Some time later I called Hassan’s mobile phone, knowing he wouldn’t answer in the evening rush, and left a short message telling him of my mother’s death. Then I ate a banana and a stale bread roll I had in my bag, cleaned my teeth and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night I woke up with the sensation of falling through the pitch-black air, and I remembered that I was supposed to meet Eve in the coffee shop at eight o’clock the night before. I pictured her sitting waiting for me, the cast of disappointment slowly settling on her face as the waitress circled the pickings of the dead evening like a skinny blonde buzzard.

Eventually Eve would have requested the bill and walked out. How long would she have waited for me – half an hour, an hour? The knowledge that I’d let her down kept stabbing me, but I suffocated the regret with the thought that she was better off without me, even if she didn’t know it. I could never go back to her now anyway, all messy and bloodstained after what I was about to do.

On the coach that dragged itself out of the grey, clogged suburbs of London and way up to the fields and craggy heathery patches of Scotland – punctuated with tidy wee flowerbedded towns and stone kirks – and on to the wind-battered, salty ferry port of Stranraer and over to home, I had thought about Titch. He was the closest thing to a brother I’d ever had. You don’t choose your brothers, after all, and I hadn’t ever chosen Titch. He was just always there.

After my mother died, Big Jacky had got friendly with Titch’s mother, through chatting at the newsagent’s, I suppose. As the two jagged halves of broken couples, they had sometimes helped each other out with looking after one another’s children. I don’t think there was ever any romance between them – certainly, the thought had never occurred to me at the time – but then there were vast tranches of Big Jacky’s interior life that were unknown to me.