Sometimes in the afternoons wee boys of the urchin class still swaggered in, so edgy you could cut yourself on their banter, and made deadpan offers to sell you three jokes for a pound.

I ordered a whiskey.

‘Jacky!’ I turned around, and there was Sammy who I went to school with, his face shining with the pleasant sweat of four pints, and a russet-haired girlfriend beaming by his arm. He was a couple of years older than me. It was a long time since I had last seen him.

‘Jacky, how are you?’ He placed an authoritative, amicable hand on my shoulder. He was heavier than I remembered him, kitted out in corduroys and a navy fisherman’s sweater: he looked oddly well-to-do. ‘How’s things? How’s your dad?’

Years ago, he used to come over to my house after school sometimes, to watch TV or play football. Big Jacky always called him the Sergeant Major, because of his blond brush-cut and his precocious capacity for organisation. He said that on his way home from work he could hear Sammy from halfway down the street, bawling us all into position for some pitched battle.

‘My dad died, Sam. Heart attack,’ I said, and gave a small smile to show that I was aware of the social awkwardness of my answer. He looked genuinely grieved: his girlfriend had the decency to look grieved too, even though she didn’t know me.

‘Och Jacky, that’s terrible. When did it happen?’

‘A few months ago. It was bad, I miss him.’ I hustled him past the expected condolences: ‘Anyway, what about you, what are you up to?’

‘Well, I’m getting married in the autumn, to Shauna’ – he indicated the girl beside him, with a proud flourish of introduction – ‘and I’m running a car valeting business now, employing about ten people. It’s going pretty well, we’re getting a lot of corporate accounts. But listen, how are all the rest of them – do you still see Titch?’

In truth, Sammy had always been a bit impatient with Titch, who was a human liability in Sammy’s embryonic money-making schemes. When we were twelve, Sammy had set us up with buckets and sponges to wash all the cars on our street, at a cost that undercut the nearest carwash (Sammy took his cut, naturally, for supplying the materials and sweet-talking the neighbours). We were all raring to go: Sammy had sketched for us a tantalising picture of entrepreneurial rewards, with bouncy new footballs and cinema tickets ripening as the fruits of our labours.