Copyright

Dedication

For my parents

Epigraph

One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—

One need not be a House—

The Brain has Corridors—surpassing

Material Place—

Emily Dickinson

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Part Two

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Part Three

24

25

26

27

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Part One

1

Belfast, 1995

I grew up in a rainy city, walled in by dark hills, where people were divided by size. We came in one of two sizes: big or wee, with no real words for those who fitted somewhere in between.

Mostly the reason for a fella’s nickname – Big Paul, say, or Wee Sammy – was staring you in the face, or the chest. But sometimes strangers were puzzled when they heard some great lump, with arms on him like two concrete bollards, being spoken of as Wee Jimmy.

The explanation was simple: he was obviously the son of a Big Jimmy, and had contracted the term ‘wee’ early, from the pressing need to distinguish the child from the father. Although he had long burst out of his wee name it clung to him as he surged through life, a stubborn barnacle on the side of the Titanic.

I was once Wee Jacky. But when Big Jacky, my father, collapsed on the street one day, his hand flapping towards the astonishing pain in his heart, the need for my title ebbed away on the pavement. I became just Jacky, because I was now the only Jacky.

Then there was my friend Titch. His name belonged to the third and rarest category: he was so enormous, but so unthreatening, that his bulk could safely be referred to in ironic terms. So he was dubbed Titch, a miniature word synonymous with a small perspective on life.

The clash between Titch’s name and his appearance made strangers laugh. From the moment of introduction he was a walking contradiction, an ambulatory joke. But he turned out to be no joke for me. That big soft eejit, and what he stumbled into, was the trigger for the whole nasty business that swallowed me up like a wet bog.

I grew up in Belfast: my beloved city, baptised in tea and drizzle, sprinkled with vinegar-sodden chips and cigarette butts. You turned off the Lisburn Road, with its smattering of boutiques and cosy coffee shops, and just kept walking over the metal footbridge until at last you made it to our battered grid of streets with its two-up, two-down terraced houses crammed together in different shades of brick, paint or pebbledash. Every so often there was a derelict one with boarded-up windows, dismal as an eyeless face. And there I was, walking down Lucan Street towards the house where Titch lived with his mother.

It was the best time of the day for me: the fading hour when a long summer evening tips into the night, and mothers come to their doors to reel their grumbling children back in from patchy football games on scrubby grass. One of them was sitting on the brick wall near the waste ground as I walked past, scuffing his heels on the graffiti. He yelled after me in his reedy voice: ‘Mister, lend us a quid would you?’ I would have walked on, but there was something about the pally delicacy of his lend that made me laugh, the wily pretence that I had a hope in hell of ever getting it back.

I turned round to look at him. He was slouched up there, about eleven years old, puffing on a cigarette and screwing up his eyes like a bad imitation of James Dean. He wouldn’t have known who James Dean was, of course: he thought he had made up the squint himself. He had a ratty skinhead and one of those childish old man’s faces, the fine skin stretched over the sharp bones a bit too tightly for someone so young.

‘What would you do with a quid,’ I asked him. ‘Go and buy yourself some more fags?’

‘Sure a quid wouldn’t buy me a whole packet anyway,’ he answered, quick as a ferret.

‘At the corner shop, they sell them as singles,’ I said. A second’s pause. The wee dervish knew I had him on the hop.

‘I was gonna get a bag of chips,’ he countered, sliding his eyes away in expectation of defeat. I handed him the coin: ‘Don’t be spending it all in the one shop.’

He grinned, a sudden flash of pure joy, and faked falling off the wall in amazement as payment. I watched him saunter down the road to the chippy, trying to flick his fag-end into the gutter like a practised smoker. In about a month’s time, he’d have it just right.

The moment sticks in my mind: his dwindling, cocky figure in the grey light. It was the last time that things in my life seemed clean, the smiling photograph snapped minutes before the car crashes. Seconds after I walked into Titch’s house I could smell the first cracklings of trouble, like something softly burning in another room.

The years had dealt Titch’s mother a few thumping blows, and you could see their impact in the depressed sag of her shoulders. She was like a sofa that too many people had sat on, and the heaviest arse was Titch’s dad, a salesman and raconteur who drank up the housekeeping money, and then the rent money, and then buggered off to leave her precarious and alone with Titch, her hulking, simple-natured son with a penchant for stealing things from shops. Titch’s dad had since shacked up with a hairdresser from Omagh, by whom he had two more children in quick succession. He sent Titch occasional birthday cards with a fiver or tenner tucked inside, and the scrawled words ‘From Your Dad’ beneath the glaringly false inscription To The World’s Greatest Son.

When Titch was younger he hoarded all his dad’s cards from year to year and used to pore over them sentimentally. Then one year the dad’s card arrived ten days late, bearing the gold-piped legend Happy Birthday Son, and in his furious disappointment Titch threw the entire carefully saved stack on the fire. Now he filleted the money wearing a bored, sulky expression, plump fingers rustling speedily inside the envelope, and threw the card into the bin without even reading the message. At least, that’s what I had seen him do, but it might have been for effect. I bet he fished it back out and had a proper look at it later.

There was a kind of sweetness running through Titch’s mum: she wasn’t a whinger. She never hinted that God had dealt her a bad hand. She had dealt it to herself, she said, the day she first saw Titch’s dad relating a joke in a smoke-filled city centre bar, with his gleeful face shining as he approached the punchline, and the men crowding round him already in stitches at the way he was telling it. She should have seen he was a bad egg from the word go, she said, but then again that might have been why she had liked him. Maybe the whiff of sulphur had attracted her.

I knocked twice: the front door opened, more slowly than usual.

‘Ah hello, Jacky,’ she said. The day’s worries had seeped into her voice.

‘What’s up?’ I asked, hanging my jacket in the narrow hall. She ushered me into the front room and nodded towards Titch’s bedroom.

‘He got into bother at McGee’s shop. The old man caught him taking a packet of biscuits he hadn’t paid for and there was a bit of a row, I think.’

She watched me warily, the hazel eyes waiting for a definitive reply.

‘Oh dear,’ I said. It was worse than she knew. I had heard that the McGees were hardmen, heavily involved. The older McGee was a nasty piece of work: rancid with an unnamed resentment, quick to anger and loath to forget any slight. He hung about in a couple of local drinking clubs with a guy called McMullen, who had a pot belly and weaselly eyes, and who was said to have killed at least three people himself. I didn’t know if he had or not, but bad rumours clung to him.

There was no missus on the scene. People whispered that oul McGee’s wife had abandoned the family and Northern Ireland years ago, when her two boys were young, never to return. This was a maternal crime alluded to only in hushed voices, although I heard Titch’s mum say once – as though uttering a small heresy – that she was a good-looking woman and the only one in that family with a civil tongue in her head. For most people, though, the wife’s flight had given her husband a reason for the drop of arsenic in his soul.

From what I remembered, McGee’s grown son now called round after work twice a week to take him to a drinking club where he stayed until the small hours, diligently feeding the next day’s irritable mood with copious amounts of spirits. The son lived a few streets away from me. He had an Alsatian dog tied up in his back yard that growled if it heard anyone walking past.

As a shopkeeper, the da maintained a testy politeness with his regular customers, but he wouldn’t take kindly to some fat chancer just wandering in for a free packet of chocolate bourbons.

‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. You go and speak to him. I can’t get any more out of him.’

I started walking up the stairs towards Titch’s room. Titch was lying on his long-suffering bed, ostentatiously scrutinising one of his mother’s very old Hello! magazines. He had heard me come into the house long ago, which is why any moment now he would affect a sudden surprise at my appearance.

Titch. Physique: overweight, shambolic, implicitly threatening the trembling frame of his single bed. Eyes: pale blue, currently glued with manufactured attention to a picture of Ivana Trump. Mood today: laconic, with a strong undercurrent of surly defiance. His left hand dangled speculatively above a half-open packet of Jacob’s Custard Creams, like one of those mechanical claws you try to pick up prizes with at fairgrounds.

‘Hello,’ he said, without looking up.

‘Is that a tacit acknowledgement of my presence, or are you just rehearsing aloud the title of your reading matter?’ I said. I liked talking this way to Titch.

‘What?’ he said. You had to hand it to Titch, he was a genius of repartee. He was a lord of language, drunk on the endless permutations of the spoken word.

‘You’re a lord of language,’ I said.

‘Bugger off, Jacky,’ he said, mildly. He shifted slightly: the bed frame winced and shivered. I could see he was working up to some tremendous pronouncement. ‘How do you think that Trumpy woman gets her hair to stay like that?’

That did it. I went over and pulled his head round to face mine. The pale blue eyes carried a look of resentful surprise.

‘Listen, you big eejit,’ I hissed. ‘Never mind Ivana fucking Trump’s hairdo. What did you do today in McGee’s shop?’

The eyes widened slightly in recognition, and then floated lazily away from mine. ‘The old man caught me taking a packet of Jaffa Cakes.’

‘Why didn’t you take them from Hackett’s? At least your ma settles up with them at the end of the week.’

‘Hackett’s was closed.’

There you have it: Titch’s immortal logic. Hackett’s shop, his usual stomping ground, was closed. So what did he do? He took himself over to McGee’s, and straight into a row with a muscular wee psycho.

‘So what did he say when he caught you with the biscuits?’

Titch sighed. He wanted me to go away now, but he could see there was no dodging the question.

‘Oul McGee saw me putting them inside my coat, and he came over. He said “What do you think you’re doing you thieving bastard?” I s-said I was going to pay for them. He was squeezing my arm till it hurt, Jacky, and he said ‘You were not, you big fat bastard.’ And he kept on squeezing.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘He was hurting my arm, Jacky, so I told him to f-f-fuck off and gave him a push. He skidded and went flying into his tins of tomato soup.’

In the midst of his self-righteous distress, Titch’s shoulders began to heave with laughter at the memory.

‘Did he fall down? Did anyone see?’

‘Aye, he fell down with all the tins rattling round him. There was no one else in the shop but them two oul Maguire sisters. They were letting on they were shocked, but I saw one of them laughing into her coat collar.’

