Nguyen didn’t drive straight back to the guest-house. Once he’d collected his van from the car park off Gloucester Street he headed north along Victoria Street and then cut westwards across the city along Divis Street, past grim blocks of flats, to where it turned into Falls Road. It wasn’t that he was worried about being followed, because he knew he was long gone from Donegall Square before the bottles crashed on to the floor. It wasn’t that he enjoyed driving, either. He’d always found sitting behind the steering wheel stressful and he’d been looking forward to the day when his daughter would pass her driving test so that she could do all the restaurant deliveries for him. He drove around to get a feel of the city and its people, and at the back of his mind lurked the thought that by understanding the people of Belfast he might be able to understand why the IRA had killed his family. The city centre was prosperous, shiny fronted shops and clean pavements. The cars in the streets were mainly new and well cared for and there were few signs of a city in the throes of sectarian violence. ‘Belfast Says No’ said a banner Nguyen had seen hanging under the green dome of City Hall in Donegall Square, but he didn’t know what the city was saying ‘no’ to. There was a strong police and army presence, with some streets sealed off with metal railings manned by armed policemen and turnstiles to allow pedestrians through one at a time, but there was no air of tension, none that Nguyen could detect, anyway. He had a large-scale map of Belfast and its surroundings spread over the passenger seat, and as he stopped at a red traffic light he scanned it, trying to pronounce the strange names: Knocknagoney, Ballyhackamore, Cregagh, Skegoneill, Ligoniel, Ballynafeigh.

A horn sounded and he realised the light had turned green. He missed first gear and went into third by mistake and the van stalled. The horn blared out again and it was joined by others until he got the engine started again and pulled away jerkily.

He drove along the Falls Road, the Royal Victoria Hospital on his left, and the city changed character. It took on a brooding, menacing air. He saw burnt-out cars down side roads, rusting hulks that had obviously been there for months, like the skeletons of long-dead animals. There were children everywhere, in push-chairs, playing football on the pavements, walking with their parents, standing on street corners, loitering outside pubs, children with worn clothes and unkempt hair and runny noses. He drove by red-brick houses that had been gutted and never repaired, derelict wrecks like rotting stumps in a mouthful of bad teeth. There were splashes of colour among the drab greyness – extravagant murals on the gable ends of the terraces, paintings of masked men with machine guns, elaborate crosses, memorials to hunger strikers who had died in prison, and the tricolour, the Irish flag. There were slogans too, many of which Nguyen didn’t understand, but there were some he could read: ‘Support The Provisionals’, ‘Troops Out’, ‘Ireland for the Irish’. He drove by a pub, windows protected with thick wire mesh. There were two men standing either side of a black wooden door with their hands in their pockets and they scrutinised the van with hostile eyes. Lookouts, Nguyen decided. He would have to be more careful where he showed himself. The city centre had lulled him into a false sense of security. Out here, in the Catholic working-class areas, he could feel the mistrust in the air like the cloying damp of a morning mist. The men saw that Nguyen was Oriental and immediately lost interest in him.