But still there is this secret place in your life that you can revisit, this strange cul de sac, this weird bubble where everything stops dead except for the deed itself, which is forever being replayed, somewhere, offstage, somewhere out of the ordinary, where this one event, repeated, forever, goes on outside of time and space. And whenever you want to, you can re-enter that house, climb in that same window, revisit moments that no one else has the ability to even imagine. Imagine that. You have regrets. Of course you have regrets. But even these are crooked and surprising and not what anybody would expect.

In one way I felt as if it cut me off from Tommy and Barney and from the rest of The Boys. You’ll probably say to me that’s mad talk, Samuel, sure you were all killers. But each one of us was isolated by it, I says to you, right back. Caught up in our own loops, I says to you. Even as the central loop, the troubles, our troubled Irish history, contained them all.

No one suspected me. Mack joked that I got my wish. That was easy, he says to me. Tommy says that I must have contracted one of them psychic death rays from the comics. In the papers it says that there had been no sign of forced entry. They thought it was an honour killing. Arlene had crossed the lines, they says, and was mixing it up with the other. People get killed for that every day in Belfast. Just like in any other city, in a way.

I told nobody. In my mind it was a promotion. Not in rank, just further into the future. One giant step. I bought every newspaper that I could. I read every single account. None of them fit the facts. It was all outlandish speculation. More than that. None of them mentioned her man in terms of the UDA or the UFF. His name was Jimmy Campbell. He was a painter and decorator, was what they said. I began to think that everybody was in on it. That everybody was colluding to keep this cunt’s affiliations and identity a secret. I started to think that I had netted myself an even bigger prize than I had thought. I flattered myself, telling myself that the upper echelons had taken a hit. A hit so bad that they had been forced into hushing it up while I disappeared into the night like the Holy fucking Ghost. And I remembered what Kathy had said about invisibility and I realised that Tommy was right, I had caught a superpower, just not the one he thought. How could he? By this point I had become one of the invisible. But what I didn’t realise was that it meant that other people could see right through you.

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