I sat on the chair beside his bed and stared at him, hard. He looked back at me, guiltily, but still with that little smile twitching somewhere beneath his smooth, pasty skin. I knew he was secretly freeze-framing the image of old McGee toppling backwards in furious disbelief, his arms and legs waggling comically as the soup tins clattered around him. Titch was savouring that moment like a mouthful of stolen Jaffa Cakes.

‘It’s not as funny as you think. You know your aunt in Newry,’ I said. ‘If I were you, I’d go and stay with her for a while.’

His mind slowly wheeled round to face this new and unwelcome proposition. The mouth made a brief ‘O’ of apprehension.

‘I don’t like that aunt. She’s always nagging me and she never gives me enough to eat. Why?’ he said.

‘Because you knocked down old McGee and made him look stupid,’ I shouted. ‘And McGee’s son is apparently well connected. So the next time you go dandering down the street, looking for new biscuits to stuff into your fat face, you’re liable to get a severe hammering. You think that it hurt when McGee squeezed your arm. It’ll be nothing compared to this: you won’t be able to walk right for a year.’

‘Aw Jacky, they would never do anything about that. I only gave him a wee push.’ He picked up his Hello! magazine again, stubbornly. ‘And I gave him his Jaffa Cakes back.’

There was no talking to him. Sometimes Titch reminded me of a vast, impenetrable animal: a whale maybe, drifting through yesterday and today, in some unreachable element of his own. Warnings bounced off him. He swam around in the blue water of his mother’s love, and the harsher currents of my affection. He couldn’t understand that something entirely different, something much darker and nastier, might be waiting out there for him.

I could warn him about getting a hammering, all right. I could also warn him about the grave possibility of a Martian invasion in ten years’ time. It was all part of the meaningless, potential Future: all one and the same to Titch. Defeated, I took one of his custard creams. He looked up: ‘Hey Jacky don’t be eating all my biscuits. I’ve only got twelve left.’ He was trying, clumsily, to charm me out of my mysterious bad mood. I got up to leave: ‘Don’t be looking for women in those gossip mags: you’ll end up with an ex-wife who takes you to the cleaners for your Hobnobs.’

His mother was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, an unravelling parcel of nerves. I told her: ‘He knocked old McGee over. I’d get him up to your sister’s in Newry if I were you.’

She was on the verge of tears: ‘There’s no way he’ll agree to go.’

In the days that followed, I pushed the business about Titch to the back of my mind like a stack of unpaid bills. Titch wouldn’t go to Newry, and I was in no position to kidnap twenty stone of struggling biscuit-snatcher and take him up there by myself. And it wasn’t just Titch, there was something else, too. No one ever really believes in something bad until it happens. Not even the one who predicts it.

2

At the time Titch nicked the Jaffa Cakes the armed gangs in Northern Ireland had been fighting for over twenty-five years, and they had only recently grown weary of it. They had differing aspirations for our little state of six counties and one and a half million people. The IRA wanted a united Ireland, while the Loyalist UVF and the UDA preferred us to stay part of the United Kingdom. They had formerly reached consensus on one thing, though, which was that the best way to persuade ordinary folk on the other side of the sincerity of your argument was to build a large stack of their corpses and promise more of the same until your demands were secured.

We called our situation the Troubles, and the longer it had dragged on the more fitting that genteel euphemism became. The murdering was sporadic but fully expected, like some recurrent, rumbling agony in your unmentionables. The populace soldiered on through it, mainly keeping their heads down and quietly hoping that splashes of terror didn’t land on or near them. In between shootings and bombs there were businesses to be run and children to be raised. Things didn’t fall apart, quite. They kept on, but more painfully.

At long last the killing had grown stale, even for past enthusiasts. The whole thing had lost its mojo. No one knew where it was headed any more. All armed groups had recently agreed to stop the violence – the headline stuff, at least – while they reconsidered their options.

Given what had gone before, this period of relative calm was much appreciated, but energies need somewhere to strut their stuff. Muscles require flexing. Now that the loyalists were no longer officially engaged in killing Catholics, they had begun to consider more closely the question of discipline nearer home. Certain young Prods were stepping out of line, giving cheek, failing now to understand the long-established principle of who was in charge. They needed to be dealt with.

I had concerns that Titch, who had never before been considered an example to anyone, might finally become one now.

In our house, we had never been big fans of the local paramilitaries. Big Jacky didn’t sound off about it beyond the front door, because in our neighbourhood you never got anything but grief by gabbing. But he used to tell me how in the days before this bother got started he would dander freely up the Falls, and Catholics came over here without any problem. Now we were walled off from each other in raging wee cantons.

Like his father before him, Big Jacky stood up in grave reverence for ‘God Save the Queen’ and scrupulously arranged the poppy in his lapel on Remembrance Day. He had a notion of Britain that I couldn’t quite boil down, but that stood for something larger and more historic than the territorial daubs of red, white and blue that marked the kerbstones near our house. A photograph of his grandfather who died at the Somme stared out at us, handsome and doomed, from a frame on the bookshelf. Big Jacky said to me from when I was small that all this killing ever did was slather on misery.

So when the young fellas came to the door collecting money for ‘the prisoners’ he would say gently, ‘Och boys, sure I have my own charities, and it’s hard enough now just to pay the rates,’ steering them on their way as though he had already forgiven them their presumption in asking.

They mostly seemed to take it okay, although once I saw a younger guy give him glowering looks, muttering about freeloaders being made to pay the price or get the fuck out, before the older guy with him quickly whispered something to shut him up.

Big Jacky had lived around there for a long time, I suppose, and he knew some of the players from school to nod to, but I understood that wasn’t the only reason why he got more leeway than most.

It was this: once or twice a week, Big Jacky helped out at a club down the road for disabled kids, and he had got especially close to one wee boy there called Tommy.

Tommy’s legs were heavily unreliable, which meant he needed a wheelchair, but every so often he could flash you a smile of heart-liquefying sweetness which he used to his advantage. His speech was slow and woolly, and you had to bend right down next to his mouth to make out what he was saying, but his mind was sharp. With his snappy observations and his pale, fragile body, he was a Venus fly trap masquerading as an orchid.

The club was run by a bosomy, middle-aged woman called Barbara, an energetic matriarch who made up in practicality what she lacked in imagination. What creative flair she did have went into her hair, dramatic stabs at glamour which varied wildly in their success rates. Hairdressers rubbed their hands at her approach like pushers welcoming a star junkie.

Given his difficulty in speaking, Tommy was tight with his words, but he had great timing. One afternoon I walked in to look for Big Jacky and Tommy immediately started agitating for me with his arms. I got up close to hear him say in his distinctive voice, as if transmitting from several leagues under the sea, ‘Barbara’s had her hair done.’

The next second big Barbara steamed into view, dead serious beneath a majestically awful new custard-coloured bouffant, and the pair of us cracked up.

Tommy’s dad was a very senior Loyalist, above even the likes of McMullen in the hierarchy, and – despite his readiness to okay the shattering of other families – he dearly loved Tommy, who held a place in the one small compartment of his heart that had not yet ossified. He had a slack face and hard-working eyes, and he observed how much Tommy liked Big Jacky, who was endlessly patient with him, taking him back and forth to the toilet without complaint and listening carefully to whatever he said.

Big Jacky didn’t like Tommy’s dad, though. I could see that in the tension of his jaw in the man’s presence, the way his natural reticence retreated even further into the guarded handover of monosyllables. But he gave him the minimal courtesy due to any father of Tommy’s. And perhaps because of this chance connection down at the club, Big Jacky never had too much trouble from anyone. You couldn’t rely on that, though. You couldn’t rely on anything.

Mrs Hackett in the corner shop sometimes filled me in on stuff that was going on locally, so long as no one else was in earshot. I had learned that good timing and a modest outlay on a tin of Buitoni ravioli and a packet of Punjana teabags could purchase some thought-provoking snippets. She had long ago developed the habit of confiding in Big Jacky – something perhaps to do with the natural fraternity of shopkeepers in a volatile city – and now it had transferred to me. What Mrs Hackett wasn’t told, she overheard. She was an assiduous wee gatherer of information. I couldn’t be entirely sure of its direction of flow, even though I trusted to her good intentions, and so I never told her anything I didn’t want others to know. Given my caginess, that limited the scope of our chat, but I kept the ball in the air with pleasantries. Thank God for the weather in all its variations.

‘Another oul rainy day,’ I observed.

‘Och, will it ever stop?’

As she handed me my change she took a quick squint down the central aisle of the wee shop, then right and left. A signal to linger. She leaned over the counter and whispered: ‘Say nothing but there was another beating last week.’

‘Who was it?’

‘A wee boy from Arnold Street. Only sixteen. I know his mother. She was in this morning in an awful state, a bag of nerves.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Four of them jumped on him on his way home and battered him with iron bars. He’s up there in the Royal now. Head injuries, broken leg.’

‘What was it over?’

‘Some row over a girl, his mother said. Him and another lad argued over a girl but it got out of hand and the other boy’s uncle is, you know.’

A meaningful glance from behind the thick glasses. She would never say the actual word.

The door suddenly swung open and a stout, middle-aged man I had never seen before walked in. Mrs Hackett’s voice grew abruptly louder –

‘Well enjoy the ravioli, now. I hope you have an umbrella.’

‘Don’t worry, sure I’ve got my waterproof jacket.’

The thing I had liked about living with Big Jacky was his capacity for silence. It wasn’t a brooding silence, with argumentative storm clouds waiting to burst overhead. You could relax in the expanses of Big Jacky’s silence. It was the mental equivalent of an endless highway stretching out of sight, carrying within it peace and possibility.

These were the sounds that punctuated an evening with Big Jacky: the soft rustling of the newspaper, the hiss of the kettle, his belly-chortle at some fresh piece of idiocy issuing from the gabbling television, a courteous observation about the rain, the spit of sausages frying in a pan. He didn’t ask me too many questions. I suppose that’s why I told him almost everything.

