Later that night we went up to the Bow Bridge, up at the Whiterock, and sat there underneath it, smoking fags and watching the swallows that had their nests in the girders flying in and out and making that song they have, that summer song, and everybody was coming in and asking if it was true what had happened and Tommy’s sitting there like a movie star, not even reacting, just smoking and listening to the birds and the women are crying and all these hard-case IRA men are shaking him by the hand and one kid even got him to sign a plastic bullet. What are you going to write on it? I says to him, and he looks at me and he winks. For the good times, he says, and the pair of us cracked up laughing like the mad Paddy bastards what we were.

*

The next day we’re at the wedding in the photo. We’re with Patrick and Barney and this cunt McManus, you would not believe this cunt: knob-end. Tommy’s got Patricia with him. She wanted to take him to America. She wanted them to have a baby, but first she says that she wanted them to save up enough money so as they could bring her up in New York. They didn’t want to bring up weans in Ireland, not with the way things were. Who could fucking blame them. If they had gone back then, Tommy would have been on the silver screen in Hollywood by now, there’s no doubt about it.

Patrick was a real snob of a fella. This cunt wouldn’t take public transport anywhere even though back in reality he was a promotions man in a fucking supermarket. You know the guy what comes up to you when you come through the door and gets you to take a nip of whiskey and a wee bite of a fruit scone? That’s your man Patrick when he wasn’t plugging boys for the Ra. But he was a good cunt to know. That was where we got the knock-off booze.