Ireland could do with some fucking superheroes right now, she says to me, and it’s barely a whisper now. What, I says to her, Captain Ireland? What would his powers be? Invisibility, she says, at least I think that’s what she says, that way he could walk all over this fucking town as he pleased, I think is what she whispered at the end there.

*

Someone spots Barney walking up the Falls Road with a busted head, staggering about all over the shop, it’s a taxi driver that we know who works for the Ra and he pulls over and bundles him into the back seat before anyone sees him. He’s clearly out of his box. He’s taken a right fucking pasting. This fucking man-machine, this fucking man-mountain, was so indestructible that he had walked all the way from the city centre on autopilot, not even knowing where he was, like a crow with a severed claw and with its left eye pecked out.

The driver drops Barney off at his house, his wife Shona is out there in a panic, Shona who was five foot two and made of bullets. They send someone round to the house to get me and I leave Kathy tied and gagged in the living room while I inspect the damage. Barney’s got a big dirty gouge out his head. You’re going to need stitches in that, I says to him, and then he goes and throws up all over himself, this fucking thick green puke, he’s a Tim to his insides, I says to myself, what the fuck is this cunt eating. I tear his dirty shirt off and I ball it up with his stained vest and I run through to the kitchen and launch them out the back window. Thing is, barring his being at death’s door, Barney’s banned from all the hospitals in Belfast due to his losing the head and causing carnage. I don’t want to phone Mack, because then it looks like what the situation is: out of control.

I ask Shona if she’s got any Bushmills. Then I ask her for a needle and some thread. She’s only got this fucking light-blue wool she uses for the knitting but it’ll have to do. I ask her to leave the room. Why, she says to me, what are you going to do to him? What do you think I’m going to do? I scream at her. Take my dick out and dip it in the wound? Get the fuck out of here, I says to her. Okay, Barney son, I says to him, get this down your neck. I pour him a half-pint of Bushmills with two Panadol crushed up in it. I mean, he’s incoherent as he is, so it can’t do any harm. I tie a small wee knot in the wool and I thread the needle. Then I just pinch the skin around the cut and start sewing. All this fluff is coming off the wool and it’s getting into the blood so as it looks like someone has split his head open with a stick of candyfloss. I’m hoping that it doesn’t give him some kind of uncommon brain infection. But then it’s like that experiment where the guy puts electrodes into your brain and you start to hear things, see things. Barney starts talking like a tape recorder, talking in this fucking disconcerting voice that I have never heard before.