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think it really hit me, though, until one day Austie said: ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Tallon, you’re gone into an animal. What are you trying to do to yourself at all? You keep on like this and you’ll make Hoss Watson look like a clothes peg!’
    We had a laugh about it but I can’t say I was laughing very much when I weighed myself on the chemist’s scales on the way home. I had gone up from twelve to sixteen and a half stone. I told myself I would have to work out a programme of fitness and discipline for I definitely was starting to look more like Hoss than Keith Carradine. It shows you how stupid I could be that there I was, working out my campaign of order and fitness right there in my mind — I had paid another visit to Dublin for the sole purpose of viewing
Taxi Driver
again; so much then for my subsequent denials! — and me halfway through another steak and kidney! Thinking about Jacy and thinking about Mona and how the ‘programme’ must be started once and for all.
From Monday on
— Total Organization! was all I could think. That was the way it had to be. ‘There’s no other way,’ I repeated. ‘Total Org, is the only option.’
    (There is a torn piece of paper here marked ‘T. B. is God’s lonely man!’ T. B. being Travis Bickle, of course, the character in the movie. And, underneath — can you believe it? — ‘I must get in shape. Toomuch sitting has ruined my body. Twenty-five push-ups each morning, one hundred sit-ups, one hundred knee-bends.’
    I must have copied it out in the cinema, if the crazily slanted writing is anything to go by. No, I remember doing it actually — scribbling it on my knee in the Adelphi on Dublin’s Middle Abbey Street.)
Peace and Reconciliation Rally
    ‘Are you at it again?’ says Austie, pushing the pie aside as he hands me this leaflet about the peace and reconciliation rally they were planning for The Courtyard. It was Fr Connolly who had organized it, he told me.
    ‘He knows the crowd above in Belfast who got the whole thing started.’
    I had seen them on the telly, talking about setting up a movement for peace after three innocent children got run over. ‘Maybe we could get Boo Boo and the boys to play at it,’ I said.
    ‘Like fuck we could,’ said Austie, rolling a keg along the floor in front of him. ‘Can’t you read? The word is “peace”, not fucking mayhem. Will you change that barrel there Joey and make yourself useful to fuck out of that!’
    ‘
Peace
,’ I said and smiled, giving him the ‘V’ sign just for a laugh. When I was changing the barrel, Hoss came in and I handed him the leaflet. He sneered, then rolled it up in a ball and tossed it on the floor. ‘Doddering old bollocks of a padre,’ he said. ‘Nothing better to do with his time than talk to them mad bitches.’
    ‘I think it’s a good idea,’ I said, although to tell the truth I didn’t think any such thing. I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I was thinking:
Soon it begins. T. O. Total Organization
.
    ‘Peace with justice — that’s all we’ve ever wanted,’ Hoss said and flicked a flame from his lighter. ‘And we won’t have that until those cunts are gone.’
    ‘What?’ I said as he jerked his thumb at the telly where a British officer was addressing the camera, explaining some action or other in the South Armagh area.
    They said it was going to be the hottest summer for fifty years. Eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit, according to the weatherman, average twenty degrees above normal. The fire brigade was up and down the street the whole day long, off out in the country fighting gorse firesand barn blazes. On top of that there was a water shortage. Then there was the bank strike, everyone cashing their cheques in Austie’s. ‘The country’s going mad,’ said Austie with a sigh as Paddy Cooney, the Minister for Justice, appeared on the screen and promised all-out war on the Provos. ‘There is a huge round-up on the way,’ he went on, ‘and an awful