Check it out: Barney was radioactive, ha ha. He had some traumatic accident where he had got caught in the birth of a star or a planet and he had become like a mini supernova giving off all this radioactive power so as he had to be strapped into like titanium-grade armour to deal with this galactic deformity so as that he looked like a goddamned man-machine because he would literally burn up anybody who had contact with him, which made him like The Thing from The Fantastic Four, in a way, like tragic and sad and with no way of getting a girlfriend but with the power to destroy an entire fucking planet. But the thing is, he could be in two places at once, because his particles had deformed and gone subatomic so as he was like a one-man army. The name Beavis gave him? Neutrino.

And Tommy? Tommy was The X-Ray Kid. And get this: he had hypnotic eyes. No bull. He could shoot a beam from his eyes that would reveal anything. That could strip a woman’s clothes off to her ankles. That could read thoughts. That could see through walls. That could hypnotise you into believing that every star is a planet just like ours. That would mean that all he needed to do was to stare at a copy of the Reader’s Digest and he could download everything in there and get special knowledge without even fucking bothering to read it. He had to wear these special visors, mind, otherwise he would be going about turning the whole world upside down with a glance. I says to myself, that’s autosuggestion right there, The X-Ray Kid is writing the damn book, that’s true superpowers, all this mad stuff is real.

And as for me? I’m not going to tell you my superpower. See if you can’t figure it out for yourself. But I’ll give you my name: my name was The Anomaly.

*

That’s when we realised that Miracle Baby could read the future. That was his superpower. Thing is, if you asked him something that he knew, he would tell you the truth, you would get the full story, no problem. But he was just like a Weegie board, because if you asked him something that he didn’t know, then he would just start making it up. But then everything he made up started coming true. Only but it takes us a while to figure it out.

We’re sitting in Tommy’s back garden and Miracle Baby is working on some rock formation he was making for the equivalent of ten pence an hour. Miracle Baby, Tommy says to him, do you know your man Jinksy O’Connor? Very neat, Miracle Baby says, Jinksy O’Connor is very neat. It was true, Jinksy was a pal of Mack’s and even though he was half-blind he dressed well plus he was always polite and decent, except when he was sticking you in the ribs with a sharpened chisel, which was his weapon of choice, that and strangulation with women’s nylons, it turns out.