right and that this guy is fucking Bob Marley.

None of us has ever done drugs before in our life but now we’re sitting there with three fat supermarket bags full of the stuff. It’s disgusting, Barney says, it smells like that vomity Italian cheese, he says. It’s supposed to be good for listening to the music, Tommy says to us. Come over to mine later, he says, and we can listen to some Como on it and see how he sounds. Como would never approve, Barney says. He doesn’t need to know, I says to him.