On a street where Protestants and Catholics once torched each other’s houses a generation ago, Noel and Danny — men who fought on opposite sides of the bloody Troubles — look each other straight in the eyes and shake each other’s hands, as if they were old friends. They linger in front of a spike fence that surrounds Transform Family Fitness Centre on Lanark Way on an unusual, blue-sky day in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Forty years earlier, Noel and Danny would have viewed this scene as an absurd, impossible fiction. Seeing each other on this street, they would have reached for a gun.
Yet here they are, sharing a quiet word. Noel is a slight man, wearing a puffy, black ski jacket and faded blue jeans and tennis shoes, pulling Danny’s hand close to his body.
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