*

It’s frightening what fear can do when you think about it. Think about it. We helped ourselves to these people’s worldly possessions, we took over their shop, we tied this poor woman up and made her wear a pillowcase for a mask and kept her in a boarded-up house with no floors, just because the Ra says they needed the money and not a sinner raised a finger against us. It was good times, if you were on the right side, or at least one of them. But if you fell through the cracks: forget it.

And not a sinner questioned us about running this comic shop neither. Sometimes weans would come in and ask about where’s Davy what runs it but we just says to them he was gone and that’s that and they shrugged and bought their comics as usual and left, or even weirder, some of them would catch sight of Tommy and think that he was Davy and some of them even called him Davy, see you later, Davy, they would shout to him as they left. I says to Barney, do you think our Tommy looks like your man Davy? Sure, he looks nothing like him, Barney says to me.

One time the landlord even stuck his head round the door but we just says to him we was under new management and he never called us again because I think he got the message. We spent all day, every day, with our feet up, reading the comics. That’s when I got into what they call the underground comics. Super Furry Freak Brothers, Mr Natural. Comics aren’t for weans anymore, I says to Tommy and Barney. They’re still sat there reading Tarzan like a pair of mental defectives. And it was more than comics what we sold. We sold war games. Everything from the Nazis in Europe to the Elves in La-La Land. There was a magazine called Dragon where they would talk about rules for defeating dwarves and skills for supernatural sorcerers and with pictures of women with big huge tits in skimpy leather outfits disembowelling priests with double-headed axes. I felt right at home. This is Ireland, I says to myself, everybody’s at it, it’s just that we’re the only ones up front about it. I don’t need a map of Middle-earth to find my way into slaughtering a troop of Huns. They called them role-playing games, RPGs for short. These are games where what you do is you pretend to be somebody else. But here’s the thing: the point of the game is not to win. The point is to play your part. I mean, you could get points and gain skills and stuff like that, but the real, serious gamers would try to get into the mindset of their characters and make the decisions that they would make, whether it was to their advantage or not. What I’m trying to say is, it was about being true, to a fantasy, for sure, but being true to it all the same.