After the spectacular dryness of the mummy, Big Jacky and I always used to walk back to the gardens, and into the splendid damp of the hothouse, billed on a brass plaque outside as The Tropical Ravine. It was a Victorian glass dome that, once you stepped inside, was suddenly bursting with humid jungle. You could have sliced the air with a knife inside the hothouse, and it would have poured out water. Plants with fleshy stalks as thick as a child’s arm juddered near the little waterfall, and bulbous fruits drooped from thick, unidentifiable vines.

I opened the door and went in again, for the first time in years. The humidity was just the same, a tender slap on the face with a wet flannel. But the glasshouse seemed darker and smaller than I remembered. Inside, a man was taking his daughter round on the wooden pathway, holding on to her hand tightly in case her chubby, unsteady legs gave way. She must have been about three or four, an outspoken child in a short red coat. They stopped briefly to stare into the water beneath them.

‘Is there frogs in that?’ she said. She had one of those sweetly rasping childish voices like a scouring pad on silk.

He didn’t pay attention to her question: he was kneeling down to point out a giant water lily.

‘Is there frogs in that?’ she said again, louder this time.

The piercing question made me smile. For a second I yearned for all the brackish impurities in my life to be boiled away, and myself distilled back to some clear childhood moment when the most important thing, the only really important thing, was whether there might be frogs in that.

10

Back in Murdie’s house, the local news was on the radio. ‘The Chancellor of the Exchequer pledged to keep inflation rates down … there has been a train crash in the Midlands, two people have been injured … speaking today, the Northern Ireland Secretary confirmed that the IRA and the Loyalist ceasefires in Northern Ireland are still in place … police confirm that a 77-year-old Catholic man last night became the oldest victim of a paramilitary attack, thought to be linked to Republicans: four masked men broke into his flat in North Belfast, and beat the old age pensioner with iron bars in his legs and ankles. The victim is said to be in a serious but stable condition in hospital. And now over to Martin Rawlins for an hour of country music from Nashville, Tennessee …’

It has always interested me, how the truly momentous happenings in life, the great solid chunks of luck or misery, must swim in the grey soupy water of something trivial.