I wondered sometimes how I, with my spiky edges and tangled imaginings, could have sprung from the quiet bulk of Big Jacky. He did, too. As a child, I would sometimes catch him looking at me strangely, as I gyrated wildly in my Indian chief’s headdress or danced with frustration over a difficult puzzle. I heard him once saying in a low voice: ‘You’re like her.’ I knew who he meant: my dark-haired snapshot mother, the fine-boned, smiling face that lay in his bedside drawer with his most precious things. She was frozen there, next to an earlier model of him grinning broadly beneath a modest dirty-blond pompadour. I don’t remember her. She died of meningitis when I was two.

In deference, perhaps, for me being like her, he fed me with books: shyly, at first. He brought home the daily newspapers and historical pamphlets from his newsagent’s shop. He bought dusty, dog-eared volumes from church fêtes and charity shops: everything from Oliver Twist to paperback Westerns by authors with names like Buck Tyrone and Cliff Ryder. He filled in little forms from the back of the Reader’s Digest in his sloping, careful hand, and sent off for handsome, maroon-bound tomes with titles like Strange Stories and Amazing Facts. They came thumping on to the doorstep, bursting with the lurid, illustrated mysteries of Spring-Heeled Jack, the fiery devil that terrorised the good citizens of Victorian London, and of the wailing faces which had appeared on floor tiles in Spain, mouthing inaudible agonies because the house had been built on the site of a medieval graveyard. There was even a photograph of the wailing faces: they were all smeary and open-mouthed, as though shocked at the cheek of the energetic Spanish housewives who had tried to wipe them off the tiles with a damp cloth.

He brought home the gleaming satin memoirs of Hollywood movie stars; and the autobiographies of long-dead sportsmen; and assorted poetry anthologies, trickling out lines of Larkin and Betjeman, Hughes and Heaney. Big Jacky didn’t say much, but every week floods of new words spilled from the pockets of his brown overcoat, and I danced around with expectation. The books piled up: Aunt Mary and Aunt Phyllis, my mother’s sisters, observed developments from a distance, darkly, twitching to take over. He must have sensed the conversations bristling self-righteously over their Carrickfergus kitchen table (Something should really be done. There’s just him and the wee boy in there now, and the place is coming down with all these books he buys, and the child looks as peaky as bedamned) and stubbornly ignored them.

If Spring-Heeled Jack and his clawing cohorts sprang into my dreams, and I woke up dry-mouthed with terror, I made my way to the room where Big Jacky slept. When he felt the nervous phut-phut of my breath on his sleeping cheek, he would stir and lift a corner of the quilt. ‘Get in,’ he said and I would lie awake, comforted, next to my big, flannel-wrapped bulwark against the dark.

Every so often the aunts would pay us a visit, motoring sedately into Belfast under the patchy pretext of a birthday (mine or his) or a spurious shopping trip (for one of those fine wool cardigans, a Christmas present for Anne next door, you know, can’t get them for love nor money in Carrickfergus, not even at McGill’s, just thought we’d call in and see how you two were getting on.)

Aunt Mary, her husband Sam, and Aunt Phyllis all lived together. Phyllis had never married. ‘Phyllis was too much of a lady to get married,’ said Aunt Mary, meaningfully. It was as though the goatish attentions of a man, all beard and raw lust, might have catapulted Phyllis on to a precipice of mental distress from which she would never claw her way back.

When Sam and Mary went on holiday, Phyllis came along with them. ‘Three’s company, four’s a crowd,’ Aunt Mary would carol gamely, although sometimes – when Phyllis was off peeling potatoes, drooping over the sink in her long brown cardigan – Mary would whisper: ‘Of course, sometimes Sam and I would like a wee fortnight on our own. But it wouldn’t really be fair on Phyllis, to leave her behind in charge of the house, away from all the fun.’

Mary’s whispers had a tendency to carry. Now and again I wondered if Phyllis could hear.

Sam enjoyed his bowls and his television. He was retired from his job as a bank clerk. We saw him about once a year, when we visited them in Carrickfergus, and then he would say: ‘Long time no see, Jackies Senior and Junior,’ and excavate himself from his armchair to fetch Big Jacky a whiskey.

He was a tame man, really. Any rebellious sinews in him had long ago been replaced with a convenient machine-washable stuffing. Mary had him kitted out in pale lambswool pullovers, like Rupert Bear. His clothing was organised to match the house, an overheated cave of squashy velveteen sofas, pastel Chinese rugs, and polished tabletops sprinkled with lace doilies. You could sink back into those soft furnishings and not be seen again for a week. It was a miracle Sam was still alive. One day scientists would discover him dead there, the suburban equivalent of the leathery men they found preserved for centuries in those Danish peat bogs. He would have his eyes still wide open and his hand stiffened around the remote control. They’d dub him the Bungalow Man, and scientists would marvel at the contents of his stomach (a diet of oven chips and chicken nuggets, specifically designed by Mary to generate no kitchen mess).

China figurines of dancers sprang from the sideboards, suspended in eternal pirouettes. Brass lamps gleamed from shining coffee tables. The furnishings of the house demanded a vigorous cleaning regime. They got it with blasts of spray and polish, worked in deep with triple applications of elbow grease.

Our front room in Belfast clamoured for no such attention. It had a brown 1950s sofa with wooden legs, and a fraying green armchair. A low, rectangular coffee table provided a stationing point for mugs of tea. Big Jacky accommodated himself in the armchair while I extended myself on the sofa, where years of pressure had made convenient buttock-shaped dents. When the aunts came to our house, I could see that the sparseness of Big Jacky’s taste dismayed and unsettled them. They fluttered around, hunting for a corner on which to perch. They besieged my father with pointless knick-knacks: fringed, furiously patterned cushions, knowing china squirrels with nut-packed cheeks, Belleek pottery sweet-dishes and embroidered tablecloths, to take the edge (although they never actually said this) off his spartan, miserable life with his peaky, odd son. He thanked them politely and pressed them to take some more tea. When they had gone, he put the things away carefully in a cupboard, and brought a small selection back out only before their next visit.

One day when we had waved off Aunt Mary, amidst a rapid hail of queries and promises, Big Jacky sat down in his armchair and took out his pipe. Pressing the springy tobacco into the bowl, he sighed and said: ‘Normal service resumes.’ He lit up, and took a puff. Then he said: ‘They drove your mother mad too.’ That was it. The pipe smoke drifted my way. I drank it down with the brandy-glow of conspiracy.

After Big Jacky died, normal service never resumed again.

3

A few days after I heard what Titch had done in McGee’s shop, I was walking past his house down to the chippy. I looked in the window: Titch was beached on the floor of the front room with a pint glass of orange squash beside him, and his mum was lying on the sofa with her shoes off. They didn’t see me, because both of them were in hysterics at some crappy film on the television.

Why didn’t I go in? Normally I would have. But it’s a bore, when you’re in the middle of watching something, to have to start explaining the whole plot to the enquiring, only half interested visitor (He’s the blonde one’s husband, but he’s doing a line with the brunette who’s married to the police inspector. No, not him, the other one, with the moustache). And I suppose I didn’t want to take my claw-hammer to the fragile shell of happiness that surrounded them. I carried Titch’s trouble around with me now. The pair of them had unburdened themselves of it, and burdened me. I’d walk in there as gloomy, responsible Jacky, with a miserable long face on him like a Lurgan spade, and the talk would suddenly be all about McGee, and Titch going to Newry, and Titch refusing to go to Newry, and his mother trembling again on the edge of weeping. The funny film would be forgotten and the laughter stowed away, and who knew if anything would ever happen to the big eejit anyway?

I walked on. The midget James Dean with the skinhead was hanging around outside the chippy, with a can of Sprite in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. He acknowledged my proximity with a curt wee hardman nod.

‘Hello,’ I said.

He proffered his crumpled packet of Embassy, eyes narrowed: ‘Smoke?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I’m frightened it might stunt my growth.’

‘Very fucking funny,’ he said, mortally offended. The swear word was thrown in as proof of his maturity. He hauled all four foot seven of his dignity up on the wall and sat there, puffing away and ploughing all his energies into ignoring me.

I bought my chips, soaked them in vinegar and salt, and came back out. I had poked a hole in the warm paper to eat them while I was walking and keep them hot. He was still there, working hard not to look at me.

‘Chip?’ I asked him.

I was sorry I had made that crack earlier, after he had offered his ciggies with such ill-concealed pride. He turned his head slowly, still offended, but he couldn’t be bothered to keep it up. The hand came down and rummaged around for a chip: it salvaged two. I sat up on the wall beside him.

‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘Jacky. What’s yours?’

‘Marty.’

A pause, bulging with contemplation.

‘I seen you walking around with that big fat fella from up the road,’ he said eventually.

‘Is that so.’

‘He’s not right in the head, that fella.’

‘Maybe not. His name’s Titch,’ I said. ‘Are you right in the head?’

He laughed, showing his pointed, irregular teeth: ‘My ma says I’m a headcase.’

‘Good, then you and Titch would get on fine. Two prime headcases together. Joint gold medallists at the Headcase Olympics.’

‘My ma says he takes things from shops.’

‘Your ma keeps her eyes peeled. Do you ever take anything from shops?’

‘Took a couple of Crunchie bars once from Hackett’s, when Mrs Hackett was away in the back getting newspapers. And a Walnut Whip, a few times.’

I thought of poor old Mrs Hackett, carefully exploring the familiar confines of her shop like some ponderous old turtle in a crumbling tank. It was almost impossible to imagine her young. She looked as if she had been born with a granny perm. I pictured the doctor saying to Mrs Hackett’s mother, ‘Congratulations. You have a lovely baby girl,’ and both of them looking down fondly at Mrs Hackett’s tiny wizened face, framed with the hollow sausages of grey-beige hair.

God help her, anyway, when even eleven-year-olds saw her for a soft touch. And God help Titch, when even an eleven-year-old knew to take things from Hackett’s, and not McGee’s.

‘You shouldn’t steal from Mrs Hackett,’ I said. ‘She has trouble with her arthritis, and she’s always nice to the customers, even wee headcases like you.’

‘Aye she is,’ he conceded. ‘She gave me an ice lolly once when I told her it was my birthday.’

‘See?’ Something struck me: ‘Was it your birthday?’

