The song ended. I tried to steady myself. And then I heard him turn to his girlfriend and assert, with slurred deliberation, ‘Nobody fucking messes around with you or my fucking family.’

She looked back at him hazily, with smudged eyes, trying to pacify him now, repeating, ‘Yes, yes … och sure I know that.’

He kept on: ‘You should have seen the last fella we done. He was a big fat slabber, but he couldn’t even make a fist when it came down to it. When we pulled him out of his house, he just kept squealing for his ma-a-a-mmy.’ He rolled his eyes stagily like Al Jolson as he delivered the punchline.

I felt a terrible coldness coming over me, as if I was being dipped in a bath of ice. It was a single realisation, pumping into my brain in waves, each wave bigger than the last, sickening my stomach, filling the empty space behind my eyes with a red, pounding mist. I realised exactly who he was. He was McGee’s son.

He kept on: ‘He had insulted my da.’ His voice rose to a screaming falsetto, a drunken pastiche of a terrified woman’s voice: ‘Mammy! Mammy! Ma—’

I leaned over and hit him on the jaw as hard as I could. He tumbled off the bar stool with a crash. I heard girls screaming, and Murdie saying ‘Jacky, what the fu—’ I climbed over the bar and slammed him again twice, when he was moving back up off the floor.

I don’t remember much about what happened next, except that Murdie pulled me off, and Jimmy and Joe moved in to surround him and bundled him outside, befuddled and jabbering with rage, before he could take a swing at me. His girlfriend was left behind, yelping and hissing at me like a vicious, scalded cat, ‘Why did you do that, you bastard?’ before someone propelled her outside as well.

I could hear roars coming from outside the bar, and Jimmy’s voice saying firmly, ‘I’m sorry sir, you’re not getting back in. If you keep trying to get back in, I’ll have to call the police. We’re closed now.’ Then more shouts, and threats: ‘I’ll be back for you too, you fat bastard.’ And, finally, a calm that was somehow worse than the noise.

In the centre of the silence I thought: why did you do that? But I knew why I had done it. The phrase drifted into my mind, ‘to get him back for what he did’. And then I thought: no, Jacky, you haven’t got anybody back. They’ve got you now.

That night, Murdie told me not to come back to the Whistle. It was for my own good, he told me, and he was right. It was also for his good, I told him, and I was right too.