The clash between Titch’s name and his appearance made strangers laugh. From the moment of introduction he was a walking contradiction, an ambulatory joke. But he turned out to be no joke for me. That big soft eejit, and what he stumbled into, was the trigger for the whole nasty business that swallowed me up like a wet bog.

I grew up in Belfast: my beloved city, baptised in tea and drizzle, sprinkled with vinegar-sodden chips and cigarette butts. You turned off the Lisburn Road, with its smattering of boutiques and cosy coffee shops, and just kept walking over the metal footbridge until at last you made it to our battered grid of streets with its two-up, two-down terraced houses crammed together in different shades of brick, paint or pebbledash. Every so often there was a derelict one with boarded-up windows, dismal as an eyeless face. And there I was, walking down Lucan Street towards the house where Titch lived with his mother.

It was the best time of the day for me: the fading hour when a long summer evening tips into the night, and mothers come to their doors to reel their grumbling children back in from patchy football games on scrubby grass. One of them was sitting on the brick wall near the waste ground as I walked past, scuffing his heels on the graffiti. He yelled after me in his reedy voice: ‘Mister, lend us a quid would you?’ I would have walked on, but there was something about the pally delicacy of his lend that made me laugh, the wily pretence that I had a hope in hell of ever getting it back.

I turned round to look at him. He was slouched up there, about eleven years old, puffing on a cigarette and screwing up his eyes like a bad imitation of James Dean. He wouldn’t have known who James Dean was, of course: he thought he had made up the squint himself. He had a ratty skinhead and one of those childish old man’s faces, the fine skin stretched over the sharp bones a bit too tightly for someone so young.

‘What would you do with a quid,’ I asked him. ‘Go and buy yourself some more fags?’

‘Sure a quid wouldn’t buy me a whole packet anyway,’ he answered, quick as a ferret.

‘At the corner shop, they sell them as singles,’ I said. A second’s pause. The wee dervish knew I had him on the hop.

‘I was gonna get a bag of chips,’ he countered, sliding his eyes away in expectation of defeat. I handed him the coin: ‘Don’t be spending it all in the one shop.’