I would have, too. They had offered me a counsellor as well, but I had said no thanks, I’d have to get over this in my own way.

Two days later, Phyllis visited in an even worse state. Her lipstick was put on all awry, as if it had made an escape bid for the safe territory of her right ear. The Loyalists had issued a death threat against me if I came back into the area. Posted through our front door, it was signed with the military-sounding pseudonym of Captain Grey. Phyllis had called the police, who had been very pleasant about it, she said. They had sat down and taken a cup of tea with her. Their sympathetic advice was that, since they hadn’t the means to guarantee my future safety round the clock, it might be better if I left the area for a while. ‘A cooling-off period,’ was how they described it.

The Loyalists and the IRA were ordering people out of Northern Ireland all the time now, as if they owned the place. We were supposed to go and skulk about in other countries, dreaming about a moment when they would finally turn round and suck their teeth in lofty contemplation and maybe let us slink back in.

Because they were all on ceasefire no one in authority would really challenge them, in case they got annoyed and started swinging the big wrecking-ball again. The government thinking was that in the meantime you had to allow them their wee patches of control. Gerard and I, unfortunately, had our postcodes in those wee patches.

I was leaving anyway, I told Phyllis, so it didn’t make things any different.

‘At least I have it in writing,’ I said. ‘If I come back and they don’t shoot me, I’ll be able to sue Captain Grey for breach of contract. Hope he has money.’

Phyllis just looked at me.

But I wasn’t feeling half as witty as I made out. I didn’t want to leave the hospital ward. My bed was next to the window. At night I could lie motionless between the clean sheets and watch the clouds moving across the sky. There was the faint smell of detergent in the air, keeping our poisoned exhalations clean. I could hear the music still trickling out from Gerard’s earphones, although he had fallen asleep. Even the old man calling softly for Mary was a kind of comfort, although he did so less often now. I feared being left absolutely alone. I feared travelling into the heartless expanse of a city I didn’t know, and that didn’t know me.

On the day that they said I could go, Gerard was quieter than usual. His eyes were red-rimmed and he wasn’t playing his techno music. The doctors had told him that morning that he would walk with a limp for the foreseeable future, which Gerard took to mean for ever.