Do you think we can trust him? Tommy says to Miracle Baby. Tommy and Jinksy had been set up with some low-key racket down one end of the Falls Road and Tommy was convinced that Jinksy was out collecting on his lonesome. Jinksy O’Connor can’t be trusted with his ma’s underwear, Miracle Baby says. What?! He can’t keep his hands out his ma’s panties, Miracle Baby says, which is going to do for him in the end, he says. Then he starts giggling to himself. Fuck is he talking about? Tommy says. Fucking wee daftie. Then a week later, and I’m not kidding you, Jinksy O’Connor is discovered, by his own sister, half-naked and hanging from the ceiling, with a set of tights round his neck and wearing a pair of his ma’s panties. The stupid cunt only went and asphyxiated himself to death in one of these accidental sex murders; what the fuck just happened.

We round up Miracle Baby, pull him into a car as he’s walking down Jamaica Street, his face all snottery and with ice cream all down his top. Tommy’s driving, I’m in the back seat. Miracle Baby, how the fuck did you know about Jinksy O’Connor? Tommy says to him. Everybody knows about Jinksy O’Connor, he says. No fucker knew about Jinksy O’Connor: fact. Miracle Baby was become prophetic, he was pulling this knowledge out of the air, which is what it means, prophecy, to get your information from the future. So as we started asking him all this other madness.

Will there ever be a united Ireland? Naw, never, he says. That’s fucking mutinous talk right there, Tommy says to him, but guess what, he’s still right. Will I get laid at The Shamrock on Saturday night? Yes, Tommy, he says, but that didn’t take a fucking mind reader. Wait, I says to him, do you think the Ra are going to hit Mad Dog McPaik? He’s a dead man, Miracle Baby says, and so he was, a week later. Who killed Arlene McDaid? Tommy says to him, and time stops dead.

I’m looking down at Miracle Baby, who is lying on the back seat with all of this pink ice cream down his jumper, and with snots and saliva on his face, and he’s writhing down there, like a terrible grotesque nightmare he’s wriggling, and he looks up at me, and he sticks his tongue out and he crosses his eyes, but before he can say anything else I says to him, wait a minute, I says, wait, I’ve got a better one, let’s get fucking serious here for a moment why don’t we, is the Europa still standing, I says to him, and he says it right back to me: the Europa is a mighty fortress. What the fuck.