‘Which means you want to be keeping a good two hundred yards back,’ said Big John.

We were horrified. Through a miscarriage of justice, plain as, Tom N had earlier in the year been placed on a sex register. Oh the world is mad! Tom N is a placid, placid man. We were all six of us quiet as the grave on the evening train then. It grew and built, it was horrible, the silence. It was Everett at last that broke it; we were coming in for Helsby. Fair dues to Everett.

‘Not like you, John,’ he said.

Big John nodded.

‘I don’t know where that came from, Tom,’ he said. ‘A bloody stupid thing to say.’

Tom N raised a palm in peace but there was no disguising the hurt that had gone in. I pulled away into myself. The turns the world takes – Tom dragged through the courts, Everett half mad, Mo all scratched up and one-balled, Big John jobless for eighteen months. Billy Stroud was content, I suppose, in Billy’s own way. And there was me, shipwrecked in Liverpool. Funny, for a while, to see ‘Penny Lane’ flagged up on the buses, but it wears off.

And then it was before us in a haze. Terrace rows we passed, out Speke way, with cookouts on the patios. Tiny pockets of glassy laughter we heard through the open windows of the carriage. Families and what-have-you. We had the black hole of the night before us – it wanted filling. My grimmest duty as publications officer was the obits page of the newsletter. Too many had passed on at forty-four, at forty-six.

‘I’m off outings,’ I announced. ‘And I’m off bloody publications as well.’

‘You did volunteer on both counts,’ reminded Big John.

‘It would leave us in an unfortunate position,’ said Tom N.

‘For my money, it’s been a very pleasant outing,’ said Billy Stroud.

‘We’ve supped some quality ale,’ concurred Big John.

‘We’ve had some cracking weather,’ said Tom N.

‘Llandudno is quite nice, really,’ said Mo.

Around his scratch marks an angry bruising had seeped. We all looked at him with tremendous fondness.

‘’Tis nice,’ said Everett Bell. ‘If you don’t run into a she-wolf.’

‘If you haven’t gone ten rounds with Edward bloody Scissorhands,’ said John Mosely.

We came along the shabby grandeurs of the city. The look on Mo’s face then couldn’t be read as anything but happiness.

‘Maurice,’ teased Big John, ‘is thinking of the rather interesting day he’s had.’

Mo shook his head.

‘Thinking of days I had years back,’ he said.

It has this effect, Liverpool. You’re not back in the place five minutes and you go sentimental as a famine ship. We piled off at Lime Street. There we go: six big blokes in the evening sun.

‘There’s the Lion Tavern?’ suggested Tom N.

‘There’s always the Lion,’ I agreed.

‘They’ve a couple of Manx ales guesting at Rigby’s,’ said Everett Bell.

‘Let’s hope they’re an improvement on previous Manx efforts,’ said Billy Stroud.