It’s strange at first, working behind a bar. You feel like you’ve been pushed on to a stage without knowing your lines, with the lights shining on you and a host of querulous faces looking on. And then after a while you get used to it, and the bar becomes your little square arena, your illuminated patch.

The important thing, Murdie told me, is that you’re never seen to be standing idle. If you’re not serving customers, then you should be polishing glasses, or stacking beer mats, or wiping up real and imaginary spillages with a damp cloth. But you are never performing these tasks to the exclusion of the customer’s most vital interests. All the while, you are watching out for the thirsty, expectant face in the crowd, the frantic signalling that someone is dying for a drink.

When things get busy, said Murdie, you must learn to keep in your head the chronological order in which these thirsty faces appear, and serve them accordingly. If you mix them up you must quickly apologise. You must not disregard the short man (for Murdie was short himself) or the plain woman in favour of those individuals who naturally catch the eye and thus seem to be blessed with Bar Presence. The tall, burly man and the beautiful woman have already queue-jumped in life, said Murdie, but they should not be permitted to do so at the bar. To the truly professional barman, Bar Presence should be irrelevant. Order of appearance is everything.

I was hardly ever bored behind the bar, apart from very early in the evening or late at night when you got stuck with the tedious pub raconteur in the Aran sweater who had bolted his corduroyed arse to the bar stool. I liked it best at the height of the evening, when the place was packed with people and noise, and everyone was laughing and shouting for more drink, and you started to work with a feverish rhythm that drove everything else out of your head. I liked having a bit of money, too. Murdie paid me a decent chunk of cash in hand at the end of every week.

It was Phyllis’s birthday halfway through the month and I asked Murdie for the night off. I’d been feeling guilty lately about how grumpy I’d been with her since she moved in. She had been dropping wee hints about her birthday, and how Mary and Sam would be away on holiday together and sorry to miss it but she had thought this time she would just stay in Belfast for it. ‘Is that so,’ I had said, distantly, as though my radio wasn’t even picking up on her faltering signal.