The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay. Anne Doughty

come back at me. Not nastily, but always firmly. You shouldn’t make closed statements about yourself, he said, because people and circumstances change all the time. Surely there were things I thought now that I never used to think, things I did now that I couldn’t do before.

      I hadn’t noticed before how different Ben’s way of thinking about life was from George’s. I wondered if I would have noticed the difference had I not been sitting in the sun, in an abandoned quarry, over two hundred miles away from the low, red brick wall where I’d bumped into the two of them on a bright, spring morning that now seemed a very long time ago.