*

Then Bobby Sands goes down for fourteen year. I mean, we didn’t really know him. He was up in Rathcoole and we were down in the Ardoyne. But my ma knew his family and he was a good guy by all accounts, a bit of a soft touch when he was a kid, that’s what I heard, and of course he looked like a fucking hippy and had no sense of style whatsoever, which meant he was onto plums, in our book anyroads, and even years later when they got that mural of his on the wall of the Sinn Féin, my Aunt Betty goes past and is like that, he was some man, she says, but could he not have combed his hair and got a jumper what fit him?

Bobby gets fourteen year for bombing this carpet factory in Dunmurry, out Lisburn way. He doesn’t go down for the bombing, mind, he goes down for possession of a chatsby. He gets lifted by the peelers afters a ten-way firefight where they get their car rammed. He gets sent down to the Crumlin Road Gaol. And what happens is he kicks up a fucking storm.

I heard he was getting taunted. I don’t know if it was his hair or what but next thing we hear they’ve got the poor cunt on boards, what means they took every single item of furniture out his cell and just fucking sat him there. Then they stripped him bollock naked. Then they started starving him. This is the British government what’s doing this. That was when a lot of people turned. I mean, it may be hindsight. It may be all that Bobby Sands stands for this weather. But now I mind it as the moment that something snapped. That something was loosed. And besides, in Ireland history isn’t written. It’s remembered.

*

If there was one thing The Green Book hammered into us (The Holy Bible, some of us called it), it was that we were engaged in a glorious struggle, that we were the heroes of the future, that we were fighting for a legitimate cause, and that we weren’t just fucking common criminals anymore, which was some laugh, believe me, because a lot of us were just that, or at least had been, until the day they beat us over the head with this fucking Green Book. But back then it felt like a calling, like fate or destiny had played their pish-stained hands, and I never forgot what Mack said about thickening your skin and toughening yourself up. Now I understood what he meant. He was telling me in code. He was speaking just like Miracle Baby spoke. The struggle was making us all into oracles. Making superheroes of criminals. Making gods of murderers. Making legends of men. There’s a new world coming. What a time to be alive. 1977. God Save the Queen. We mean it, man.

*