In the bed next to me there was a boy called Gerard. He had short hair that he had bleached blond, with the mousy roots sprouting through, and a silver ring through his left eyebrow. He was sixteen. They were keeping him in for some operations because his IRA punishment beating had gone wrong.

His right leg was held together with steel pins, and the doctors were pleased they had been able to save it, he said. His ordeal was more formal than mine: he had been required by the IRA to turn up for his beating by appointment, under threat of suffering something unimaginably worse if he didn’t. I thought about what it must have been like for him, watching the hands on the clock creep towards the agreed hour.

A year or so earlier he would certainly have been shot in the legs, he said, but out of respect for the fact that there was a ceasefire on it had been decided to do him over with baseball bats instead.

‘It was the Provies,’ he said. ‘They told me to keep very still and take it. But I moved when they were doing it and it shattered the bone. Then they said it was my own fault.’

‘Why did they do it?’ I asked him. The sludgy words came dropping out carefully. It hurt to talk.

‘Joyriding,’ he said. ‘People were complaining about me. Me and my mates gave some cheek to the Provies. Sick of them fellas standing on the corners and bossing us about.’

Gerard played techno music on his Sony Walkman all day. I could hear its tinny pounding leaking from his headphones, as his skinny torso twitched to the music. It kept him distracted. He was probably escaping into some endless fantasy about scooting round his housing estate at full pelt in a stolen car.

‘I’ve got to stay in here for weeks,’ he said. ‘I’m bored out of my nut.’

His mother came sometimes and pleaded with him to keep out of trouble when he left hospital. When she went home, Gerard would look over at me and sag his upper half in dramatic mock relief at the end of the lecture. Sometimes his girlfriend Roisin came, tottering in her high heels and caked in black eye make-up. She looked about fifteen.

Gerard looked forward keenly to her visits, counting the hours, and then was slightly offhand with her when she finally arrived. He would deign now and then to let her pull the plastic curtain round his bed and kiss him, though.