Your beard’s sticking out the bottom of your mask.

He chuckled softly. No flies on you, missus, he said. Go on through, ladies.

Cushla thanked him and drove off. Over the following days, the bare larder and her car’s empty fuel tank took up all her time. It wasn’t until the strike ended that she realised how outrageous the encounter had been. That someone she had known most of her life had stopped her at a paramilitarised checkpoint that had been erected in the cause of preventing her kind from participating in government. And pretended not to know her.

She had cleaned to the end of the counter. The news had moved on to a human-interest story, about the threat to traditional home bakeries from factory-made bread. A tall man in fogged-up glasses was maniacally cutting soda farls without taking his eyes from the camera, and blaming the Common Market for the drop in sales.

Eamonn flipped down the stout tap, a pint glass tilted under it. He inclined his head at the door. Here comes Rumpole, he said. Look after him, will you?

Michael hung his jacket on the back of a stool, lighting a cigarette in the juvenile way he had, one eye almost closed. Cushla put a whiskey in front of him. Sandwich? she said.

No, he said, holding out a pound note.

He was going home to his wife, she thought, and felt her lips push into a pout. She turned away from him and went to serve someone else.

When you’re ready, said Michael, his voice thick with irony. She plucked the note from his fingers and went to the till, stabbing at the keys. She returned with his change, leaving it stacked on the counter, ignoring his open hand.

Newspapers were folded and tucked under arms, glasses were drained. Eamonn left and there was just Michael and Jimmy at the bar and a couple of men from the Super Ser Club, as Eamonn called them; men who had drunk themselves out of marriages and into unheated bedsits near the esplanade. Cushla checked they each had a drink and cleared all the empties and ashtrays to the sink. Michael had pulled his stool beside Jimmy’s and was smiling as the old man made chop-chop karate motions, as if he was single-handedly taking on a battalion of Japanese soldiers. Older people loved to talk about the war, especially the Blitz. Belfast endured the worst single night of bombing outside of London but it was more than that; the doodlebugs had been non-sectarian. They could talk about that war because this war was unspeakable.

She went towards them with a stack of clean ashtrays. I was sixteen, Michael was saying. My mother saw something on the road and sent me out to investigate. The road was in pitch darkness, of course, and I crawled across the tarmac on my belly.

Was it a bomb? said Jimmy.