So he goes up to these two young fellas and starts talking to them very friendly like, and the young lads are laughing, and then Jack gives me a cold, hungry look like a wolf in a horror film, and he turns sudden nasty on them, and draws a blade, and he looks at them fair and square in the falling light, the two of them shivering like deer, and one of them gives me about two hundred nicker in notes like, and the other gives Jack his traveller’s cheques, and Jack is fair fucking snarling at him, ‘They’re no fucking good, you got to sign them for me,’ he says, and the lad, he was maybe German or French, didn’t know what that was, and Jack grips his hand to show him what he meant, and the young lad leaps back, and then the other lad leaps forward, you know, one leaping back, one leaping forward, it would a’ confused General Patton. ‘You fucking German cunt,’ says Jack, though he may have been French either, and in fact he was French, because it came up in court later. ‘You fucking German cunt,’ and he runs the knife into the German – the French lad I mean – but it doesn’t go in, I mean it goes into the lad’s wrist in some funny sort of way, and now the lad’s leaping about with the knife caught somehow in his bleeding wrist, and screaming, and then Jazzman Jack shuts him up, I mean, shuts him up, and then this priest – I kid you not, what was he doing there in the park that time of night? – comes suddenly into view, and it’s by no means easy to see a priest that time of day in the twilight, with his black suit, and he was a brave fucker he was, and was doing what he thought was right, raising the alarm, the bastard, and then we were lamming it over the grass trying to get out of that park and back into the city, but the cops were there in their big 4×4, Jaysus, and you can imagine the rest. And Jack got sixteen years for that because of his priors and I got ten because of mine being fewer than his but only just, and the judge said we were to serve every day of our sentences, and I certainly done that, which is to say, five years. For good behaviour. Yeh. And another six months off for grassing up Jazzman Jack. Honour among thieves, I ask ya.

The filth kept that quiet. You know, in the interests of universal love. Not to mention me staying alive in the slammer.

‘Young people of Ireland, I love you,’ says your man John Paul.

That was very nice of him.

So, all things considered, it was going to take more than the ma crossing the river to Janet. It was going to take a miracle, says you. Oh, in fact, says you, it can’t be done. Everything gone too far over, and that’s that.