Him and the rest of the troop were spinning and turning every few yards, trying to get back inside the big barracks before anything kicked off. The barracks with its massive square cast-concrete watchtower is opposite St Patrick’s chapel spire, the two hives of activity like a set of tall-pillared gates to the Republic. What did the English boys make of ‘the situation’, stuck in all the little grey towns along the border? Carncloon looked grimy in the winter light: the main street missing a shop here and there where a bomb had gone off, grubby windows with drawn curtains or sheets of corrugated tin. Only the broken glass glittered where it had been swept into the gutters, blood diamonds.

The 11+ Protestants who went to the academy were hanging about outside Crawford’s too. They wore their uniforms with the same pride. We are put on separate buses to get to our separate schools even though both the schools are in Omagh, but when we get back to Carncloon we all have to get the same bus out to the hills. Nobody dies. We’re all friends anyway when the hay has to be got in.

We all have the same Christian God, hearts, lungs, spleens and animals to deal with. We just deal with them in separate churches, separate doctors’ surgeries and separate vets’. We’re told from the cradle that they’re land-robbing bastards; they’re told we are vermin who don’t know when to stop breeding. They like marching about after bands playing ‘The Sash My Father Wore’ battered out on drums; we don’t march about so much since Bloody Sunday. They drink in their own pubs on St Patrick’s Day; we drink in ours and we largely stay indoors for the Orange Parades on the Twelfth of July so they can burn their Pope dollies and enjoy the heat from the flames licking their white gloves and bowler hats. It was a brilliant system right up until it totally broke down.

Joe and me walked away from the laughing and giggling and the odd whoop and whistle to the back of the Long Lounge. It had been firebombed a year ago; some people said it was an insurance job, others said it was an Ulster Defence Association job. The UDA was set up to battle the disease of Republicanism and operated under the banner of the Ulster Freedom Fighters when they had to carry out any violent acts.

–  We are not a disease, says Mammy, don’t you ever forget that, Mary Rattigan.

I just nod but I think to myself, you are a disease, a plague! It’s how I test if she can still read my mind. I’m getting better: no slaps now for nearly a month.