Carlo Gébleron encountering violence when you least expect it.
In his last year at Portora, our local grammar school (yes, it's where Beckett and Wilde went), son number one is a restless fellow. He has outgrown school, and the town of Enniskillen where he has grown up.
He applies and gets a place at Manchester. It's a name that frightens fathers - at least this one. I've read the articles. Manchester's got the highest crime rate of any British city. It's packed with knife-wielding delinquents. Why not apply to Trinity? No, Dad, he says. He wants to get out of Ireland. He wants to meet people. He's going to England.
October comes, and off he toddles. He's in halls of residence. That's the best way to meet all those interesting people he wants to meet. Only he's forgotten, the halls will also be full of Ulster folk who've gone to England for the same reason he has.
So, lo and behold, he meets two lads from Belfast, and they click. There's the shared humour for a start - what's known in Ulster as slagging. The Belfast boys have huge fun at my country son's expense. They wonder if it's true every boy in Fermanagh marries his sister (if their mother isn't available, ha ha)? Naturally, they've never been to Fermanagh. Why would they go to where everyone marries their sister, et cetera? In which case, says my son, they must.
Cut to the summer of 2006. Son is home on holiday and parents are away in Rossnowlagh. Down come the Belfast lads. It's mid-week; Wednesday. Yes, Enniskillen will be quiet but never mind, says my son. It'll be easier to get a pool table and the extra elbowroom in the bars will be nice.
They go in. The evening passes without trouble. They don't knock anyone's drink over. They don't steal anyone's girl. No one asks them outside. In the early hours of the morning, they ring for a taxi. It'll meet them by the River Erne.
They leave Enniskillen's main drag and set off down a well lit but narrow lane that runs from the Town Hall to the river. On the way they encounter a youth. What are you staring at, he asks one of the Belfast boys? He's going to tear the Belfast boy's bollocks off, he adds.
The Belfast boy explains this won't happen because rude boy will have his balls ripped off first. In retrospect this looks like a mistake. But at the time it seemed like, well, just another example of your common-or-garden Ulster slagging, giving as good as you get, and all that.
My son and friends walk on. They do not harm, threaten or molest rude boy. He's just an idiot and they've got a taxi to catch and several episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm to watch when they get home.
There is a whistle - long, hard, piercing - and the sound of running feet. My son turns. He thinks it's a friend running after them who perhaps wants to share their taxi. But it isn't. It's rude boy and several of his friends, all teenagers, a year or two younger than my son (who's 19), but big, burly, quasi-adult creatures, who clearly have been waiting in the wings to intervene in a row, any row, provoked by rude boy with his unwholesome penchant for castration. There are at least seven of them, or maybe eight or nine. My son doesn't get the chance to count. He gets several blows to the head. He goes down. He has a fleeting impression of trainers on, in and around his face as he's kicked repeatedly. It could be worse. The Belfast boys are being beaten with a log that one of the pack has thoughtfully remembered to bring along, to improve the craic and all that.
And as it started, so it ends, suddenly. The pack vanishes. My son can barely see and his face feels as if it's been run over by a tank. His clothes are blood-sodden. It could be worse. At least one of the Belfast boys is unconscious. That's the log, thank you. Logs, applied to the back of the unprotected cranium, do tend to do that.
The following morning we hear the news and rush home. The Belfast lads have gone by the time we arrive. They left at the earliest possible opportunity, we gather, which is hardly surprising. My son's face is swollen and bruised. He's photophobic and nauseous and he's been vomiting. That's head injury for you. Luckily, for him, he didn't get the log treatment, like his mates. And miraculously, his humour has remained intact. Well Dad, he says, Manchester, most violent city in Britain? Still don't want me to go?
I go to the bathroom. His clothes from the night before are in the bath. The police (who he saw after the assault and again the following morning) have asked him to keep them. His jeans and shirt look as if they've been immersed in a tank of blood and dyed red. And then there are his trainers. It's not just that they're bloody, though they are. They are full of blood. Blood has run into them like rainwater. They are trainers filled with blood. How hard and for how long, I wonder, must you hit someone in order to make him shed enough blood to fill his trainers? Quite a lot, I think.
Carlo Gébler's most recent book, The Siege of Derry, is published by Abacus in paperback, €8.99