Listen, lags, Jayzus says to I’s, don’t give way to wonder, I will pick out your eyes you bastards, He says to I’s, and He goes back to His thing about the two muckers Pat and Mick, and the sun in the sky, and how they’re in a new country, in a new life altogether, and they stop the first person they meet, and they ask him if he knows whether that’s the same sun they saw in the Ardoyne long ago, the same sun sat up there in the sky throughout the whole fucking shooting match, and now the figure on the cross is lagging in and out of reality, and the first person they meet is speaking in the voice of Christ Jayzus, which is the voice of a priest in the H Block at the beginning of the second hunger strike, in the spring of 1981, and He says to them, sorry, lads, but I wouldn’t know if that’s the same sun that you saw in the Ardoyne; I’m a stranger here myself.

They say that Jayzus’s final words were something to do with His Father. But that’s the last any of The Boys ever heard from Him.

*

This is the story of Adam’s Apple, son, this is how they all became scundered about being naked in front of each other, because up till then life was fucking beezer, my friend, only they couldn’t mind anything at all because of that they had no lingo, all except for body lingo, and for making sounds like songs, maybe, like musical sounds, a wee bit, I think, but not actual words, that is until Adam takes a bite of this fucking apple and it meant he could speak the English, just like that, up until then every day had been the same but then Jayzus Himself, or more likely his da (let’s face it), let a snake loose in the garden and the snake was the first thing what could talk but it was lonely because nobody else had words that they could use with it, so as the snake tempted Adam to eat this apple, he didn’t even know it was an apple till then, he thought everything was a part of himself, he didn’t even know how a snake was a snake, so we’ll never know how it did it, but basically the snake says to him that the apple was something different from himself and that if he wanted to he could eat it and find out the names of everything, including his wife, who at that point he had no idea was called Eve. After that, he began remembering.

*