Does anybody die in the Europa? I says to him. Does anybody die when we bring it down around their fucking ears? The Europa is still standing, Miracle Baby says, and it’s like his eyes have frosted over, like there’s a film over his eyes that has blotted out his pupils and he says to me, no one dies, with his blind eyes he says to us, no one dies. Tommy looks at me in the rear-view mirror. I know what he’s thinking. No one dies. The Europa is a mighty fortress. We walk in there with a suitcase full of Semtex and we make our mark without taking a single fucking life. Clean, and easy. We pull over to the side of the Alliance Road, give Miracle Baby twenty pence for more ice cream, and scream off into the future that had been promised us by a retarded baby.

*

1977, son. That’s when it all gets fucking serious. Changes at the top, my friend. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams are moving up, plus they had guys like Tom Hartley in there, the Falls Road Think Tank they called it, but there had been too much thinking, we all knew it, even for these guys, even though they couldn’t stop thinking, and producing books and pamphlets, and taking over local newspapers, even though we all knew that we had been held up, that things were too quiet, that the stand-off would never last, that the Brits would only respond to a massive and concerted show of force.

Everybody gets given these fucking Green Books, have you seen these things? They call us in, me and Barney and Tommy, and they attempt to scare the living shite out us. The IRA was the law. They were the true government. They were the voice of the people. So obeying orders to the point of laying down your life was something that was expected of every one of us. I mean, there was talk from some of The Boys about building a Socialist fucking Republic and all of this nonsense, but that meant nothing to me and less than nothing to Tommy and Barney. They couldn’t fucking spell socialism and were disinclined to try. We were motivated by more immediate concerns: protection, resentment, ambition, revenge, honour, sex, money, style, class – okay, I’ll give you that one – plus a history of violence that ran through our veins and that (let’s face it) was one of the only things holding the generations together. So as when they take us in and they hand us these Green Books and they says to us that we must be capable of murder, we must be capable of cold-blooded killing, without regrets, we could’ve laughed in their faces, if we weren’t all in on the joke in the first place. Killing without conscience: that’s what being one of The Boys was all about. A state of Total War like your man Goebbels: that was the legacy our families had handed down. Total War was our first-born and best-loved. Attrition, The Green Book says to us. Bombing, it says. Curbing, it says. Sustaining, it says. Defending & Punishing, it says. It was like a roll-call at school. We knew all these wee bastards. We grew up with them.