‘She followed me right up into our den and I was angry at her, because I didn’t want her to know where it was. She was such a pain in the arse. And there she was, standing in the middle of my safe space, and she was asking questions.’ He mimics a child’s voice. ‘Why are you crying? Did you get in trouble? What’s wrong? And I was just so very, very angry.’

Chapter Forty-Eight

Declan

A single light bulb hanging from a wire from one of the rafters casts a soft glow around the attic. It’s freezing up here, Declan thinks, and he can hear the house creak and the slates rattle as the storm rages outside. He uses the light from his phone to see into the darker corners of the attic until he spots the old artificial Christmas tree surrounded by boxes of baubles and tinsel and tangled lights. Pushing those out of the way, he finds a large brown cardboard box, on which he sees ‘Boys’ stuff’ written in thick black marker in his mother’s handwriting.

He pulls the box forwards and picks at the end of the thick tape holding it closed until he gets enough purchase to pull it back. His mother has stored things methodically. There is a box of sports medals, garnered at every sports day and summer scheme the twins attended over the years. There are badges from the Boy Scouts, lovingly unpicked from uniforms the boys had long outgrown and stored in a Tupperware box. Photo albums stacked neatly on top of each other. A few football sticker books he had no idea she had kept. And nestled at the bottom, two shoeboxes, wrapped in brown paper and too much Sellotape, with his name on one, Niall’s on another.

On both, in block capitals, they had written ‘1999 Time Capsule. Do Not Open!’ Declan remembered how he’d hated putting it together. He’d rolled his eyes at his mother. He was fifteen. He was in his too cool for school stage, facing detention after detention, sneaky cigarettes out of his bedroom window. He thought it babyish, stupid to put together a time capsule. He’d done a half-hearted job. He knew that.

He could still remember what he threw in his. A copy of The Chronicle. His Oasis CD, which he’d outgrown and no longer listened to. Some badges he’d taken off his school bag, bearing names of bands he liked – or thought he should like. Nirvana, Radiohead, Stereophonics. The battered Casio watch that no longer worked and his old Tamagotchi that he had been religious about taking care of for six months before moving on to the next craze.