Sometimes I think that maybe now I’ll only go back for good in an urn, and whoever cares enough can spoon me out like instant coffee and sprinkle me over the Lagan. Or if Eve should die first, and I’m old and alone, perhaps I’ll leave London behind and let Belfast drive me crazy one more time.

The city does that: it sits and waits patiently for its émigrés to return, and sometimes they do. When the world-famous snooker player Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins was ruined with cancer, he came back to Belfast, to the same streets where he first started out as a wee lad playing truant in a local snooker hall called the Jampot.

He fell into a small council flat in Sandy Row. There was nowhere else for him to be. His crackling wire of electricity, that made sparks fly off the green baize every time he walked towards it, had worked loose and reduced everything in England to ash: his stacks of prize money, his cheeky street-urchin’s face, his marriage, his health. When he played in the world championship final in 1982, Big Jacky and I had sat jammed together on the sofa, eyes glued to the screen, and cheered at the television when he won the title for the second time. Away from the lights of the tournament halls, though, the little sizzle beneath his skin wouldn’t let up.

Higgins couldn’t get the hang of time, the way most people learn to. He couldn’t handle the way it slowed down without asking. When he was playing snooker, he could bend time to his will, letting it hang suspended in the air, or blasting balls round the table faster than an intake of breath. Out there in the world, though, the minutes moved too sluggishly for his internal beat, so he drank and brawled and head-butted to kick-start them somewhere in the chaos.

Back in Belfast in his final days, he haunted the pubs and streets, a six-stone shocker of a body hauled around by a tiny, gaunt head with burning eyes and a rasping voice, still smoking and drinking beneath a raffish fedora hat. Marty saw him a few times in the bar opposite his flat, reading the paper and sinking Guinness. By then a pint of the rich, black stout was often the closest he came to food. His loyal friends in the snooker fraternity, many of whom he had insulted in his cups, raised cash in an effort to buy him new teeth. He had none of his own left, but a skein of cockiness persisted in him like a live nerve.