Everybody loved the Europa. It stood for something in Belfast. For another life. For having enough money to get away or at least only have to come back and visit. Plus and it was called the Europa. It was greater than Great Britain. It was something Ireland could be a part of. But I was as mad as your man Hitler. I’d bring the whole of the Europa down in flames just for the sheer fucking hell of it.

Me and Tommy and Barney get the job. Course we do. But really it was a solo mission. I couldn’t let on about the full details of my own involvement and on the other hand here was me having to protect Kathy. I was on nobody’s side, really, except for the side of history, which is all you can do, except for the side of the future, which is on its way. But they knew what was coming.

Come on,

it was an f-ing game,

come on

The Boys had hit the Europa within three months of it opening in 1971. And again and again ever since. But nobody had ever levelled it. It was all about coming up with new plans of attack. And here’s me eating stolen room service off silver trays, in random rooms, outside the eyes of security, and making love in every one of them; what an opportunity, what a fucking gift.

*

Listen, I’m banging on about the Nazis. I had plenty of time to read about the Nazis later when I was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, that bitch. I read a ton of books behind bars. Believe me. I read about other wars that took place. Wars in the Middle East and wars in South America and wars in Africa, wars in every language on God’s earth. But it was the war with the Nazis that struck me the most and that had the most similarities with our own situation here in Ireland.

Your man Goebbels gives this speech. He was the head of propaganda for the Nazis and he gives this speech at a sport centre in Berlin. All the hard cases are there, all the old fighters. This is in about 1943, I think, when it’s becoming clear that Germany is getting shafted on all sides. Goebbels talks about Stalingrad, one of the big crazy Nazi defeats, where they were driven back and massacred, lots of young Nazi soldiers are killed, there’s no way to avoid talking about it, so as Goebbels comes up with this thing, it was propaganda but it strikes a chord, he comes up with this thing where he says that all the young men that had died had lived out their mission, he talks about it as if they had solved the riddle of their life much earlier than the survivors, much earlier than the people at the talk in the sport centre. In fact he says that it was actually the people that were left alive who were in limbo because they still had the whole puzzle of their life left to unravel. Think about it. All the young boys that had been killed at Stalingrad had just fulfilled themselves early and even now, even now they were ghosting in the light of eternal blessings, which was not a religious thing, Goebbels was not a religious man, he couldn’t give a shite when the churches got bombed, but what he meant is that living out your own life, completely, whatever the story, means to get bathed in this light at the end, the golden light of destiny, this final illuminating moment where all of this stuff makes sense.