Autumn brought my favourite shade of red in the shape of the bold Lizzie Magee. She kept her promise and started to come home more often when the retaliation we thought was inevitable for the Omagh bomb never materialised. With her to pick me up and keep me company, I started to go into town more. She was around the week the steel barricades were taken away. The sparks from the grinders flew silver as they chopped through the metal poles and every barrel of concrete was lifted on a forklift and put in the back of a van. Carncloon looked naked without them and when we were able to walk from one end of the town to the other it just didn’t seem right. We kept meeting Protestants who looked as lost as we did, all of us like pigs going to hoke.

Cars could be left unattended, they could be parked right outside shops, there were fewer and fewer roadblocks. All the shops in the Diamond, a triangle of buildings which had been used to bookend the security gates in and out to the bottom of the town, were demolished: Carncloon was going to have a village green. Lizzie Magee and me nearly wet our drawers! Why would a town need a tragic patch of grass when five green hills loomed around it?

The Long Lounge was finally going to be rebuilt and I had stammered a ‘yes’ when John Johns suggested we might go there together when it was finished. I thought of all the kissing I had done with Joe Loughrey in the burned-out dance hall at the back but the next time I set foot in there it would be to stand at a bar and have a drink with the man who had become my husband. Life was a strange beast. I’d never thought we would go out together when all we had ever had was the staying in. Not that I was complaining; the staying in was a high point of every day.

The barracks remained, huge and grey at the top of the town, but the rest of the place started to look normal: a few shopkeepers even licked on a bit of paint, a lot of green and white appeared at our end, a lot of red and blue at the other – old habits die hard in Northern Ireland. By Christmas, even a cheery string of white bulbs survived the season, strung across the air above the marks of the border, casting a weak festive light between us and them. Progress was being made!