I look out the window and I can see Billy McNab’s weans playing in their back garden. The boy has a toy gun and is leading the two girls into a shed at the bottom of the garden with blindfolds on. The whole fucking city is at it, I says to myself. Okay, okay.

I take a packet of twenty B&H from my top bin, crack it. I neck two cans of green, one after the other. I always had a set of cans stashed under my bed in case of emergency even though they would get mouse shite all over them. Probably pished on them too. The mice, I mean. Fuck it. Might make it taste better.

I’m going to tell them it was me. I make the decision. It’s a gamble. Mission accomplished, I’ll say. The dissidents are a bunch of fucking lying rats. I was there. I had a bagful of explosives on me. It was a mad coincidence, I says to myself. We’d both gone to hit it at the same time. Then on the news, they says it. They says it exactly like Miracle Baby says they would says it. No one died. The Europa is a mighty fortress. That was it. That’s what sealed it for me. This is how it is written. I called Tommy’s from a phone box. His ma answered. Have you heard about this thing at the Europa? she says to me. I have that, I says. Brave boys, she says to me. Brave boys. Aye, he was, I says to her. When Tommy gets in, tell him to come and pick me up from my ma’s house, I says to her, and I hang up the phone. I try to have a Tom Tit in the outside toilet but for some reason I just cannot go so as I go back up to my room and I sit down on the bed with the unexploded bomb underneath it and I watch Billy McNab’s weans, mockexecuting each other outside in the garden.

*

You get these turds, these turds off the telly, asking how is it possible, to kill, to maim, and to protect the killers afterward, to treat them as heroes, even, in their own communities. All in this fucking whining fucking voice. I want to say to them, it’s fucking elementary, my dear tosspot, have you never heard of loyalty? Have you no concept of friendship? Have you never had a family you would protect with your life? Do you not admire bravery? Have you never felt the calling of your own blood?

Thing is, we all know it. We all understand it just fine. But only when it’s our own side we’re talking about. Well, I’m from the other side, and I’m here to tell you it’s the fucking mirror image of your own. Except braver.