In our house, we had never been big fans of the local paramilitaries. Big Jacky didn’t sound off about it beyond the front door, because in our neighbourhood you never got anything but grief by gabbing. But he used to tell me how in the days before this bother got started he would dander freely up the Falls, and Catholics came over here without any problem. Now we were walled off from each other in raging wee cantons.

Like his father before him, Big Jacky stood up in grave reverence for ‘God Save the Queen’ and scrupulously arranged the poppy in his lapel on Remembrance Day. He had a notion of Britain that I couldn’t quite boil down, but that stood for something larger and more historic than the territorial daubs of red, white and blue that marked the kerbstones near our house. A photograph of his grandfather who died at the Somme stared out at us, handsome and doomed, from a frame on the bookshelf. Big Jacky said to me from when I was small that all this killing ever did was slather on misery.

So when the young fellas came to the door collecting money for ‘the prisoners’ he would say gently, ‘Och boys, sure I have my own charities, and it’s hard enough now just to pay the rates,’ steering them on their way as though he had already forgiven them their presumption in asking.

They mostly seemed to take it okay, although once I saw a younger guy give him glowering looks, muttering about freeloaders being made to pay the price or get the fuck out, before the older guy with him quickly whispered something to shut him up.

Big Jacky had lived around there for a long time, I suppose, and he knew some of the players from school to nod to, but I understood that wasn’t the only reason why he got more leeway than most.

It was this: once or twice a week, Big Jacky helped out at a club down the road for disabled kids, and he had got especially close to one wee boy there called Tommy.

Tommy’s legs were heavily unreliable, which meant he needed a wheelchair, but every so often he could flash you a smile of heart-liquefying sweetness which he used to his advantage. His speech was slow and woolly, and you had to bend right down next to his mouth to make out what he was saying, but his mind was sharp. With his snappy observations and his pale, fragile body, he was a Venus fly trap masquerading as an orchid.

The club was run by a bosomy, middle-aged woman called Barbara, an energetic matriarch who made up in practicality what she lacked in imagination. What creative flair she did have went into her hair, dramatic stabs at glamour which varied wildly in their success rates. Hairdressers rubbed their hands at her approach like pushers welcoming a star junkie.