Davy came over to me as I stepped down from the platform after speaking at one of the huge trade union rallies against sectarianism a fortnight ago. He looked like a cool sort of dude, 20ish, with a good-humoured face, the right jeans and long blond hair styled just so. He said that I’d once promised to come and see the band that he played in and then hadn’t turned up.

I agreed that this was perfectly possible, what with all the various commitments I had, and one thing and another, and any of the other excuses that came to mind that I use in these circumstances. We stood talking slightly awkwardly for a couple of minutes not quite knowing how to break off the encounter, before settling on an agreement that we could both do with a pint and dandering up the hill and into the pub.

It turned out that it wasn’t the band he wanted to talk to me about at all, but the suffering his family was going through as a result of the killings, and his aunt and uncle and their family too.

He was a cousin of Robbie’s, one of the men charged with one of the incidents of sectarian slaughter which had been instrumental in bringing so many people onto the streets. He had the same surname as Robbie, and they lived about 50 yards apart on the same street. “My father and mother, my aunt and uncle, all of us, our lives are just ruined,” he said. “We’ll never know happiness again.”

None of them could believe it all at first when word came that Robbie had been picked up and was being questioned about murders. They hithered and thithered up and down into one another’s houses, full of agitation, boiling with anger. They contacted councillors and clergymen asking them to intervene, have the young fellow released. They were outraged that his arrest might be seen as associating them with the unspeakable violence which had unnerved the whole community.

Robbie’s father was well-known locally for his deep religious convictions and abhorrence of violence. They didn’t just want the youngster released, they were anxious and determined that the RUC would explain publicly that it had all been a mistake, that they’d picked up an innocent person.

Then the phone calls started. They’d lift the phone and somebody would start attacking and abusing them, calling them Orange bastards and Loyalist murderers. Because they had the same name and came from the same street, there were as many calls to Davy’s home as to the uncle and aunt’s.

To begin with they answered back, shouting our young fellow is innocent, how dare you say such things to us, and would slam the phone down and rail against the injustice and vindictiveness of it all, and try again to have someone intervene and right the mistake and clear their family of this stain.

As the days passed they allowed themselves to relax a little, seeing an end to their ordeal in sight. The police could only hold people for seven days without charging them. Neighbours were saying that everybody arrested was being held for the full seven days because of the anger there was everywhere over the spate of killings and the need to reassure people that something was being done. They could understand that, recalled atrocities from the past when they had looked at the papers themselves to check if there’d been any arrests yet. But it still wasn’t right that their whole family, especially Robbie, who was hardly out of his teens, was being put through this torment.

They weren’t able to get in to see Robbie while he was being questioned and they didn’t ask themselves, didn’t allow the thought to surface, whether there was any chance he might actually have been involved, because that was too terrible a possibility to contemplate, and anyway they knew him, better than anybody, knew it wasn’t the type of him, not in any way. So they waited distraught for the days to pass and release to come.

When a solicitor called to say Robbie was being charged and would be up before the court the next morning, accused of murdering all those people, machine-gunning them, they were struck dumb with horror. They pulled the blinds in their houses. There was hardly a word spoken between them for hours through the evening. They all cried and caressed one another and knelt down and prayed and asked God please not to let this happen, to lift this darkness from their lives and let them see the brightness of joy again.

Afterwards, somebody mentioned that it must have been like this for the relatives of the UDR Four and the Birmingham Six and they said in whispers to one another that sometimes these things can take ten, fifteen years before the mistake is admitted. It was worse, said Davy, far worse than having a death in the family. When there’s a death it’s over, you can only look back in sadness. This was like looking forward to a death every day, forever.

It was when Robbie and the others who had been charged with him appeared in court that the true depth of the horror opened up before them. It was his attitude, the angle of him, the way he walked, the way he looked, his expression. And when he shouted and ranted UFF slogans in defiance, the truth of his allegiances showed itself to them with a devastating suddenness, like a dark thunderclap of the soul.

It was unimaginably worse now. Now they had to admit the thought that, actually, they’d been pushing away from them since the moment they’d heard of the arrest. They had never really managed to get rid of it, they could acknowledge that now, now it didn’t matter. Some of Robbie’s family felt that they could never speak with him again, never look into his eyes, never see him as one of theirs. None of them could fit it together in any way that made sense, put the Robbie they knew and had been tender with alongside the person who was being accused of erupting into savagery and a maelstrom of death. Like everybody else they had pictured the scene when they’d first heard. Now they had to picture Robbie in it, and they couldn’t, but they did because they had to.

It was all out now, the name and the face, and the phone calls came incessantly. Fucking murdering Orange bigot scum bastards, the ’Ra should fucking torture you, burn you out, you’ll fucking die in agony. Davy’s father who had been the strongest of them all in the beginning and arguing back was now weeping and apologising, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please forgive us, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Davy didn’t go back to work for four days. He’s a construction worker, on a site with a majority-Catholic workforce, and he felt he couldn’t face them. He remembered when he would hear of somebody charged with an IRA offence that he’d think, if he knew somebody from the same family, that, Jesus, I never knew they were like that, assuming that they must all be of the same way of thinking, or at least that they obviously must have known.

He knew quite a lot of Catholics, mainly through work. His best pal, a workmate, was a Catholic from the Lecky Road in the middle of the Bogside. Now he thought, they all must be thinking that about me. Eventually, he phoned a shop-steward and asked what would the score be about coming back in and was told, for fuck’s sake, Davy, wise up. And it had worked out OK. His best friend was with us as we talked. They had left work and gone to the rally together.

He said that he did get the impression some of the people he worked with were different with him now, more reserved. He’d thought once or twice they were looking at him and talking about him, but he couldn’t be sure. Maybe he was only imagining it. His pal said that to be frank there were people like that alright, but then there were ignorant fuckers everywhere.

We sat drinking and talking about the ignorance of all manner of fuckers until the three of us were the worse for wear and then we went to another pub and, as far as I remember, took to shorts and became paralytic. Then, five days later, on Tuesday of last week, there was a statement in the local paper from a former mayor, a member of the Democratic Unionists, complaining that two families were on the brink of having to move from their homes because of the deluge of hatred descending upon them. It seemed that after they had had the phone taken out the hate started coming by the bundle in letters every day.

I phoned Davy’s pal and asked if there was anything I could do, maybe make a public statement, or talk to somebody on the Catholic side who might have some influence on the people concerned. But he said, no, you might just as easily make things worse, they’re just victims of the situation now, that’s all there is to it. And for the moment I couldn’t think of anything else to say. There’s probably thousands like them.