‘No.’

He dug his paw in for some more chips.

A pause.

‘The thing about telling lies to people,’ I said, slowly, ‘Is that one day they find out you’ve been lying. And when they do, they don’t like you as much as they did before.’

‘Mrs Hackett never liked me that much anyway,’ he said. ‘Think she knew about the Walnut Whips.’

There wasn’t really much I could say to that: it had the probable advantage of being true. I got down off the wall, and passed the rest of my chips over to him: ‘You finish them. I don’t want any more.’ He sat watching me as I walked back up the street. As I turned the corner I saw him squinting into the greasy paper, diligently hunting out the best bits, the crunchy pieces of fried potato that lurk around the sodden corners of the bag.

When Big Jacky died, Aunt Mary and Aunt Phyllis made a pilgrimage to Belfast to sort out the funeral. They took charge of all the phone calls to friends and family, such as there were. I could hear every word they said as I lay in my room, looking at the shadows the lamp cast on the ceiling. (Yes. An awful shock. Quite sudden. Just passed away right there on the street. Still, at least he didn’t suffer for too long. Thank you. You know how much we appreciate it. Him? Oh, taking it very hard, you know, can’t get too much out of him as usual.)

They put the death notice in the Belfast Telegraph. Aunt Mary wanted a poem, but Aunt Phyllis thought not. I thought not, too. God knows what doggerel the pair of them would have come up with.

They held lengthy, respectful consultations on coffins and services with Mr Gascoigne, the undertaker. They mulled over flowers. Fine choices were sifted and weighed. The Porchester (handsome oak, satin-lined) or the Wellington (slightly more accommodating, less costly wood)? They could have mummified him in newspaper, tied him up with brown string and lowered him into the Lagan, for all I cared. All I knew was that he was gone for good. I didn’t say that, of course. I dug up an empty opinion. On balance, the Porchester, I said.

The aunts annexed the kitchen with the speed of two peacetime generals suddenly placed in charge of a military campaign. Odd, I thought, that it took a death to bring them fully to life. They churned out doilied plates of tray-bakes and delicate, pan-loaf ham sandwiches carved into tiny triangles. They went shopping for teabags, milk, sherry, whiskey, beer: the full equipment for the perfect funeral. I should have been grateful. God knows I couldn’t have done it by myself. And yet I wasn’t, particularly. I thought I could smell a faint triumph buried somewhere in their help, the way a dog can sniff out a bone deep in a dustbin.

Sam dug himself out of his sofa, prised his hand off the remote, came up for the day to commiserate, and motored sedately back to Carrickfergus that night. The aunts stayed over. It was like a terrible dream played out in slow motion, and this time there was no waking up. I didn’t want to stand there after the burial in my Sunday suit as the kind, creased faces came up one by one and said: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Jacky. He was a great man.’ I wanted to haul myself off into waste ground and howl like a wolf, dash my head against the wall until my forehead poured with blood. Anything to distract me from the pain coming from the void deep in my chest, the small hollow the size of the universe where Big Jacky had been.

Titch and his mother came to the house: he was in his Sunday suit, too, but it fitted even worse than mine. The too-short sleeves exposed his bluey-white, plump wrists. His mum was running around helping, but Titch stood in the corner at a loss for what to do and ate nearly two plates of sandwiches. I saw jowly Aunt Mary shooting him a glance of distilled venom as he started in on the tray-bakes: it was the only thing that made me smile all day. Before he left, he came up and said to me in a rush, ‘I’m very sorry, Jacky. I liked Big Jacky an awful lot.’ I knew he meant ‘loved’. His anxious face was pale and clammy with sweat.

I told him: ‘He really liked you too.’

The ambush came the day after the funeral. I was sitting in the kitchen on a hard wooden chair, drinking lukewarm tea and watching a shaft of sunlight falling through the window. I was counting the minutes, waiting for the aunts to go home. They would say: ‘Will you be all right?’ and I’d say graciously, ‘Yes. I’ll be fine. Thanks for everything. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.’ And then I’d wave them off and go upstairs and lie on Big Jacky’s bed and stare at the ceiling and think about him quietly as the light faded and darkness slowly filled the room like black ink pouring into water.

I might go and get one of his shirts out of the cupboard, with the pipe-smoke smell of him still on it, and put it on the pillow beside my head and just lie there a while thinking about the things we did together over the years. I wanted to remember him taking me to the Botanic Gardens when I was younger, and both of us standing silently in the hothouse watching the big, leathery water lilies floating in the pond.

But it didn’t happen like that. Suddenly the two aunts padded into the kitchen with manifest intent, a pair of soft-soled missionaries circling a recalcitrant native. Aunt Mary had her coat on, I noted. Aunt Phyllis, ominously, didn’t.

Mary broached the subject first: ‘We were thinking it might be better if Phyllis stayed here for a little while, and helped you get back on your feet. She could help out at the newsagent’s too, until you sorted something else out.’

The newsagent’s: I hadn’t even thought of that. It had been closed since Big Jacky died.

Aunt Phyllis was looking at me, expectantly. I stared back at her, wild-eyed. I was appalled. Every fibre of me was screaming no, no, no, this mustn’t happen. I made a flailing effort to push their fait accompli away: ‘Oh you don’t need to do that, Aunt Phyllis. I’ll be fine here, sorting things out on my own. Please don’t put yourself to that trouble, honestly the two of you have done enough already. More than enough.’

Mary struck a firmer tone, her cheeks puffing out with confident authority: ‘No, really, Jacky. We are certain it would be best.’

You big bloodhound, I thought, fuck off and sniff round someone else. It was a dirty trick, to mob someone the day after their own father’s funeral. My heart was pounding with the injustice of it.

‘I’ll be fine, honestly,’ I said.

I looked again at Phyllis, at the worn, expectant face, the tightly permed hair, the fussy wee cardigan with the careful bow tied at the front. It was a miserable enough life she had up there in Carrickfergus with Mary and her husband, and Mary queening it over her. I was her bid for independence, the last raft drifting past on an isolated river. She was clambering aboard me with a horrible tenacity: didn’t she realise she would sink us both? No, no. I struggled to fight off the pity. Pity makes weaklings of us all.

Phyllis said: ‘It would only be till you got yourself set up again, Jacky.’ No, no. Mary chipped in quickly with: ‘You can’t be expected to manage here on your own like this. Phyllis can sort things out around the house.’

A brief stab of utter hatred, followed by a little flood of guilt. They had me now. I was sliding underwater.

I looked at Phyllis, and said: ‘Just till I get myself sorted then. That would be kind of you.’

Phyllis smiled. Mary remembered there were some more of Phyllis’s things in the car, and bustled out to fetch them.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. That night Phyllis moved herself into Big Jacky’s room, so I couldn’t very well go in there and lie down, as I had planned, unless I wanted to give her a heart attack as well. I lay in my own bed, seething.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. The bathroom had quickly filled up with Phyllis’s bits and pieces, her aspirin and cuticle scrapers. Towelettes and hairnets, Q-tips and denture grip. Like the Dana song: all kinds of everything remind me of you.

Tick-tock. How about if I plastered my face in Phyllis’s Pond’s cream, backcombed my hair to stand up like a fright wig, wrapped my sheet around me like a toga, and walked into Big Jacky’s room saying, ‘Phyllis, get up. It’s exactly this time every night that we slaughter the cat’? She’d leg it all the way back to Carrickfergus in her long nightie, squealing like a stuck pig.

Tick-tock. Or, still with the face cream on, but in a voluminous nightdress to look like my mother, whispering, ‘It’s Grace, your dead sister. Leave wee Jacky alone, he’s mine, after all, not yours.’ But that would be a wicked thing to do. Big Jacky would be ashamed. I pictured him up there, looking down at me and smoking the pipe, slowly shaking his head in grave disappointment. ‘Don’t torment Phyllis,’ he would say. ‘She’s not a bad soul.’

Tick-tock. I could just about hear her snoring. Does that mean, if she woke up, she could just about hear me crying?

Tick-tock. The starlings singing, puffed up with the importance of the morning, balancing on the telegraph wire with their gnarled little feet. The grey dawn creeping through the fine curtain. The piglet oink and whistle of Phyllis snoring. Me wide awake.

And all of that was just one night.

4

‘Your big mate got a beating last night.’ There was a mixture of fear and excitement in Marty’s voice as he ran up next to me: fear at the darkness of what had happened, excitement at the size of his news.

It was a lead weight casually pitched into the bowl of bad soup already swaying in my stomach.

‘Which mate?’ I said. I didn’t need to ask.

‘Your big dopey mate, Titch you said his name was.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘I heard the shouting in the night. Four fellas with balaclavas on pulled him out of his house, I seen them out my window. They yanked him out over towards the waste ground, and I couldn’t see, but I seen the one left behind pushing his ma back into the house. She was screaming too. The ambulance came later.’

How much later? I thought. They had got organised and cocky about the beatings now. I had heard that they dialled the ambulance themselves before they gave someone a doing. I wondered what they’d hit him with. I hoped to God it wasn’t the planks of wood with rusty nails in it. The last boy that got that had infections and was in the Royal for weeks.

I could picture him there, flailing around, a clumsy bear prodded with hot pokers. It made me wince even to imagine it.

‘Thanks for telling me,’ I told Marty. He nodded abruptly and sauntered off down the street.

Round the corner, the birds throatily singing, the children squabbling over the football like seagulls with a piece of bread. Everything was just the same and everything was different.

Titch’s house had brown cardboard tacked over the frame of the living-room window, where the glass had been. The red paint was coiling back from the dents in the front door, where boots had kicked it in. This was now the bad-luck house, singled out from all the houses in the street. The plague house.

I knocked. The door stayed shut. I knocked again. Nothing. I looked towards the window. As I stared at it, I saw the bottom edge of the cardboard peeling inwards: an eye was staring at me through the small triangle of space. Titch’s mum’s eye. My two eyes looked back into her single eye.

‘Let me in,’ I whispered.

A few seconds later the front door opened. I went into the hall and looked at her face. My God, she had aged twenty years in a night. Her swollen eyelids looked as though they had been scrubbed with the pan scourer. I went into the living room and sat down. ‘What happened?’

