We sat down and he told me all about the DJ-ing and how things had started to go right when a promoter spotted him playing trance music in Belfast and offered him a gig in London and before long the jobs were trickling and then flooding in, even from outside the UK. His constant music references – dubstep, downtempo, breakbeat, hardcore – were all gobbledegook to me. For myself I liked live soul nights in down-at-heel old men’s pubs, but it did me good to see his face all quick and bright at how life had panned out for him. He was still eating up his success like a ripe peach, with the juice of it running down his chin. There were no kids yet, he said, but he had met a woman he liked and I got the feeling that procreation had become a dangling possibility. The fine lines around his eyes signalled it might be time.

He went back to Belfast now and then to see his parents, he said, and recently in the city centre he had bumped into a fella who – the week after he’d finally come home from hospital, shakily bolted back together – had stopped to holler at him from across the street: ‘Ye got what ye deserved.’ But the fella must have forgotten all about that because now he came up to Gerry like an old pal, saying he’d seen him in the magazines and as a favour would he think about playing a wee birthday gig downtown some time in a particular club the fella had in mind.

‘What did you say to him?’ I asked.

‘I told him in no uncertain terms to fuck off.’

In no uncertain terms. I enjoyed that. Gerry asked about me and briskly satisfied himself that my life was in good shape, like a clear-headed doctor checking up on the people who are still walking around after a train crash. He still pulsated to a fast beat.

And then, after all that, he suddenly started talking about Frankie Dunne. I suspected there weren’t that many people he could talk about Dunne with. Maybe that was the real reason why he had come. It had clearly been sitting on his mind.

‘Do you remember the fella I told you about once in the hospital, the Provo that beat me for joyriding?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

‘Aye,’ I said, ‘Frankie Dunne.’

‘Well, it turns out Frankie was a tout,’ he said. ‘He was one of the IRA’s chief inquisitors, and a very busy, chatty tout. He went around interrogating and stiffing people left right and centre for supposedly squealing to the Brits while he was doing the same himself, non-stop. For years he was one of the juiciest sources they had, the gift that kept on gabbing. It’s all come out.’