‘Aye, he fell down with all the tins rattling round him. There was no one else in the shop but them two oul Maguire sisters. They were letting on they were shocked, but I saw one of them laughing into her coat collar.’

I sat on the chair beside his bed and stared at him, hard. He looked back at me, guiltily, but still with that little smile twitching somewhere beneath his smooth, pasty skin. I knew he was secretly freeze-framing the image of old McGee toppling backwards in furious disbelief, his arms and legs waggling comically as the soup tins clattered around him. Titch was savouring that moment like a mouthful of stolen Jaffa Cakes.

‘It’s not as funny as you think. You know your aunt in Newry,’ I said. ‘If I were you, I’d go and stay with her for a while.’

His mind slowly wheeled round to face this new and unwelcome proposition. The mouth made a brief ‘O’ of apprehension.

‘I don’t like that aunt. She’s always nagging me and she never gives me enough to eat. Why?’ he said.

‘Because you knocked down old McGee and made him look stupid,’ I shouted. ‘And McGee’s son is apparently well connected. So the next time you go dandering down the street, looking for new biscuits to stuff into your fat face, you’re liable to get a severe hammering. You think that it hurt when McGee squeezed your arm. It’ll be nothing compared to this: you won’t be able to walk right for a year.’

‘Aw Jacky, they would never do anything about that. I only gave him a wee push.’ He picked up his Hello! magazine again, stubbornly. ‘And I gave him his Jaffa Cakes back.’

There was no talking to him. Sometimes Titch reminded me of a vast, impenetrable animal: a whale maybe, drifting through yesterday and today, in some unreachable element of his own. Warnings bounced off him. He swam around in the blue water of his mother’s love, and the harsher currents of my affection. He couldn’t understand that something entirely different, something much darker and nastier, might be waiting out there for him.

I could warn him about getting a hammering, all right. I could also warn him about the grave possibility of a Martian invasion in ten years’ time. It was all part of the meaningless, potential Future: all one and the same to Titch. Defeated, I took one of his custard creams. He looked up: ‘Hey Jacky don’t be eating all my biscuits. I’ve only got twelve left.’ He was trying, clumsily, to charm me out of my mysterious bad mood. I got up to leave: ‘Don’t be looking for women in those gossip mags: you’ll end up with an ex-wife who takes you to the cleaners for your Hobnobs.’