‘They came at about three in the morning. I ran downstairs when I heard them kicking in the door and they said where was Titch? I said he was at his aunt’s in Newry and one of them said “You’re effing lying you oul bitch” and two of them pushed me to one side and went upstairs to find him.’

She was crying now, pulling in the air with big, hungry gulps, her hands dipping and soaring. The words choked her as they came out.

‘And then they dragged him out of bed and down the stairs. He didn’t know what was happening and he kept shouting for me. Pulled him out the door and I tried to follow but one of them pushed me back and said “You stay out of it.” The same fella cut the phone and threw it out the front window, and then he said, “You effing stay in here. I’ll be in the hall and if you try to get out I’ll sort you out too and make sure he gets a worse one.”’

‘Where’s Titch now?’

‘Upstairs, lying in his room. He wouldn’t stay in hospital so eventually they let him home. When I brought him back from the hospital the only thing he said was “Don’t let anyone in.” He’s got a broken arm, a fracture in his leg and his face is all swollen up. The doctor said it was with baseball bats. He’s pushed his desk against the door of his room.’

‘I’ll leave him alone today then,’ I said. ‘Maybe call in on him tomorrow.’ I bent to give her an awkward kiss on the cheek. She wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t our usual parting gesture. Her head was bowed and hot, the cheek damp and stiff, crusted with a layer of dried tears. I walked out on to the street.

I took a few steps. Then something made me look back up to Titch’s bedroom window. I hadn’t expected to see anything, I don’t even know what made me turn round. But what I did see nearly stopped my heart: a swollen, malevolent thing looking back at me, standing in the space made by a tugged-aside curtain. It took me a second to realise that it was Titch. His head seemed monstrous, the eyes shrunk to sunken currants, the face a blackened, purple mass of bruises.

Those watching eyes, I knew, had soaked up all the horror on my face. I stopped and raised a hand to him from the street. After what seemed a long time, one bandaged hand rose slowly in reply. I turned back then and kept on walking.

As I walked, I was trying to think what he had reminded me of. Something from childhood. The lonely monster, shut up in a tower. That, but something else too. Then I got it. When I was younger, we used to play with a kit called ‘Mr Potato Head’. You took an old potato, and stuck plastic eyes and a nose and stringy hair on it, and turned it into a bit of a character. For a couple of hours you’d prop him up in fruit bowls and push him around in empty egg cartons. But then you would go on to something else and forget about it, and two weeks later you’d find oul Mr Potato Head lying somewhere behind the bin, with his head turning all purple and yellow, and accidental eyes sprouting out of him.

So that’s what they’d done to Titch. Except he had felt and heard it all: every kick, every spike, every burning word. And he wouldn’t have understood why this evil had fallen upon him. For a packet of biscuits? Dumped by the bins to bloat and rot, my best mate, Mr Potato Head.

I couldn’t go back home. There would be too much chat out of Phyllis. By the time I usually came in Phyllis was always hungry for my presence, even though it was invariably unsatisfactory. She yearned for gossip and confidences. I found myself unable to provide these things. She could have wolfed down a six-course banquet of discussion, and I was only capable of passing her the occasional bruised windfall.

Sometimes I would struggle to do my best, courteously assembling snippets from here and there, but I couldn’t tonight. How could I hand over the happenings of the day? ‘Four men in balaclavas came round to Titch’s house last night, dragged him on to waste ground and gave him a terrible beating. Could you change over to BBC 2, I think the snooker’s on?’

But it wouldn’t be left at that. The story would make too big an impact. You can’t drop a boulder into the centre of a still lake and not expect to create some ripples. There would be a silence – not a dead silence, but a busy one, building to a gush of who, what, why, where, when, and now what will happen? And I knew the answer to most of these things, and yet had no heart to begin explaining any of it to Phyllis or even to myself. None whatsoever. An immense weariness came over me: it would have been very good to curl up in a dark corner away from it all, and sleep for a thousand years.

I started the walk into town, moving through the fine rain, the shining, shifting curtain of small falling needles. Nowhere does drizzle like Belfast. It’s our speciality. We should parcel it up and export it to the Saudis. They’re gasping for it, by all accounts.

5

Drink. The clatter of laughter, and raw shouts, and mists of smoke rising from wood-panelled cabins. Light filtered through stained glass. I was in the Crown Bar, Belfast, ornamented Victorian gin palace and liquor saloon: a doughty old coquette who had her fancy windows shattered every time the IRA attempted to blow up the Europa International Hotel opposite, which it did with a zeal undimmed by repetition.

Just a couple of years earlier one of the IRA’s 1,000-pound car bombs had hit the jackpot, and not only blasted a large, jagged hole in the side of the Europa, but instantly reduced the wedding-cake pomp of the nearby Grand Opera House to rubble as well. The Europa’s head concierge said afterwards that if he stood at his desk in the lobby he could now see straight through to the Opera House stage. Anything really nice we had, it got wrecked. After a while you got used to it.

For over a century, in and out of disturbances, the Crown had flung open her doors and spilled men out at night into the path of horse-drawn traps, trams, trolleybuses and finally motor cars. They were her roaring, weeping, brawling, laughing men, their walnut brains pickled and petrified in alcohol, pushed out to confront the cold, stony pavements and their icy wives. Or maybe their women were there with them too, arm-in-arm as they both swayed home in a sidelong pavement dance, bloodstreams running warm with beer and port.

Sometimes in the afternoons wee boys of the urchin class still swaggered in, so edgy you could cut yourself on their banter, and made deadpan offers to sell you three jokes for a pound.

I ordered a whiskey.

‘Jacky!’ I turned around, and there was Sammy who I went to school with, his face shining with the pleasant sweat of four pints, and a russet-haired girlfriend beaming by his arm. He was a couple of years older than me. It was a long time since I had last seen him.

‘Jacky, how are you?’ He placed an authoritative, amicable hand on my shoulder. He was heavier than I remembered him, kitted out in corduroys and a navy fisherman’s sweater: he looked oddly well-to-do. ‘How’s things? How’s your dad?’

Years ago, he used to come over to my house after school sometimes, to watch TV or play football. Big Jacky always called him the Sergeant Major, because of his blond brush-cut and his precocious capacity for organisation. He said that on his way home from work he could hear Sammy from halfway down the street, bawling us all into position for some pitched battle.

‘My dad died, Sam. Heart attack,’ I said, and gave a small smile to show that I was aware of the social awkwardness of my answer. He looked genuinely grieved: his girlfriend had the decency to look grieved too, even though she didn’t know me.

‘Och Jacky, that’s terrible. When did it happen?’

‘A few months ago. It was bad, I miss him.’ I hustled him past the expected condolences: ‘Anyway, what about you, what are you up to?’

‘Well, I’m getting married in the autumn, to Shauna’ – he indicated the girl beside him, with a proud flourish of introduction – ‘and I’m running a car valeting business now, employing about ten people. It’s going pretty well, we’re getting a lot of corporate accounts. But listen, how are all the rest of them – do you still see Titch?’

In truth, Sammy had always been a bit impatient with Titch, who was a human liability in Sammy’s embryonic money-making schemes. When we were twelve, Sammy had set us up with buckets and sponges to wash all the cars on our street, at a cost that undercut the nearest carwash (Sammy took his cut, naturally, for supplying the materials and sweet-talking the neighbours). We were all raring to go: Sammy had sketched for us a tantalising picture of entrepreneurial rewards, with bouncy new footballs and cinema tickets ripening as the fruits of our labours.

It all began smoothly on day one, with the Sergeant Major strenuously demonstrating the correct procedure on his own father’s gleaming red Ford. It was to be Titch’s job to fill the water-buckets, and mine to rinse and clean the different cloths. Then we set to work, but by midday I could see Titch’s mouth drooping sullenly, and a lead-limbed, lackadaisical quality sneaking into his polishing. Titch never really understood the concept of delayed gratification. At one point he went off down an alleyway on his own, and was sitting there gratefully peeling a chocolate bar when I found him and dragged him back.

The next day, at the appointed hour for beginning the car-washing, I was there all by myself. There was no sign of Titch, or the water-buckets which he had carted home the day before, grumbling. Sammy and I went round to Titch’s house: nobody there, and no explanatory note – nothing. Sammy was livid. He had to go begging for water-buckets and help me do it himself, abandoning his superb supervisory role as our manager, or risk angering his new customers. He damned Titch – the lazy big fathead – to high heaven. When Titch and his mother arrived back the next day, from a visit to his grandmother in Larne, the Sergeant Major wouldn’t speak a word to him for a fortnight.

‘Titch isn’t too good,’ I said. ‘Four paramilitaries dragged him out into waste ground last night and gave him a terrible hammering.’

Sammy’s expression took on a curious mixture of surprise and intimate understanding. He leaned close, and asked in a lowered voice, ‘Was he dealing drugs?’

I stared back at him. ‘Sammy, catch a grip. Titch can hardly get around to dealing you a hand of cards, there’s no way he’d be up to drugs.’

‘Well why did they do him, then?’

‘He got into a row with old McGee, who runs that corner shop. Titch nicked a packet of Jaffa Cakes. McGee’s son is involved.’

‘Jaffa Cakes.’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘And they did him for that?’

‘They did him for that.’

‘Poor bastard.’

Sammy started chewing over this information, soaking up its future implications for himself. He shook his head, slowly and sorrowfully: ‘They’re really getting out of control now. Everything you want to do, or think of doing, they’re on your back. They came round the other month asking for a slice from the car valeting business.’

‘And what did you tell them?’

‘I cut them down. What they were asking for at the beginning was a joke: there wouldn’t have been any business left in a year to take anything out of. But you’ve got to give them something, or—’ he broke off, raised his eyebrows, and mimed striking a match ‘—and I don’t want to collect any insurance money on my place just yet. I like it where I am.’

