*

Doctor, doctor,

he says.

Who’s there? I says

to him.

Is this, what, the butcher shop? he says

and then:

half a pound of kiddlies, please,

he says.

Do you not mean kidneys? I says

to him.

I said kiddlies, diddle I?

he says.

*

I’m cracking up over this. It’s like we’ve tapped into the automatic part of his brain and all it contains are jokes. Irish jokes. My wife’s a prostitute, he says to me. I says to him, keep it down Barney, for fuck sake, Shona’s just next door. A prostitute, Barney says to me, thank fuck for that, I thought you says she was a Protestant.

Here, I says to him, and I pour him another Bushmills: drink this, it’s the law. I finish sewing him up and it doesn’t look half bad, apart from it’s fuzzy and it looks like he has a weird blue weave in his hair. I put him on the couch and he falls asleep so as I shout Shona through. Some craic, innit? I says to her. But the joke’s lost on her. She sees the job I’ve done on his head and I think she’s going to take a fit but instead she just stands there and sighs. He looks like a wee angel, she says to me. It wasn’t the first description that came to mind but it’s a thumbs-up and I’ll take what I can get. I leave Barney to recover, hopefully, who knows, and I head back round to the house. But I can feel that something’s wrong. Something in the background there. Prophecy. There’s no one’s there, I says to myself. She’s gone, I says to myself. I’m like a wolf with a dirty rag. I break into a run. I burst through the door and in the living room there’s nothing but an empty chair with a pair of stilettos on it. It’s like the Invisible Woman hanged herself. Or was raised up, into the air, and disappeared.

*

Of course it was them fucking Conan comics what did it. Of course Barney has gone in there looking like he did and asked if they have any Sexy Sword of Conan. Of course the guy says he does, he’s got some in the back, and would you give him a minute, would you, and while he’s gone Barney locks the door so as it’s just the two of them, then he takes out his gun, and he goes into the back room, and by this point the guy is already halfways out the window, this tiny wee window at the top that he can barely fit through, and Barney gets up on the counter and starts pulling him back into the room by the legs, but the guy starts kicking with these boots on, these boots with the steel toecaps, and Barney says he feels it like it’s splitting his skull and he falls back off the counter, he falls back out of control, and he fucks his head off the edge of this metal table as he goes. He doesn’t remember much of anything else, after that.