I can hear her saying it, here, right now, like she was lying in my arms, next to me, and I could touch her head with the back of my hand that’s shaking. Except for I’ll break your heart, whispering it in my ear. What a turn. Sometimes she would smuggle food up from the kitchen. Sometimes even a bottle of wine. We’d lie there, on the messed-up sheets, with a tray over our legs, watching TV like a happy couple. We’d watch the news about the troubles and she would say to me, how deep do you go? I’m just a Saturday boy, I says to her, only I says it in the way that somebody who wasn’t just a Saturday boy would say it. Do you know about role-playing games? I says to her. Was your husband not into all that? Of course I do, she says. Well, how deep do you go? I says to her. She puts her finger in her hair and she twists a little curl around it and she smiles. I’ve discovered my own superpower, she says to me. You mind what I said about invisibility? she says. I thought about her high heels, sitting on the chair, when I discovered she was gone. That’s my superpower, she says to me. Which means that even when you’re not with me, I’m right there beside you. Thing is, it was true.

*

My big sister was killed by Mr Hitler in the Blitz. He’s dropped a bomb on our house in Belfast and the family had to sleep out, on a steep hill, in a park, overnight, and she died of exposure. Nobody put her picture on a charity box. No one offered to house them or support them. They slept in a park until our da found them an abandoned house and moved them in. All my cousins moved away, eventually. Looking for work and a place to settle down that wasn’t a fucking war zone. They went to Glasgow and Birmingham and Liverpool and London and the Isle of Man. Nobody dignified them by calling them refugees. We were just the dirty Irish, filthy Tims, ignorant Micks, fucking daft Paddies lower down the pecking order than blacks or dogs. And it kept happening, all over again. People were getting burnt out their houses every day of the week. People were getting shot down in the street. People were getting dragged by the hair along the pavement, bloodied and screaming into army vehicles, I saw it myself, locked up for defending your own neighbourhood. I looked at the Union Jack and forgive me, son, but all I saw was a swastika. I looked at the Red Hand of Ulster and to me it was nothing but a blood-soaked Sieg Heil.