Emre Arikan’s Reviews > Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland > Status Update

‘You cannot mourn someone who has not died.’

“He would sit in his flat and stare for hours out of the window, chain-smoking, gazing…”

Sometimes Hughes would go for a walk only to discover, as if in a dream, that the old streets he remembered were gone, and new, different streets had taken their place. Once, he got lost in his own neighbourhood and a stranger had to guide him home.

‘I am now my own tool,’ she mused. ‘I am also the craftsman wielding the tool. I am carving away at myself.’

Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as ‘Belfast confetti’.