“Shit. You have it all wrong,” said one ginger-haired lad. “From the beginning Shamey Coyle dreams of getting away from Belfast. If he joins the RA he sees himself as a free man one day walking down the streets of New York.”

“It’s no wonder,” said Jack, “that where we are is called ‘the place of the bog’.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aitnamona – it means ‘the place of the bog’.”

“Do you speak the Irish?”

“Yes.”

“Well, wee lad, you could be making a few bob just up the road there. I hear they’re looking for an Irish teacher in the Mills.”

And that’s how Jack Ferris, after a few weeks building up a profile of Shamey Coyle, left the group that was trying to put the play together and began teaching Irish in Conway’s Mills on the Falls Road. He never actually discovered what Shamey Coyle did when he left prison, but somehow or other he learned to mourn the death of Christopher Little, whose existence he would not have thought of had he not come into being through a conversation with a man who would have killed him.

The teaching of Irish did not bring in much money. His group consisted of two ex-prisoners, a few sons of Comhaltas people, two Republican poets, a young short-story writer anxious for fame, and two girls who were actually learning Irish as a foreign language at school.

In the dark winter nights he’d park the Lada in a side street off the Falls outside the door of a friendly couple. He’d walk the rest of the way. Always he would remember those little streets, the few figures waiting smoking in the dark outside the hall, the lighting of the Superser, the coffee break, the strange sensation of hearing the Irish of O’Ríordán the poet spoken by a group of Belfast adults, while outside a British convoy moved down the street, or a helicopter sent a probing light across the Guinness barrels in the yard.

He had never taught before, and did not want to take it on, but it was Catherine that encouraged him.

“You’d make a beautiful DJ,” she told him. “If you were on the radio I’d listen to you all the time. And you’d make an even better teacher.”

“I’ll be too nervous.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

Twice a week he made the trip and then went off with some members of his class to a nearby pub. They told stories of their lives with a harsh fluency in plain English. The young writer wanted to know how he might write a book that’d make a million. See that boy Jeffrey Archer! And what about Barbara Cartland? Ah couldn’t be bothered wi’ Belfast, who wants ta write about Belfast, said the short story writer, I’ve had it up ta here.