Roisin was kind-hearted. She always brought chocolate for me as well as Gerard, because she felt sorry for me. I just posted the milky squares into the slot of my mouth and let them melt on my tongue, leaking out sweetness. Anything else involved too much unpleasant working of the facial muscles. I appeared more badly beaten than Gerard, although he was actually far worse off than me. I had needed rows of stitches in my head and cheek and some more on my arms and legs. My face looked like an old piece of fruit, dappled with rot, the kind you might make jam out of if you were feeling very thrifty. Otherwise you would chuck it away.

Gerard’s bother was all in the legs department, and his baby face was unmarked. He said: ‘There’s a bad apple in every barrel, my ma used to say, and in this ward it’s you.’ We got on well, him and I. He was refreshingly short on self-pity.

My tongue kept probing the empty space in the back of the top row of teeth. I doubted if you would be able to see the gap when I smiled, but it hurt too much now to find out. I was vain enough to care about how I looked at the end of all this. I was no pin-up, but there was something about my face that women liked – some suggestion of romantic complication – and I didn’t want to lose that small advantage. God knows I didn’t have many others.

When I got bored I would mumble a comment at Gerard, just to get him going.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up, Gerard?’ I said to him one day.

He answered exactly as I knew he would, ‘I am fucking grown up,’ furiously moving the top half of his body to some imaginary techno beat, apropos of nothing.

Then he gave it a second’s more consideration: ‘Make loads of money.’

‘They don’t put you on a big salary for joyriding, do they?’

‘They do for racing driving,’ he said. ‘Look at Eddie Irvine. Loads of money, gorgeous women hanging off his arm, international rally-races. I do exactly the same thing in Belfast and I get my leg wrecked by the Provies.’

‘That’s because you’re driving someone else’s car,’ I said.

‘So’s Eddy fucking Irvine.’

He was quick enough, was Gerard.

‘Such an innocent wee face, and such a foul mouth,’ I baited him.

‘You should swear more, then, it might make your big fat mug look better,’ he said.

Then he stuck his earphones back on. I settled my painful pumpkin head gently back into the piecrust of pillows.