She came over to me on a night out. She introduced herself as the little fair-haired girl on the school bus; I was tiny, she said, you mightn’t remember.

It was the service bus that crossed the Border at Carrickcarnon on the Dundalk-Newry road taking us to school. I didn’t remember her being on the bus. There’s a silence you get in the school bus when an armed soldier gets on board. There’s a watchfulness, something’s been violated but you don’t know what it is. There is a silence and then there is the sound of a rifle barrel held muzzle-down as it strikes the chrome hand rail beside your head. Everything is hyperreal: the battledress, helmet, boots and face streaked with camouflage. You suddenly know what a soldier is for, what their real work is.