‘Yeah.’ Matty had never felt the slightest bit Irish as a kid in London. The reports on TV hadn’t meant much, though Joe would sit up straighter on the sofa. But at secondary school, as well as the other stuff, there’d been IRA = In Ronan’s Arse and Irish jippo he-bitch written on the wall of the loo after Matty had won the right to wear trousers. Irish, whether you liked it or not.

‘And you’re on your way to something?’

Matty glanced over. The man was looking upwards, rocking on his heels. ‘I was.’

‘Good enough. You’ll get there.’ Spoken as if he was in on it, knew the whole thing. The attic, the letter, the crippling fear of finding him, the emptiness now. ‘Keep on. Keep at it. Right enough, so.’

He muttered those words again, a strange, understated rap. Matty drank from the mug, the fierceness of the whiskey and the fizz of the lemonade. Sheep moved like low clouds through the field in front of them.

Halfway through his own drink, the guy started to show his true colours, his voice riding the morphed sound of the music inside. He’d gone on about his older siblings – he’d been the youngest of ten – and how they’d not had electricity in the farmhouse because his parents had called it ‘witchcraft’. He didn’t seem to entirely disagree, though he did seem to tip his hat to progress. ‘All these young people like yourself having a bit of money to spend,’ he’d said.

Matty saw Rosa again, one arm drooping downwards from the sofa, already blueish.

But he’d just been warming up. He’d already gone on about all of the East Europeans who were going to be coming in soon enough and now he’d moved onto God. ‘All this feckology the Big Men put out. People turning away from the Church. When I was a snapper it was the priests who said what was what.’ He let out a small, clicking burp. ‘Anyway, it’ll all be coming to a head soon. He’ll be getting his own back.’ He turned suddenly. ‘You know all about it, I’m sure.’

‘Know all about what?’

‘The Day of Reckoning,’ he said, a little more grandly, sniffing and wiping his nose on the elbow of his coat before standing up. A guttural sigh. ‘On December thirty-first of this good year, there’ll be a raging in the sky, and blood pouring here on earth. Oh, everyone will be told, right enough.’

Matty looked out at the line of hills beyond the dark field. ‘Yeah?’

‘This century will be the last like it,’ the guy said. ‘All this technology whatnot will be obliterated. Flattened. There’ll be only a few of us left, starting from scratch again, if we’re not chosen to join him just yet.’

Lovely. An apocalypse plus a rapture, just for good measure.