I went to see Titch to tell him about the job. Ever since the beating, it had been a gala performance to get him to come downstairs at all. In the past he used to get a bit of spare cash for helping out at the chippy but there was no prospect of that now. His mother was at her wits’ end. There was mostly silence from him in the daytime, when he often slept, and then a rumpus during the night. His mother said that she could hear him getting up at two and three in the morning and struggling to shift the furniture around in his bedroom with his one good arm.

He had said to me, one afternoon, ‘I’m going to get them back for what they done, I swear it.’ It made me sad even to hear him say this. It wasn’t going to happen. The sentence started out with defiance in it, but it tailed off halfway through from a lack of conviction.

‘Och Titch,’ I said, ‘Leave it now. Don’t make things worse for yourself. Soon they’ll all land themselves in jail anyway.’

Titch had a counsellor. The Victim Support people had got in touch after the beating, and now a woman in a paisley-patterned duvet jacket came round regularly to ask him, in a professionally hushed voice, how he was feeling. Titch confirmed regularly, in monosyllabic form, that he was feeling bad. As the awkward silences lengthened, the counsellor was forced to stare with false, fixed interest at the family photographs displayed on the mantelpiece. Titch’s hand moved with increasing frequency towards the open packet of Viennese whirls by his side. He wouldn’t even look at a Jaffa Cake now.

Titch’s mother said that once she had read, upside down in the counsellor’s notes, the single phrase: ‘uses food, mainly sweet things, as a comfort blanket’. Titch’s mother remarked to the counsellor that she had obviously never had the chance to observe Titch at work among savouries, in the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Shaftesbury Square. The counsellor stared blankly at her for a moment, with her biro quivering above Titch’s case notes, and then said without smiling, ‘Ah. Joke.’

The whole aim, said the counsellor, was to allow Titch to ‘achieve full closure’ with his experience at the hands of the paramilitaries. It would be useful if Titch could first learn to forgive himself for behaving as a victim, and then somehow – and she recognised this might take a while – forgive his attackers for perpetrating the assault. Titch’s mother said that she had a First World War bayonet, a family heirloom, and that she would first like to ‘achieve full closure’ with the backsides of his assailants. The counsellor looked at her oddly again, she said, and then made some quite extensive notes which she casually shielded from view with her arm.