I put my address on the envelope. It wasn’t like me to seek someone out, but all at once I missed him. Maybe once or twice in your life it suddenly gets lonely when you have no one to talk to about all the stuff you thought you wanted to forget. Weeks went by, and I wondered if the letter had got lost in the post, or if he’d got it and winced a little and quietly crumpled it up. A bit of me felt like an eejit for having written.

Then one afternoon who but Gerry himself should walk into the half-empty café, looking around for me. I had someone else working on the counter. ‘I’m over here,’ I shouted from the back of the shop and when he finally saw me his face snapped into a wide smile. He came over and we gave each other an awkward hug – years in London had chipped away at our early reticence – and I stepped back to take a good look at him, at all the new ways he’d put himself together. He was wearing dark skinny jeans and a nifty wee trilby like a travelling jazz musician. When he moved towards the corner table I saw that he had learned to carry even his faint limp elegantly, a trace of damage that he now wore as nonchalantly as a scarf.

‘Look at you,’ I marvelled. ‘Like a hipster Frankie Sinatra.’

He thought I was taking the mickey.

‘Look at you,’ he said, smiling. ‘You called your café Two fucking Shots? What’s that about?’

Close up I could see that his white, even teeth were not of the sort ordinarily bequeathed by our native city. They had clearly undergone some subtly expensive dental work.

‘It’s a reference to coffee,’ I said. ‘Two shots of coffee.’

‘Yeah, better be,’ he said. ‘Make mine three. I’m fucking knackered after last night.’

He swore the way I remembered, rhythmically and without any malice, but there was an international patina to his accent now, a softening drawl buttered across his Belfast vowels. I had trained myself not to swear in front of Elsie. Cursing came unnaturally to me, but to hear him at it again felt relaxing, like he was rolling us a cigarette to share.