Peter said it was a waking nightmare at Brown Bayley’s, said the open furnaces were like staring into the mouth of hell, and that it was a miracle men didn’t die every day, given that the only protection most of them had against harm were the hard hats on their heads and steel caps on their boots. Catherine Connor’s boyfriend Martin worked there too – well, who didn’t? Attercliffe seemed to breed menfolk purely to feed the steel industry – and that was another reason why Peter hated it, knowing he might turn a corner and see Martin’s beefy mug leering at him, poking fun, raising a laugh from the other men who thought you were a killjoy if you couldn’t take a joke. Peter went to the steelworks at sixteen, because somebody had to bring money into the household and Catherine was drinking too much by then to hold down a job. He went as an apprentice and was put to work burning off twisted metal misshapes from ingots as they came off the rolling mills, or welding and repairing those parts of the furnaces no one else wanted to go near. When he came home from his shift in those days he smelled of burning metal and his overalls were black where they’d caught fire. Now though, he worked a crane, shifting steel around the factory, and his main complaint was the cold, up there in the gods, where his donkey jacket suddenly didn’t seem so thick and his hands could freeze on the levers if he forgot his gloves.

But it was Saturday morning, he had the weekend off, and he was letting Alison look after him, watching her make him beans on toast, six slices of white bread, margarine, and a pile of baked beans sliding about the plate like molten lava. Dave Lee Travis was on in the kitchen, Catherine was in her bed, dead to the world, and Martin was gone, back to his own house more than likely, where he periodically retreated to feed the miserable whippet he kept on a long chain in the back yard. This was as good as it got in the Connor household.

‘So anyway,’ Alison said, sitting opposite Peter to watch him eat. ‘Don’t be mad, but I’m not just going out this afternoon, I’m going to Hillsborough.’

He looked at her over the top of a forkful of beans.

‘He’s a Wednesday fan?’ he said.

‘Die-hard,’ Alison says. ‘It’s in his blood, apparently.’

‘Thought you were a Blade.’

‘No, Peter, I’m the sister of a Blade, as you well know. My interest in football is about as keen as your interest in, oh, I don’t know, origami.’

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘why go at all?’

‘It’s life experience,’ Alison said. ‘And it’s an FA Cup tie, against Arsenal.’