I waited until the worst of it had passed and then I went over and put my hands on his heaving shoulders. I told him gently: ‘Sshh. They won’t come for you again.’ The shoulders moved gradually to a shaking halt. And then he started to whisper something all jumbled together, like a child’s babble, and so softly that I had to lean in very close to hear. It was the same sentence, over again: ‘I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t have anywhere to go.’

7

The Whistle was a great place to work. It was an old, established bar on the way in to the city centre: a bit dilapidated, but it had charm. We got a lot of students and gentle wastrels in the daytime, and a more eclectic, fired-up clientele by night.

It was never too busy in the afternoons, and in between serving customers Murdie demonstrated to me some of the little tricks of the barman’s trade: how to polish glasses to a high sheen without smearing them again when you set them down; the correct way to serve a whiskey and water; how to pull the perfect pint of Guinness; and the proper proportions of the constituent elements in a port and lemon.

When we had the basics of the bar sorted out, said Murdie, we’d move on to learning cocktails.

At a certain point in the day, if things were quiet, he would pour a single whiskey for each of us, to be drunk slowly and without ice. We would savour the peaty burning at the back of our throats while Murdie’s favourite song, Van Morrison’s ‘Tupelo Honey’, spun lazily out of the CD player. It was a surprisingly lush choice for such a self-contained man. The golden afternoon light would float in through the frosted pub windows, spilling in widening patches on the polished wood of the tables, and for that moment all the worries that clodded to me would flake away.

One day I was staring at the fat, corrugated worm lying at the bottom of a bottle of mescal. One of the regulars had brought it back from a trip to Mexico, as a present for Murdie. He had displayed it behind the bar, unopened, and the function of the worm had begun to nag at me.

‘What’s that thing for?’ I asked Murdie.

‘That’s the mescal worm,’ he said. ‘It soaks up all the lunacy in the bottle. If you eat that worm, you’ll start hallucinating. You’ll see demons.’

He could be quite poetic, Murdie, when you got him going. We both stood contemplating it floating there wickedly like a baby’s thumb.

‘If you ate that worm, Murdie,’ I said, ‘could you remember, in the moment of insanity, why you and my dad called your band a name like the Janglemen?’