Round the corner, the birds throatily singing, the children squabbling over the football like seagulls with a piece of bread. Everything was just the same and everything was different.

Titch’s house had brown cardboard tacked over the frame of the living-room window, where the glass had been. The red paint was coiling back from the dents in the front door, where boots had kicked it in. This was now the bad-luck house, singled out from all the houses in the street. The plague house.

I knocked. The door stayed shut. I knocked again. Nothing. I looked towards the window. As I stared at it, I saw the bottom edge of the cardboard peeling inwards: an eye was staring at me through the small triangle of space. Titch’s mum’s eye. My two eyes looked back into her single eye.

‘Let me in,’ I whispered.

A few seconds later the front door opened. I went into the hall and looked at her face. My God, she had aged twenty years in a night. Her swollen eyelids looked as though they had been scrubbed with the pan scourer. I went into the living room and sat down. ‘What happened?’

‘They came at about three in the morning. I ran downstairs when I heard them kicking in the door and they said where was Titch? I said he was at his aunt’s in Newry and one of them said “You’re effing lying you oul bitch” and two of them pushed me to one side and went upstairs to find him.’

She was crying now, pulling in the air with big, hungry gulps, her hands dipping and soaring. The words choked her as they came out.

‘And then they dragged him out of bed and down the stairs. He didn’t know what was happening and he kept shouting for me. Pulled him out the door and I tried to follow but one of them pushed me back and said “You stay out of it.” The same fella cut the phone and threw it out the front window, and then he said, “You effing stay in here. I’ll be in the hall and if you try to get out I’ll sort you out too and make sure he gets a worse one.”’

‘Where’s Titch now?’

‘Upstairs, lying in his room. He wouldn’t stay in hospital so eventually they let him home. When I brought him back from the hospital the only thing he said was “Don’t let anyone in.” He’s got a broken arm, a fracture in his leg and his face is all swollen up. The doctor said it was with baseball bats. He’s pushed his desk against the door of his room.’