We get up to the room and that’s when I fucking lose it. Do you know how dangerous this is? I says to Tommy. You’re playing with fire right now, I says to him. You don’t know who talks to who. You don’t know what connections these people might have. We’re over here to lie low, I says to him, not to party like we’re fucking Orangemen. But Tommy starts getting that aggressive way of his, and there’s no talking to him, his heart is fucking pounding out his chest, and now he’s talking to himself, about me, right in front of me, he’s shaking his head, these mugs don’t understand, he’s saying to himself, that fucking line that was more frightening than asking somebody if they was a neighbour. I stepped back. There was nothing anybody could do.

We shop up to this fucking back room, this lounge with a telly in the corner and an old stereo and plastic plants and everybody’s smoking and drinking and they all seem half-blocked already. The Mary Millington bird is there and she’s wearing a white dress and high heels and she’s squatting down on the floor there in front of her man, laughing and rocking back and forth on her white high heels. There are a couple other birds too. Here come the boys, her man says when we walk in, and Tommy’s got a bottle of Famous Grouse on him. They ask us what we’ve been up to and I take a seat next to one of the birds, this dark-haired bird with the buck teeth. Tommy takes a seat on the couch next to this other bird with a hairband on and what looks like Wonder Woman, only as soon as she opens her mouth it’s like Wonder Woman has been drinking potcheen on the bru for fifteen year. Tommy’s telling her about the film we saw in the afternoon, about this scene where a fighter plane fitted with a bomb is rushing toward this huge fucking tower that they’re trying to blow up and destroy and how, in the film, the pilot aims the fighter right at the control room in the heart of the tower and the camera cuts to inside the tower and you can see the fighter tunnelling through the air, and all these people start running in chaos to get away and at the last minute, and this is exactly how Tommy tells it, at the last minute the fucking pilot ejaculates out the cockpit. Everybody cracks up.

Oh my god, Wonder Woman says to him, you mean he ejects out the plane, oh my god, you are unbelievable. Tommy’s sitting there, beaming. How the fuck does he do it? Breaking the ice by being a complete fucking eejit. So are youse up for it, boys? Millington’s man says to us. He raises a can of Export in a cheers. Aye, we’re up for it, Tommy says to him. Sure, we’re up for anything, he says. Wonder Woman has her arm around him by this point. I’m looking round at fucking Red Rum to my right here, this fucking mouthful of teeth and breath on her like you would not believe. Let’s get a sing-song going, she says. Then Millington’s man starts with it. He starts to the singing of it.