Bimbo opened his packet of crisps and offered around to the other patrons to no avail. He wondered what Softly and the younger McIlenden were playing at. It was an awful suggestible alignment they presented, though there was nothing anyone could say, because it could all be innocent. Softly loved himself, was the thing, and the Stella one was lovely, but then the Denise one was lovely too, and a normal man would be down on his knees with gratitude just to have the one or the other. But Softly was the type of fella would never settle just for satisfaction.

Bimbo spouted the foil pack and shook the last crumbs of crisp into his palm. He licked his thumb for the last of the salt. He glanced at Denise. She was staring unhappily at the TV, the fingertips of one hand absently resting on her neck.

‘Back in a tick,’ Bimbo muttered.

Bimbo stormed into the jacks, thrummed a sulphurous piss into the gurgling trough. On the wall above the urinal someone had written

AISLING MCILENDEN WONT U SUCK ME OFF

BEHIND YOUR DADDYS FODDER TROUGH

Bimbo tutted. Aisling was the third McIlenden sister, only in college still, and in Bimbo’s estimation the least finest, but that was only relatively speaking. Aisling McIlenden was lovely and there was absolutely no call for such public traduction of her or indeed any other beoir on account of just being ­good-­looking. Bimbo spat into his palm and tried rubbing the foul couplet away, but it was written in permanent marker. He ground the heel of his palm in a circle against the cool brick and even as he did so he felt his horn rouse in his other hand.

‘Ah, now,’ he said, disgusted at the impertinence of his body.

A trace of Denise McIlenden’s scent had carried itself into the bleachy stench of the jacks, and it taunted Bimbo’s nose and it went down into his body and it taunted him in his blood. Bimbo stepped into a stall, drew the latch. Forty-six seconds later he came back out and washed his hands in the sink.

When Bimbo returned to the lounge there was a young man sitting on the stool that would have been Bimbo’s if Bimbo had taken a seat. The young man had the hunched, spidery posture of an adolescent, though his face looked older. He was dressed in black and he had a sword. Bimbo did not register the sword at first, because who expects a sword? The first thing he noticed was the silence that had settled over the other patrons, and for a humiliating moment he believed the silence was for him, that all present were somehow aware of what he had just perpetrated in the jacks.

The young man turned to Mikey.

‘As I was saying.’