Two days later. The lunchtime radio news: ‘House prices are soaring again for the first time in five years … schoolteachers are warning of possible strike action after their annual pay rise failed to keep pace with inflation … a gang of six masked men, thought to be linked to loyalists, entered a house in Ballymena in the early hours of this morning and beat a 24-year-old man in a paramilitary-style attack … the 77-year-old man assaulted in North Belfast on Wednesday has spoken in hospital about his ordeal. He said that he had pleaded with his attackers to leave him alone, but they continued. It is now believed that the paramilitary-style beating was a case of mistaken identity, and that the gang, thought to be linked to Republicans, was looking for another man in the same block of flats.’

I woke up on the fourth day and decided I couldn’t stay at the Murdies’ any longer. It was partly because I slept in their front room. No matter how early I got up, or how late I went to bed, I was condemned to be a bulky presence camping in the heart of their home, hammering my tent pegs into their domestic peace.

Murdie was getting edgy, smoking more cigarettes and speaking in staccato sentences when he came back at night. The main source of his irritability was Gavin, whose mere presence now played a frantic cantata on Murdie’s nerves. An extra guest couldn’t help matters. I tried to repay them by filling up their fridge. Then it drove me twice as mad to see most of the food disappearing straight into Gavin before Murdie even made it through the door. It was a race against time. Chomp chomp. It couldn’t be long, surely, before they would just order him to leave. Or maybe he would stay there for ever – a gigantic cuckoo, squawking at the small, busy Murdies – compulsively fattening and jabbering as they grew thinner and more worn out.

I had decided to get out of Belfast. The simplicity of that decision exhilarated me. I didn’t really want to go to Scotland, in spite of what I had told Phyllis. It would be too much like here, with all the canny-eyed folk in the close wee kirk wanting to know exactly who you were, and why you left and, ‘Belfast, did you say? Which part? Och, maybe you knew the McClenahans who used to come here for their summer holidays.’ I wanted to go to some big, callous place where nobody had the inclination to squander too much inquisitive energy on a stranger. I could only breathe easily in a great fog of indifference.