‘A wee boy from Arnold Street. Only sixteen. I know his mother. She was in this morning in an awful state, a bag of nerves.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Four of them jumped on him on his way home and battered him with iron bars. He’s up there in the Royal now. Head injuries, broken leg.’

‘What was it over?’

‘Some row over a girl, his mother said. Him and another lad argued over a girl but it got out of hand and the other boy’s uncle is, you know.’

A meaningful glance from behind the thick glasses. She would never say the actual word.

The door suddenly swung open and a stout, middle-aged man I had never seen before walked in. Mrs Hackett’s voice grew abruptly louder –

‘Well enjoy the ravioli, now. I hope you have an umbrella.’

‘Don’t worry, sure I’ve got my waterproof jacket.’

The thing I had liked about living with Big Jacky was his capacity for silence. It wasn’t a brooding silence, with argumentative storm clouds waiting to burst overhead. You could relax in the expanses of Big Jacky’s silence. It was the mental equivalent of an endless highway stretching out of sight, carrying within it peace and possibility.

These were the sounds that punctuated an evening with Big Jacky: the soft rustling of the newspaper, the hiss of the kettle, his belly-chortle at some fresh piece of idiocy issuing from the gabbling television, a courteous observation about the rain, the spit of sausages frying in a pan. He didn’t ask me too many questions. I suppose that’s why I told him almost everything.

I wondered sometimes how I, with my spiky edges and tangled imaginings, could have sprung from the quiet bulk of Big Jacky. He did, too. As a child, I would sometimes catch him looking at me strangely, as I gyrated wildly in my Indian chief’s headdress or danced with frustration over a difficult puzzle. I heard him once saying in a low voice: ‘You’re like her.’ I knew who he meant: my dark-haired snapshot mother, the fine-boned, smiling face that lay in his bedside drawer with his most precious things. She was frozen there, next to an earlier model of him grinning broadly beneath a modest dirty-blond pompadour. I don’t remember her. She died of meningitis when I was two.