It was the first of the summers of blood; you have no idea how many times I had to put up with the one-eyed yellow god what gazes down. It started with the two kids from Athlone, in the heart of the Free State, paid informers, when we dragged their bodies into the middle of the road and called an ambulance that ran over the pair of them as soon as it pulled round the corner. It was an old trick Mack taught us. That’s what they do with the junkies in New York, he says to us. How the fuck does he know? Tommy says to me. Maybe he was one of them New York junkies himself, I says to him, I mean, he fucking looked like one.

Then there was the off-duty RUC man from Lisburn who got a kettle of boiling water mixed with six pound of sugar over his head. Then Tommy spots a guy in the street that he says has been harassing Patricia at the dancing. We’re on the bus going past and we leap off, bounce his head off a telephone box about ten time without saying a word to the cunt, pop our cuffs, run a comb through our hair, and get back on the bus without missing a beat. Where do you need me to drop you, lads? the driver says to us, without even looking round. A private taxi full of frightened ghosts was the size of our bollocks.

Then we go out on tour. We do a week in Derry, pulling in favours, regulating bootleg booze and fags, kicking the shite out of local dealers and clearing the way for a team of boys from Belfast who the Ra were setting up to make some serious money for the cause. Then we took to using tools. It was the sweetest alibi, a mobile home full of tools and with a painting of your man Mickey Mouse on the side. Who the fuck could object? I broke a guy’s jaw with a wrench. Smashed full sets of teeth with a chisel and an iron bar (the sound of bone splintering is like nothing you could ever imagine). Tore a guy’s ear off with a hoover. Crippled two blokes with a pair of fire extinguishers. Shot a guy in the leg out the window of a moving car for the wild fuck of it (he had no idea where the bullet even came from). Dropped a guy on his head from the top of a multi-storey car park. That was messy. Buried a guy up to his neck on the beach and took turns toeing his head like a fucking football. That was even messier. Did that thing where you slit the guy’s throat with a Stanley and pull his tongue through like a tie, what do you call it, a Glaswegian necktie, but his tongue was too short, and it barely stuck out, and you couldn’t see it for the blood and gore anyway (lesson learnt). Forced this car off Etna Drive, stabbed the guy six time in the chest, put him in a bin bag and threw him in the dump. Forced this other car off the Antrim Road, held the guy down, slit his wrists and waited till he bled to death, drove back to his house, kicked the door in and left his body sitting up in a chair next to the fire for his wife to find. Held this guy by the legs off a bridge and made him sing the whole of ‘The Boys of the Old Brigade’, only he got the words wrong so as we had no option but to drop him. Blew up a row of shops in Strabane. Beat a guy senseless, shaved his head, wrote INFORMER on his forehead and hanged him from a lamp post in front of his house. Cut both a guy’s pinkies off, shoved them up his nose and sewed his nostrils shut. Only joking, we didn’t sew them shut. But we would have, if we’d thought of it.