Sometimes I would struggle to do my best, courteously assembling snippets from here and there, but I couldn’t tonight. How could I hand over the happenings of the day? ‘Four men in balaclavas came round to Titch’s house last night, dragged him on to waste ground and gave him a terrible beating. Could you change over to BBC 2, I think the snooker’s on?’

But it wouldn’t be left at that. The story would make too big an impact. You can’t drop a boulder into the centre of a still lake and not expect to create some ripples. There would be a silence – not a dead silence, but a busy one, building to a gush of who, what, why, where, when, and now what will happen? And I knew the answer to most of these things, and yet had no heart to begin explaining any of it to Phyllis or even to myself. None whatsoever. An immense weariness came over me: it would have been very good to curl up in a dark corner away from it all, and sleep for a thousand years.

I started the walk into town, moving through the fine rain, the shining, shifting curtain of small falling needles. Nowhere does drizzle like Belfast. It’s our speciality. We should parcel it up and export it to the Saudis. They’re gasping for it, by all accounts.

5

Drink. The clatter of laughter, and raw shouts, and mists of smoke rising from wood-panelled cabins. Light filtered through stained glass. I was in the Crown Bar, Belfast, ornamented Victorian gin palace and liquor saloon: a doughty old coquette who had her fancy windows shattered every time the IRA attempted to blow up the Europa International Hotel opposite, which it did with a zeal undimmed by repetition.

Just a couple of years earlier one of the IRA’s 1,000-pound car bombs had hit the jackpot, and not only blasted a large, jagged hole in the side of the Europa, but instantly reduced the wedding-cake pomp of the nearby Grand Opera House to rubble as well. The Europa’s head concierge said afterwards that if he stood at his desk in the lobby he could now see straight through to the Opera House stage. Anything really nice we had, it got wrecked. After a while you got used to it.

For over a century, in and out of disturbances, the Crown had flung open her doors and spilled men out at night into the path of horse-drawn traps, trams, trolleybuses and finally motor cars. They were her roaring, weeping, brawling, laughing men, their walnut brains pickled and petrified in alcohol, pushed out to confront the cold, stony pavements and their icy wives. Or maybe their women were there with them too, arm-in-arm as they both swayed home in a sidelong pavement dance, bloodstreams running warm with beer and port.