Then he had this cigarette station, I think that’s what you called them, carved out of dark wood to look like a mysterious island gone black with the sun. There was a wooden cobra at the front, rising up and getting ready to spit. Then there was a carved elephant’s foot you used as an ashtray and another wee elephant that just stood there like it was too young to be there in the first place and an alligator that had its mouth open with little ivory teeth whose back you could use to strike a match on it and this gravestone thing that made no sense where you kept your matches in. If you wanted to smoke at Barney’s he would pass you this thing and you would have to go through the whole fucking rigmarole of figuring it out while he’s stood there staring at you and explaining about the crocodiles of the Nile and the elephants of Egypt. I don’t even fucking know if they had elephants in Egypt, he would have been better off with a pair of camels, I telt him, a pair of dromedaries would have gone a lot better, I says to him, but he didn’t want to hear it.

Tommy bought himself another painting. That’s where the money is, he says to Barney. This is what you call an investment. Plus it tied in with Tommy’s new thing about how as we should be furthering ourselves and always getting better. It was a painting of two fellas, looking away. Two figures in a landscape, setting out on a boat, into the painting, like the horizon was real. Aside from that there was nothing but sea and sky to be seen except for one coloured rock on the bottom right that had what looked like bright seaweed on it. Tommy says he thought it was Chinese. This could be worth serious money, he says, you know what the Chinese are like. You could see what he meant. When you looked at the brushstrokes there was something Chinese about it, which means something light and delicate but deep. Then Tommy says to us: it’s allegorical. Where the fuck did he get a word like that? This is allegorical art, he says to us. Barney says to him, aye, well, but there’s not much to it, is there? It’s not much of a painting at all, he says, if you ask me. You mugs just don’t get it, Tommy says to us, and he shakes his head. Then he points to the two figures crossing the sea. Lighting out for another shore, he says to us, and he smiles, like he’s explaining something rudimentary to a small child with great difficulty. You mugs just don’t have a feel for the arts, he says to us. Mugs like you could never hope to understand, he says. Then he walks out the room, shaking his head at the state of the mugs in this world. It was another insight into Tommy’s brain. And it looked like a fucking empty ocean with two Chinese fishermen on it. It’s not how I pictured it, I’ll be honest with you.