There was a seam of absolute pragmatism running through Sammy. He just did whatever he had to do to keep going. It wasn’t a question of right and wrong. That stuff didn’t keep him awake at night. There were simply certain people that had to be dealt with and paid off. Whether it was the government taxman that came banging on his door or the local hoods demanding their protection money, it was really all one and the same to Sammy. Yes, it would be better if the system was straight, but was it Sammy’s fault if it wasn’t? It did pain his businessman’s heart, though, to have to pay out over the odds.

Sammy wasn’t a bad guy, at all. He was even kind, at bottom. There are businessmen like him all over America, gently rolling their eyes as they slide their monthly envelope over to the local Mafia. I could have seen Sammy keeping shop in small-town Nazi Germany, mournfully complaining about the boisterous antics of the young Brownshirts, maybe even occasionally passing his dwindling band of Jewish customers a wee something they were officially forbidden – but making sure he always kept the framed picture of Herr Hitler on the wall and a little nip of schnapps for the visiting SS man.

In that moment’s pause, he must have caught a flicker of what I was thinking. Whatever else, Sammy was never slow. He looked me in the eye: ‘Jacky, I’m not Charles Bronson. And if I was, I’d have a nice big pile of rubble and ten more people on the dole to show for it.’

I smiled at him and shrugged: ‘I know.’

He finished up his pint in one expansive gesture. ‘Listen, tell Titch I was asking for him, will you? If there’s anything he or the ma needs …’ A protective arm moved around his fiancée, who was already making a ‘we’re leaving, but it was nice to meet you’ face.

For a departing second, Sammy’s astute eyes rested on me, taking in the stubble on my chin, and the loose hang of Big Jacky’s oddly cut overcoat. Casually, as though it was an afterthought, his hand rummaged in his back pocket and produced a business card: Cleen-Sheen Cars.

‘I know you’ve probably got a lot else going on, but if you ever fancy a few hours on the side, we always need people with a bit of sense. It’s very flexible. Or give me a ring anyway, if you just want a pint.’

I took his card, and shook his hand. I had to give it to Sammy, the offer had been made with a certain panache. I watched the two of them go out the door, huddling together against the rain while his girlfriend struggled to put up her umbrella. As I said before, he wasn’t a bad guy.

When I finally got home, the house was dark. Phyllis had gone to bed. I was relieved at this, and sad too. I could see the Belfast Telegraph lying open at the television page, where she had marked out her evening’s viewing in pencil, alone.

Everything suddenly had a drunken clarity. The thought of her specially picking out which programmes to watch made me want to weep. I should have rung and told her where I was. I hadn’t. She wouldn’t mention anything about it the next day: that made it worse. I failed her as a companion, I knew. Would she be happier back with bloodhound Mary and remote-control-man Sam? Probably not.

She loved working in the newsagent’s: she hoarded little bits of information about everyone. She helped people out, sending them cards and chocolates when they were sick, and they never stopped being grateful. At least Phyllis was busy making herself part of something real. She was a spider at the centre of the sticky human web of fussing and affection. Not like me. I just hung around on the edges of things, ineffectually watching. Phyllis was trying to mean something to people. I didn’t mean anything to anybody.

I could have saved Titch, with more effort and conviction, and I hadn’t. I had guessed this would happen to him, I had even warned him, and yet there he was trussed up in bandages anyway. My superior knowledge had made not the least impression on events. The terrible, predictable misery had unfolded just as though I had never spoken, never even existed. Why had I let him learn it for himself? Had I wanted, somehow, to be proved right?

I remembered a story from a long time ago, told by a friend of Big Jacky’s who called in to see us one night. His son had been given a pet rabbit, not one of the little dwarf rabbits that are as limp as an old fur glove, but the real article: a big buck number with restless ears and a prominent will of its own. This rabbit was a source of great pride to the son. The father had watched the son building a run for the rabbit in the back garden, where the boy had made plans to observe it frolicking and chomping grass to its heart’s content.

The boy was assembling the run from loose bricks, cardboard boxes and bits of wire all shambled together, and the father saw that the rabbit could easily escape from it. So he warned the son: ‘Your rabbit will break out that run, and you’ll not see it again.’ And the son ignored him, and went on fixing up the flimsy pen.

The preparations continued, and the father saw that the moment was approaching when the rabbit would be released into the run. He said again: ‘I’m telling you now, the rabbit will be able to escape from that run,’ and then off he went to work.

When he came back that night, the house was soaked in tears. The sobbing son told him what had happened. The rabbit had duly spent a few minutes enjoying its new run, amiably grazing, and then it had suddenly bolted over a cardboard box and disappeared. He had searched everywhere for it, in neighbours’ gardens and out on the road, but it was gone. And the father, although pained by his son’s misery, couldn’t help himself from saying: ‘Son, I told you the rabbit could break out of that run.’

But the son didn’t say meekly ‘I know you did, Dad,’ or simply let the unwelcome reminder wash over him. He turned on his father with something approaching rage, and said: ‘Well, if you knew it would happen, why didn’t you stop me?’

The father laughed guiltily, telling it: the boy was right, in a way. The father could have stopped him, but he hadn’t. The boy had never owned a rabbit before, or seen one escape, so how could he be expected to believe how easily this predicted disaster would happen? Yet if the father had actually stopped him, the rabbit would never have got away; his warning would never have been proved right, and the resentful boy would have despised his father’s bullying caution. And so, the price of knowledge: one lost rabbit.

But Titch – what good had it done him, to see his judgement proved wrong? In his way, he had even been right to laugh at the thought that he might end up in pieces after a row with old McGee over a packet of biscuits. For wouldn’t it have been laughable anywhere else but here? He was the sane one, really: the rest of us were the headcases, to expect such an event and plan for it, cravenly. He had thought the world a funny, benign place. He was wrong. His uncomplicated vision had now been blackened, like burned glass. Mine had been tested and proved clear. But none of that explained why a voice inside my head, coming from a patch of waste ground, kept repeating with sorrowful insistence: ‘If you knew it would happen, why didn’t you stop it?’

Every morning, I opened my eyes to the rhythm of the creaking floorboards as Phyllis padded towards the bathroom. She had a habit of clearing her throat loudly en route to the basin. I had long ago concluded that this was partly from necessity and partly a vocal tribute to the new day. When this emanation reached my ears, I shut my eyes once again.

Phyllis’s preparations for her daily appearance at the newsagent’s were as follows: the procedures of washing and dressing, the teasing of her fine mouse-brown hair into a respectable cloud, the careful application of powder and a rose-tinted lipstick, and the ingestion of two pieces of toast washed down with a cup of tea. The execution and conclusion of these matters took approximately forty-five minutes. Then, for fifteen minutes after Phyllis shut the front door, I would lie in a fitful haze, wallowing in solitude.

After that, I got up. To be honest, I had sort of lost my way since Big Jacky’s death. I had few bearings left. I’d studied English at Queen’s University after school, but dropped out before finishing the degree. I somehow couldn’t dissect the books in the style I thought my tutors wanted. My approach seemed in some obscure manner to be frustrating them, or so it felt to me. I began to lose heart – and anyway, by the time you had prodded and tugged everything out of a book it had often quietly died on you, like a patient left open for too long on an operating table.

Before Big Jacky died, I had spent much of my time helping him in the newsagent’s shop. People used to ask me questions about the university course and whether I was returning to it, but their curiosity had receded now. They had come to accept my apparent lack of ambition as a fact of life, something which relieved and depressed me. Now day ran into day in a kind of purposeless fog. My usefulness had fallen away since Phyllis took over the shop, although I still helped her shift heavy deliveries when she asked. There were a couple of other people who helped us out sometimes, and when she saw I wasn’t handling things too well in there without Big Jacky, Phyllis had quietly upped their hours.

Phyllis had changed since she first came to live with me; she was no longer the bowed plant she had seemed in Carrickfergus. The submissive droopiness, assumed as a protective mantle under the domineering shadow of Mary, had been cast off. She was swelling into a larger, more exuberant presence, in the house and in the shop.

Well, good for Phyllis. She was waxing. I was waning. I had anorexia of the soul. I got a bit of money from the dole: that did for my food, some of the bills, and the occasional drinks I spun out across my evenings in town. My books sustained me, but erratically. I would read the same one, again and again, for hours, and yet it seemed to lead me nowhere but in a large, loose circle, like some clapped-out oul donkey on a beach.

Anorexia of the soul. Would I ever even have thought of exactly those self-pitying words, if I hadn’t drunk in so much daytime television? I watched it a lot of the time now, especially the chat shows. They drifted before me, an endless string of enormously fat people, bulimics with bad perms, shameless adulterers, weeping adulterees, feckless spendthrifts, part-time prostitutes, busted drunks and heartbroken gamblers. I applauded them all, every one, the whole limping chorus line of flawed humanity.

The American shows were the best by far. There, at least, they were all going to hell in flamboyant style, spurting out fierce jets of accusation. They were pouring the energy that built the American dream into wreaking the American nightmare. I admired that. Here at home, I was just fading into the soft Irish mud as the rain fell on me.

Take Kimberley, for example, a blowsy, bleached blonde with a mouth that raced in several directions at once, most of them ill-advised. She was fighting for the affections of Charlie, her philandering boyfriend with a long, rodenty face. But Charlie was in love with the misnamed Chastity, a sixteen-year-old minx.

Then Kimberley explained that she intended to stick by Charlie ‘because of stuff that happened in our childhoods that we’re both having a tough time getting over’. But the audience were hollering and chanting with their prissy, pleased little mouths. And then one of them stood up, a smug woman in an appliquéd top, and said triumphantly, ‘I just wonder what trailer park y’all came out of!’

Everyone laughed and yahooed. For a split second, Kimberley’s face collapsed in genuine dismay. I fell back on the sofa and started to weep, the tears soaking my face and neck.

It was then that I realised I really had to get out of the house.

6

Mr Murdie was a short man, with sharp eyes that had totted up a million bar bills and a stainless steel brain that never failed – ping! – to calculate exactly the right change. If a cannibal had killed and eaten Mr Murdie, he would probably have detected an unusual flavour permeating the leathery meat, for as Mr Murdie had spent his entire working life steeped in the nicotine fug of Belfast bars, his flesh had almost certainly been deeply and satisfactorily smoked, like a mackerel hung above a wood fire.

