I walked on and waited for the bus. It wouldn’t be so hard at all, I thought, just to slide down to where he was. It was so easy that the thought of it frightened me, like tiptoeing to the edge of a cliff and peering over, and feeling – just for a split second – your head starting to spin and your knees giving way beneath you.

They used to get all the daily papers at Delauncey’s and stick them in a rack at the café section of the restaurant, in the pretence that it was some kind of Left Bank joint where customers could sit thoughtfully and ponder the day’s political events. At the end of the day, when I remembered, I would take them home in my bag. Nobody else wanted them. Francis had probably never sat down and read an entire newspaper in his life, although he was always blathering about mind-blowing books he had read while often, I had noticed, getting the titles slightly wrong. He was prone to wittering about Jack Kerouac’s The Karma Bums. I savoured his little errors: they gave me a brief sensation of superiority.

But I felt at home with it, this feast of tiny print. It reminded me of my childhood in the newsagent’s, tying up the remaindered copies with Big Jacky, absorbing the electricity of events from all over the world, plugging into the stronger voltage of those near home.

Something happens to you when you grow up in the midst of bombings and shootings, with the possibility of someone’s agony always in the air like the coming of rain. It’s a secret that nobody really talks about: you get hardwired to the news.

The question of ‘will it happen to me?’ and ‘will it happen to anyone I love?’ and ‘will it happen to anyone I know?’ slowly becomes a reflex, almost a professional interest. You look at photographs of the aftermath of an explosion, say, in Iraq or Sarajevo, and you feel that sickened, sneaky tug of familiarity, the little quickening of recognition. They have it so much worse, you think, but still it’s something you already know, the intimacy of chaos.

In London, I still kept track of stuff at home. Delauncey’s didn’t get the Belfast Telegraph, so I sometimes read the Irish Times. In between its own stories of soaring house prices and political scandals it reported Northern news like a form letter tersely mentioning the latest doings of a regrettably delinquent cousin.