I thought about Patrick and all at once I see him in his electric-blue suit, on a cloud, getting his dick sucked by an angel at last, and I thought of how his life had been solved and the story completed whereas mine was still unravelling all over the place. But there was a connecting thread there, something we had in common, something that was running through all our lives and somehow directing them. Our stories were all tied up with each other ever since I whacked his girlfriend and her new man and shacked up with my own in the Europa.

It was like Stalingrad because I was defending several fronts at once, juggling who needed to know what, and what had to be kept secret from who. Goebbels says in that case you fight a Total War, which means that every single thing is geared toward the fight. You make it your whole reason for existing, fighting this fucking war. And how do you know when you’re winning? Okay, so as this is the best bit.

Goebbels says that you can’t judge anything by the mood that you’re in when you’re in a state of Total War. So he goes ahead and he replaces the word ‘mood’ with the word ‘bearing’, as in how you hold yourself. Now, I had to laugh. That was me and Tommy and Barney and your man Pat right there. No matter how heavy anything got, no matter how much blood we had on our hands, no matter how dangerous the situation became, we never once lost our bearing. We carried ourselves like movie stars. We modelled ourselves on Perry Como. Our bearing? You want to know how our bearing was? Our bearing was toward the future. We intended to seduce the fuck out of it.

*

We’re sat around the shop, brainstorming the approach. We still had a trickle of kids coming in to buy the comics and Barney had even made pals with a few of them. There was one kid that did his own comic strip, fantasy stuff like Savage Sword of Conan only set in Ancient Ireland (Ur-lan’t, the kid named it), that was called The Fomorians, who were creatures with superpowers that originally lived in Atlantis after it got sunk but that were tempted into leaving the waters by just how beautiful Ur-lan’t was and now they had to defend it against another race of evil superheroes called the Partholons.

This kid that drew the artwork and wrote the adventures himself, he was a wee genius, so he was. Now Barney has taken him under his wing and is buying the original drawings off him. These are going to be worth a fortune one day, Barney says to us as the kid’s leaving the store. You’re a wee f-ing genius, he shouts after him, this kid with the red hair and a duffel coat, this kid that didn’t even look round and that was obviously completely embarrassed. I have only the fuzziest memory of what he looked like. He always had his hood up, as I remember it, and he would leave or look the other way when me and Tommy showed up. This wee kid is as good as your man, Barney says to us.