Mr Murdie had observed enough alcoholic bonhomie to grow mistrustful of bonhomie altogether. It was, as he knew, a slippery and deceitful customer. He had watched it sway into gross sentimentality and lurch into frightening belligerence. That is why when Mr Murdie’s regulars sometimes slumped over the counter at the end of the evening and told him – amid slurred, urgent confidences – that they actually loved him, loved him as a best, best friend, Mr Murdie answered with an economical wee smile, and the words, ‘Aye well if you really love me, boys, you’ll clear off to your beds now and let me wipe the counter.’

Mr Murdie knew that Mrs Murdie really loved him. She wasn’t much of a drinker, though, and so she hardly ever said it.

When I walked into the Whistle Bar, where Murdie was the manager, and enquired of him whether they needed any barmen, I had reason to believe that he would help me out. Big Jacky and he had played together in a showband called the Janglemen when they were in their late teens. Mr Murdie had played the guitar and Big Jacky had been on the drums. I had seen a picture of them in their stage suits, with both of them managing somehow to look eighteen and forty-five at the same time. But there was an expression of subtle pride on Murdie’s saturnine face beneath a glossy Brylcreemed quiff, suggesting that a secret craving for flamboyance had been momentarily satisfied.

Murdie remained a friend of Big Jacky’s, and he would call round to our house on some nights to play cards and eat bacon sandwiches. When I was small he had a habit of greeting me with the words: ‘What happened – did your school burn down?’ This threw me into a pleasurable confusion. I hadn’t the least idea what Mr Murdie meant. Why on earth would my school burn down? And yet the thought that it might burn down some day was unsettling but exciting. If I woke up one morning, and Big Jacky just said, ‘No school today, son. It’s burned down, I’m afraid,’ would that be the business of school over for good, would I ever have to go again?

When I got a bit older, I used to reverse the charges and ask Murdie: ‘What happened – did your bar burn down?’ This was less of a joke than it seemed. Two of the bars that Murdie had worked in really had burned down. One was razed at a time when sectarian furies were running conveniently high in Belfast, and the owner torched it himself for the insurance money. The other was intended to act as a city-wide warning to those who chose to ignore the final reminders on their protection money. Murdie kept silent as a Sphinx throughout, observed all that happened, found himself fresh employment and carried on pouring customers’ whiskey.

He was polishing the beer glasses when I walked into the Whistle, and he seemed pleased to see me. It was a quiet enough afternoon. There were two drinkers slouched over the bar, but they were too engrossed in the horse racing on television to slide me more than a desultory glance. Murdie had been at Big Jacky’s funeral along with Mrs Murdie. I hadn’t talked to him since.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Here’s the man himself.’

He poured me a pint of lager, and then – with a quick look towards the pub door – lit up a cigarette. ‘So, wee Jacky, what are you up to?’

‘You won’t believe it,’ I said. ‘My school burned down.’

Murdie’s face cracked into a broken smile: ‘Who did it?’

‘I did. I decided I was getting too old for detention.’

He laughed, and then waited, smoking. There is an amateur and a professional style of smoking. The amateur style is floatily indulgent, expansive in the movement of the smoking arm, casually squandering the cigarette’s little life. The professional style extracts the maximum value from every puff, the smoking arm moving quickly and in a straight line, in the knowledge that the pleasure of the cigarette might soon be cut short by some external demand. Murdie smoked in the professional style.

‘Aunt Phyllis is living with me now. She’s sort of taken over the running of the newsagent’s.’

‘Is the business going well?’

‘Aye, I think it’s going all right. It seems to have plenty of customers. Most of them come in to talk to Phyllis. She’s certainly got the gift of the gab.’

Enough said. Murdie nodded, and looked at me with the unspoken understanding that there are times when you would like to put the people with the gift of the gab in a large room along with everyone who has kissed the Blarney Stone, lock the door and let them all jaw each other to death.

‘The thing is, though, there’s not really enough for me to do there. Phyllis has it pretty much all under control. I was wondering if you might need a barman here, or know anyone else who does.’

Consideration. He stubbed out the cigarette as punctuation to his thoughts. His mental machinery was doing some speedy calculations: I could almost hear it clicking and revolving.

‘Davy’s leaving next week, to go and work on a cruise liner,’ he said. ‘You could fill in for him for a while. But you’d need to come on a few afternoons, when there’s just me here, to get the hang of the place. Come in on Tuesday.’

I was delighted. I finished up my pint. Murdie walked me to the door, and, as I left, he hit me a stern, playful whack with the rolled-up copy of the Belfast News Letter he had been using earlier on to kill flies.

I went to see Titch to tell him about the job. Ever since the beating, it had been a gala performance to get him to come downstairs at all. In the past he used to get a bit of spare cash for helping out at the chippy but there was no prospect of that now. His mother was at her wits’ end. There was mostly silence from him in the daytime, when he often slept, and then a rumpus during the night. His mother said that she could hear him getting up at two and three in the morning and struggling to shift the furniture around in his bedroom with his one good arm.

He had said to me, one afternoon, ‘I’m going to get them back for what they done, I swear it.’ It made me sad even to hear him say this. It wasn’t going to happen. The sentence started out with defiance in it, but it tailed off halfway through from a lack of conviction.

‘Och Titch,’ I said, ‘Leave it now. Don’t make things worse for yourself. Soon they’ll all land themselves in jail anyway.’

Titch had a counsellor. The Victim Support people had got in touch after the beating, and now a woman in a paisley-patterned duvet jacket came round regularly to ask him, in a professionally hushed voice, how he was feeling. Titch confirmed regularly, in monosyllabic form, that he was feeling bad. As the awkward silences lengthened, the counsellor was forced to stare with false, fixed interest at the family photographs displayed on the mantelpiece. Titch’s hand moved with increasing frequency towards the open packet of Viennese whirls by his side. He wouldn’t even look at a Jaffa Cake now.

Titch’s mother said that once she had read, upside down in the counsellor’s notes, the single phrase: ‘uses food, mainly sweet things, as a comfort blanket’. Titch’s mother remarked to the counsellor that she had obviously never had the chance to observe Titch at work among savouries, in the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Shaftesbury Square. The counsellor stared blankly at her for a moment, with her biro quivering above Titch’s case notes, and then said without smiling, ‘Ah. Joke.’

The whole aim, said the counsellor, was to allow Titch to ‘achieve full closure’ with his experience at the hands of the paramilitaries. It would be useful if Titch could first learn to forgive himself for behaving as a victim, and then somehow – and she recognised this might take a while – forgive his attackers for perpetrating the assault. Titch’s mother said that she had a First World War bayonet, a family heirloom, and that she would first like to ‘achieve full closure’ with the backsides of his assailants. The counsellor looked at her oddly again, she said, and then made some quite extensive notes which she casually shielded from view with her arm.

When I called round Titch was up in his room. He was lying on his bed, reading his mother’s Bella magazine. He had it pulled open at the recipe section. When he saw me come in, he let it slide to the ground: a full-colour picture of Thai fishcakes with a tiger prawn garnish winked garishly up at us both.

I skated over the pervasive air of hopelessness. ‘I’ve got a job, Titch. I’m going to start as a barman at the Whistle on Tuesday. If you come into town to see me, I’ll treat you to a pint of lager, cider or orange squash for free, as an introductory offer. We need new customers.’

I knew there was no way he would come into town yet, but I wanted to ruffle him out of this awful torpor. I wanted to goad him into being cheeky to me again.

‘I’m not going out of the house,’ said Titch, sulkily. ‘I don’t want them fellas to get hold of me and do what they done last time.’

‘Titch, they’re not going to do you all over again just for the heck of it. They’ve already done you once.’

‘They’re not in jail, are they? There’s nothing to stop them, if they want to.’

I couldn’t argue with that. He had the relentless, correct logic of a child sometimes. The hopelessness came back to fill the small room, washing over me, touching the useless frills on the beige nylon curtains and the pointless, grinning Toby jug on the windowsill that his uncle had brought him back from Yorkshire. In my desire to shove it away, to jolt Titch out of his own grim reasoning, I threw in something even worse.

‘But Titch, it makes no difference anyway whether you go out or stay in. In fact, you’d be better off going out. They came up and got you here, didn’t they? They pulled you right out of this room, didn’t they?’

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I should never have said them. He stared at me for a second as though I had just smacked him full in the face. And then his expression began to disintegrate, falling apart into shapes that would have been almost comic if they hadn’t been so terrible. He was moving violently from side to side, putting his elbows up to shield his head, and all the time making the high-pitched wailing sound of some trapped animal in distress.

I waited until the worst of it had passed and then I went over and put my hands on his heaving shoulders. I told him gently: ‘Sshh. They won’t come for you again.’ The shoulders moved gradually to a shaking halt. And then he started to whisper something all jumbled together, like a child’s babble, and so softly that I had to lean in very close to hear. It was the same sentence, over again: ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have anywhere to go.’

7

The Whistle was a great place to work. It was an old, established bar on the way in to the city centre: a bit dilapidated, but it had charm. We got a lot of students and gentle wastrels in the daytime, and a more eclectic, fired-up clientele by night.

It was never too busy in the afternoons, and in between serving customers Murdie demonstrated to me some of the little tricks of the barman’s trade: how to polish glasses to a high sheen without smearing them again when you set them down; the correct way to serve a whiskey and water; how to pull the perfect pint of Guinness; and the proper proportions of the constituent elements in a port and lemon.

When we had the basics of the bar sorted out, said Murdie, we’d move on to learning cocktails.

At a certain point in the day, if things were quiet, he would pour a single whiskey for each of us, to be drunk slowly and without ice. We would savour the peaty burning at the back of our throats while Murdie’s favourite song, Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’, spun lazily out of the CD player. It was a surprisingly lush choice for such a self-contained man. The golden afternoon light would float in through the frosted pub windows, spilling in widening patches on the polished wood of the tables, and for that moment all the worries that clodded to me would flake away.

One day I was staring at the fat, corrugated worm lying at the bottom of a bottle of mescal. One of the regulars had brought it back from a trip to Mexico, as a present for Murdie. He had displayed it behind the bar, unopened, and the function of the worm had begun to nag at me.

