He grinned, a sudden flash of pure joy, and faked falling off the wall in amazement as payment. I watched him saunter down the road to the chippy, trying to flick his fag-end into the gutter like a practised smoker. In about a month’s time, he’d have it just right.

The moment sticks in my mind: his dwindling, cocky figure in the grey light. It was the last time that things in my life seemed clean, the smiling photograph snapped minutes before the car crashes. Seconds after I walked into Titch’s house I could smell the first cracklings of trouble, like something softly burning in another room.

The years had dealt Titch’s mother a few thumping blows, and you could see their impact in the depressed sag of her shoulders. She was like a sofa that too many people had sat on, and the heaviest arse was Titch’s dad, a salesman and raconteur who drank up the housekeeping money, and then the rent money, and then buggered off to leave her precarious and alone with Titch, her hulking, simple-natured son with a penchant for stealing things from shops. Titch’s dad had since shacked up with a hairdresser from Omagh, by whom he had two more children in quick succession. He sent Titch occasional birthday cards with a fiver or tenner tucked inside, and the scrawled words ‘From Your Dad’ beneath the glaringly false inscription To The World’s Greatest Son.

When Titch was younger he hoarded all his dad’s cards from year to year and used to pore over them sentimentally. Then one year the dad’s card arrived ten days late, bearing the gold-piped legend Happy Birthday Son, and in his furious disappointment Titch threw the entire carefully saved stack on the fire. Now he filleted the money wearing a bored, sulky expression, plump fingers rustling speedily inside the envelope, and threw the card into the bin without even reading the message. At least, that’s what I had seen him do, but it might have been for effect. I bet he fished it back out and had a proper look at it later.

There was a kind of sweetness running through Titch’s mum: she wasn’t a whinger. She never hinted that God had dealt her a bad hand. She had dealt it to herself, she said, the day she first saw Titch’s dad relating a joke in a smoke-filled city centre bar, with his gleeful face shining as he approached the punchline, and the men crowding round him already in stitches at the way he was telling it. She should have seen he was a bad egg from the word go, she said, but then again that might have been why she had liked him. Maybe the whiff of sulphur had attracted her.

I knocked twice: the front door opened, more slowly than usual.

‘Ah hello, Jacky,’ she said. The day’s worries had seeped into her voice.