It’s a bollocks cold night and there’s no heating in the toilet. I’m going to die out here on my own and nobody will know, my ma won’t be back to the morning and when she is she’ll find my frozen corpse, these are the wild thoughts raging through my mind on this filthy river. But then all of a sudden I get this feeling of calm acceptance. I mean, your ma’s toilet is hardly the worst place to die in. I lie there and I think of all the little girls, spinning into colour. And then it’s like a minute has passed and I’m back on my feet. I stagger back inside and it’s eleven o’clock at night. I was out there lying on the floor completely paralysed for three hour. Where had all the time gone? I missed Tommy and Barney and everything. I was that fucking angry I took all the grass I had and I poured it down the toilet bowl and I flushed it. When Tommy heard what I had done he went furious. He says that when you smoke it time stands still. He says that when you smoke it one Como song could last for eternity.

*

We all got a bit of money out the deal with Mack, a fair bit of money, actually, especially for us, back then, and we kitted ourself out with the tailored suits and the Aquascutum raincoats and the hats. I got a green dog-tooth suit, handmade, that was the envy of the Ardoyne, plus I was the first person in my street ever to have a gold watch. Thank god there’s a war on, Tommy says to us.

Barney had this thing for Egypt, don’t ask why, there’s no point in analysing it. He bought himself a leather folder with pictures of Egypt on the front. I don’t even know what the purpose of it was, whether he was planning on walking up and down Jamaica Street with it under his arm or keeping his letters from the bru all neat in it, but when you would go over there he would have it lying out on the table right in front of you, in a house that otherwise had no ornaments whatsoever.

Would you look at the craftsmanship in that, he says to us, look at the Nile picked out there, look at the detail of that, and there’s the pyramids, he says, that’s the boys right there, sticking up, that’s one of the seventeen wonders of the world you’re looking at, and that’s your man the Giant fucking Sphinx crouched down there by the side. You’re a Giant fucking Sphinx, I says to him.