I sort of liked it in hospital. It was like resting in the centre of a soft cloud. I felt that no one could get at me there. I was taken care of, and the nurses were kind to me in a brisk way. I didn’t have to run around explaining things and trying to make ends meet. One night when neither Gerard nor I could get to sleep we made a pact to tell each other the name of the person who had directed the attack on us, names that each of us would keep close and remember on behalf of the other.

It wouldn’t make any difference to anything, we both knew that, but there was some satisfaction just in banking the cold truth with another young human being. We had this idea that if anything worse happened to either of us, at least someone outside our family would know who was responsible. McGee’s name meant nothing to Gerard, and I had never heard the name he told me before, but I promised to remember it, and I did: Frankie Dunne. One other thing stuck with me. Gerard said that Dunne had suddenly pulled out a gun before the beating got started in earnest, and whispered softly in his ear: ‘I could just flip my wrist and plant one in your brain.’

There was an old man up at the end of the ward who kept calling for his wife in the night. I don’t know if he was asleep or awake, but he would say, ‘Mary, are you in there?’ in a sorrowful voice, again and again. Gerard said that when he got out he was going to turn the phrase into a techno record, and make a fortune playing it in the dance clubs for all the Belfast ravers: ‘M-m-m-mary, are you in there? Are you in there, Mary?’

The old man didn’t get many visitors, although his middle-aged daughter came sometimes, and sat there with an air of permanently distracted affection. The nurse told me that his wife had died last year, that was why he kept calling for her. He had a gentle old patched face, full of seams and lines, and fine white hair sprouting in clouds from either side of his head like some absent-minded professor. One day when he was having his afternoon cup of tea, I sent the nurse over with a bar of the chocolate Roisin had brought for me. I watched the nurse telling him who it was from. He looked over, and then his wandering, bleary eyes found the bed she had indicated, and me in the middle of it. He slowly raised one gnarled hand in a majestic gesture of acknowledgement. Thereafter, on his way to the bathroom in his striped dressing gown, he made a sort of little joking half-bow at the foot of my bed. A delicate gent.