It is a calming place, the Botanic Gardens, a green park set behind a pair of heavy Victorian wrought-iron gates. I sat down there on a wooden bench and looked at the organised pinks and reds of the flower beds, and thought of the gardeners plotting precisely this spread of colours, and ordering in all the bulbs, and carefully planting them, and then watching the flowers straggle up and grow to their full, brazen moment before they begin their gradual drooping towards death. I thought of how a gardener might take pride in that, and of how – as the hectic world outside the gates chased stupidities and bred its failures – the flower beds in the Botanic Gardens might be counted a rare thing, a modest and complete success. If you died and were forced to justify your existence before God, and you told him, ‘I made the flowers bloom every year in the Botanic Gardens in Belfast,’ it would not sound a shabby way to have spent your whole life.

The gardens were full of schoolchildren in their uniforms, temporarily released for lunchtime, waving their dripping ice lollies and bawling amiable insults. Young women, who had worked all the morning in nearby offices, unpacked first their sandwiches and then their lard-white legs beneath the sun. On the grass, university students kissed and alcoholic tramps hunted casually for cigarette ends on the path.

I used to come here with Big Jacky. First, we would go into the Ulster Museum itself and straight up to see the main attraction, the Egyptian mummy in her glass case. The mummy was a fine-boned, shrunken thing, short of stature, and her head and one hand were left unwrapped for the benefit of onlookers. The leathery little face was all cheekbones, and you could still see some of her teeth, like small, stained squares of brown pottery. There was even hair, too, a patchy custard fuzz.

Back then, I just used to look and look at the mummy, without even thinking. But today, up close again beside her transparent tomb, I thought how very strange it was that this desiccated thing was once actually a young woman who ran around and laughed in the sun, and was quiet or talkative, and who maybe fell in love and sang songs and stroked cats. If anyone had told her where her body would end up, how unbelievable it would have seemed.

Now, everything that remained of her was lying in a glass case for generations of Belfast schoolchildren to gawp at. Big Jacky had told me once about a school friend of his, a real head-the-ball, who screwdrivered open her case one time they were all knocking about up there, reached in and shook her frail dark hand. The others were excited and half scared by the act of sacrilege. But that was back in the old days, when you could do nearly any mad thing.