The Ceasefire Babies was what they called us. Those too young to remember the worst of the terror because we were either in nappies or just out of them when the Provisional IRA ceasefire was called. I was four, Jonny was three. We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us.

The first time Jonny tried to kill himself, the ambulance was parked just beyond his front door, as if the paramedics were mindful of drawing attention to the house. Despite the fact that the local papers brought news of suicides every week – for some reason the numbers had rocketed – there was still an element of Catholic shame about it all. When they carted him off to hospital to pump the tablets out of his stomach, his mother didn’t go with him.

That night, he was released. We’d formed a ‘suicide watch’ in preparation: “You go in for your dinner and I’ll stay with him, and then I’ll go in for my dinner when you come back.” When he joined us, little was said. We didn’t ask him why he’d done it. He was only 16, the rest of us a year or two older. To our teenage brains, suicide was like cancer, an accident of fate. Sometimes people survived it, and sometimes they didn’t. The newspapers, bringing reports of more deaths every week, spoke of it like a disease, using words like ‘epidemic’. It never occurred to us, as we took turns to keep an eye on Jonny that night, that it didn’t matter what we did. He would just keep trying until he managed it.

Jonny was my best mate. We’d met three years before when his family had moved into the street. My house was at one end of the road; his, the other. We matched in several ways: dark hair, dark eyes and glasses. People mistook us for siblings. But one thing that didn’t match was our ability to sing. While I could be outdone on a harmony by a choir of alley cats, Jonny had a voice like velvet. Every day, he’d rehearse in front of the mirror, singing along to CDs, trying to reach higher and higher notes. With a tough home life, the thought of being onstage was what got him out of bed every day. When his mother left the house for the pub, sometimes not returning until the next day, he’d bring us up to his room and practise. Sometimes, you couldn’t walk down the street without him bursting into song.

One day we were standing at his end of the street. I had a secret to tell him.

“I’m gay,” I said.

“Guess what? I am too!” he replied.

It was a relief, to find someone else ‘not normal’. We were the neighbourhood’s resident freaks – or so we thought. Walking through the area, day or night, was a bit like running over hot coals, except instead of trying to avoid being burned, you were trying to avoid the local hoods, hoping they wouldn’t spot you.

There were five of us: me, Jonny, Jonny’s brother Jimmy, Big Gay Mick and Tanya, a sweet-natured English girl with long fair hair and blue eyes. But, as childhood friends do, we grew apart. Maybe we’d have grown together again if another ambulance hadn’t come and taken Jonny away. His brother told me about it afterwards. It happened at a house party. With a few drinks in him, he’d got upset, disappeared and taken another lot of tablets. By this time, his mother had been taken ill and was recovering in a home. Jimmy had been sent to live with his dad. The last I’d heard of Jonny, until Big Gay Mick knocked on my door, was that he was in a mental health hospital. Now he was dead.

I lived in the street for three more years. When I left, Jonny’s house had been boarded up, the windows barricaded with sheets of rusted metal. The only window left untouched was the one at the top, the one through which the neighbours used to hear him sing.