‘What’s that thing for?’ I asked Murdie.

‘That’s the mescal worm,’ he said. ‘It soaks up all the lunacy in the bottle. If you eat that worm, you’ll start hallucinating. You’ll see demons.’

He could be quite poetic, Murdie, when you got him going. We both stood contemplating it floating there wickedly like a baby’s thumb.

‘If you ate that worm, Murdie,’ I said, ‘could you remember, in the moment of insanity, why you and my dad called your band a name like the Janglemen?’

‘It wasn’t us that thought of it, Jacky,’ he said: ‘it was your mother. She thought it would be funny, and it was. We got lots of bookings just because of that name.’

‘What was she like, Murdie?’

‘She was a laugh,’ he said gently, ‘a really good laugh. But kind, too, and a great dancer. And she was crazy about you.’

Then he started to empty all the ashtrays, to rinse them out before the evening crowd started coming in after work.

In the evenings, when things hotted up, the door at the Whistle was manned by Joe and Jimmy. They both wore tuxedos, the traditional doorman’s costume, and they were both built like brick shithouses, the historic doorman’s physique. Joe was dark-haired with a bristly, neat moustache. Jimmy was blond. Joe did weights at the gym to keep himself in peak condition. Jimmy probably kept fit by twirling his little brothers around like drumsticks on the Twelfth of July. I wouldn’t have liked to mess with either of them.

The year before had been a particularly bad year for Belfast doormen, security guards and taxi drivers. Doormen, whether Catholic or Protestant, were used as exclamation marks to punctuate the long-running argument between the IRA and the Loyalist paramilitaries.

The argument had long followed certain clear, established lines. The IRA would, for example, let off a bomb. The Loyalists, to emphasise how enormously they disapproved of this violence, would kill a Catholic doorman who was standing outside his workplace, musing on what to buy his son for his birthday. The IRA, to show how furious they were at this outrage, would gun down a Protestant security guard who was thinking about where to go with his girlfriend on his next night off. The Loyalists, to demonstrate their anger at this atrocity, would phone a taxi driver from a Catholic firm and shoot him point-blank in the back of the head as he politely asked them for directions. And so their discussions on morality continued.

This year, however, had been better for doormen and taxi drivers specifically, and worse generally for young Catholics who annoyed the IRA and young Prods who irritated the Loyalists. Nonetheless, Joe and Jimmy were mindful of the pitfalls in their chosen occupation.

Joe could be funny when he had time, and he had a lot of that on the door. He told me one night, stroking his lapels, ‘If they start shooting doormen again, at least I’m going to go dressed in a tuxedo. When I get up there they’ll stick me straight on the pearly gate with Saint Peter, to keep the troublemakers like you out.’

I told him: ‘You’ve been watching too many Mafia films. Knowing your luck, they’d get you when you were dandering back from the gym, in your big floppy shorts. The best you’d get then is a part-time job as a personal trainer to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’

He wouldn’t hear of it.

‘I’m going on the gate,’ he said, puffing out his chest. ‘And when I see you coming, I’ll tell you: “I’m sorry, you’re underage. You’ll have to go to hell.”’

‘Nobody’s underage for heaven,’ I said.

‘No, but you’ll still need ID before they’ll serve you a drink,’ he said. His shoulders shook with pleasure at getting the last word, and then he wheeled round and grimaced at three girls who were teetering in high heels and an atomic cloud of perfumed body spray at the door, all of them plastered in make-up and none a day over fifteen.

‘Date of Birth,’ Joe demanded flatly, with his stern official’s face on. He stared with meaning at the smallest one, a sharp-faced wee blonde who looked all of fourteen. She glared back, pursing her glossily enamelled lips as though deeply, personally affronted by the question, and then reeled off a fake date of birth that would have made her eighteen exactly two months before. Joe mimed exaggerated disbelief. They carried on this little war of nerves every couple of weeks. It was splendid to watch.

He turned towards each of the others, as though by now deeply bored and suspicious, repeating the mantra: ‘Date of birth’. They were all pretty good at it, really, apart from a plump gormless brunette who had obviously had a bit to drink already. She stumbled over the year, and then stood blinking under her heavy purple eyeshadow, trying to work out which date she needed in order to get in.

‘Sorry, you’re not getting in,’ Joe told her.

At this, the others began to squawk and flap in protest.

‘Mister, she is eighteen,’ chirruped the blonde, ‘but she’s just had her birthday. You just confused her there, the way you asked her that.’

The brunette had worked it out by now, and even caught up with the necessary, offended tone of voice. She repeated the entire date of birth again, slowly and deliberately, as though Joe had failed to understand her the first time because of his own bestial stupidity. The others fell silent in anticipation, knowing not to push things too far.

‘Happy Birthday. And congratulations. You’re the only eighteen-year-old I’ve ever met that still gets a bedtime story from her mammy,’ said Joe sarcastically.

The three of them started to snicker and preen, sensing that he was softening.

‘Get in … and next time bring your ID,’ he called after them, in pretend irritation. He turned and winked broadly at me as they stampeded towards the bar, tittering in glee and triumph, waving their crumpled fivers and asking for vodka and orange.

It’s strange at first, working behind a bar. You feel like you’ve been pushed on to a stage without knowing your lines, with the lights shining on you and a host of querulous faces looking on. And then after a while you get used to it, and the bar becomes your little square arena, your illuminated patch.

The important thing, Murdie told me, is that you’re never seen to be standing idle. If you’re not serving customers, then you should be polishing glasses, or stacking beer mats, or wiping up real and imaginary spillages with a damp cloth. But you are never performing these tasks to the exclusion of the customer’s most vital interests. All the while, you are watching out for the thirsty, expectant face in the crowd, the frantic signalling that someone is dying for a drink.

When things get busy, said Murdie, you must learn to keep in your head the chronological order in which these thirsty faces appear, and serve them accordingly. If you mix them up you must quickly apologise. You must not disregard the short man (for Murdie was short himself) or the plain woman in favour of those individuals who naturally catch the eye and thus seem to be blessed with Bar Presence. The tall, burly man and the beautiful woman have already queue-jumped in life, said Murdie, but they should not be permitted to do so at the bar. To the truly professional barman, Bar Presence should be irrelevant. Order of appearance is everything.

I was hardly ever bored behind the bar, apart from very early in the evening or late at night when you got stuck with the tedious pub raconteur in the Aran sweater who had bolted his corduroyed arse to the bar stool. I liked it best at the height of the evening, when the place was packed with people and noise, and everyone was laughing and shouting for more drink, and you started to work with a feverish rhythm that drove everything else out of your head. I liked having a bit of money, too. Murdie paid me a decent chunk of cash in hand at the end of every week.

It was Phyllis’s birthday halfway through the month and I asked Murdie for the night off. I’d been feeling guilty lately about how grumpy I’d been with her since she moved in. She had been dropping wee hints about her birthday, and how Mary and Sam would be away on holiday together and sorry to miss it but she had thought this time she would just stay in Belfast for it. ‘Is that so,’ I had said, distantly, as though my radio wasn’t even picking up on her faltering signal.

I knew she thought I’d forgotten all about it. On the morning of her birthday, I got up half an hour early – well before her throat-clearing operation – and put a bunch of pink roses outside her bedroom door. I’d bought them the day before, and kept them in a jug of water in my wardrobe so she wouldn’t see.

I got back into bed. Half an hour later, I heard the floorboards creak. Then a crash, a stumble, and a yelp of surprise. Phyllis had kicked over the roses by accident and they were all strewn about the floor, but I could see she was pleased. She kept saying ‘Oh my goodness’ as she collected them up in her nightie.

I took her out for dinner later on, to a French restaurant in town. She put on her best blouse, with a fussy wee frill at the neck, and her pearl earrings, and a daub of blue eyeshadow to set off the rose-tinted lipstick. When I saw her appear like that at the bottom of the stairs, all done up to go out, I felt an awkward pang of love for her.

In the restaurant, she had a couple of glasses of white wine with her dinner, and got a bit tipsy. The conversation got on to Mary and Sam’s holiday: they had gone to Tenerife.

‘It’s good for them to go somewhere on their own without me,’ she said. ‘I sometimes felt as though I was a bit of a spare part.’

I said nothing, sawing away at my steak. I could sense the faint electricity of something meaningful approaching.

‘I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted Mary along all the time when I was going out with my boyfriend,’ she said. There was a second’s hesitation before the word ‘boyfriend’, as though she had doubts about whether to mention it, but had ploughed ahead anyway.

I had never heard Phyllis talk about a boyfriend before. I couldn’t imagine Phyllis with a boyfriend. Mary had always said that Phyllis was too delicate to get married. I carried on cutting my steak without showing surprise, so as not to scare the revelation away.

‘When were you going out with him, Phyllis?’ I asked.

‘When I was nineteen,’ she said, ‘He was a medical student. We used to go out to dances together. Mary didn’t like him. She said he was sly but he wasn’t, he was just shy of her because she tried to bully him with too many questions.’

She smiled suddenly. ‘He used to call her the Iron Lung, because she was always hunting after me, shouting my name.’

‘How long did you go out together?’

‘Two years. Your mother liked him. The pair of us used to give Mary the slip sometimes and go out to the dances together.’

I couldn’t leave it now. I had to get to the bottom of it before the wine wore off and Phyllis clammed up about the only really important thing that had ever happened to her, and went straight back to talking ceaselessly about hairstyles and pork chops.

‘So why did you stop going out?’

‘He was killed in an accident,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I wasn’t with him because I wasn’t feeling well that night. He went out to a dance with his brother, and his brother was driving him home along a country road late that night when a van hit their car. The van’s driver was drunk.’

‘Did the brother survive?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He only had a broken arm. He got married the year after. But after my boyfriend I never felt like going with anyone else.’

‘I’m so sorry, Phyllis,’ I said. Then we both started looking, quickly, at the list of puddings. After some deliberation over the pavlova and its possible disappointments in texture, Phyllis played it safe and plumped for the chocolate mousse.

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