The back door of Number 16 was swinging open on blackness, creaking restlessly when the wind caught it. I stood in the doorway, watching the dim snow-blue light filtering down the stairs and my breath drifting on the frozen air. If I had believed in ghosts, that house would have been the let-down of a lifetime: it should have been thick with them, soaking the walls, cramming the air, keening and flittering in every high corner, but I had never seen anywhere that empty, empty enough to suck the breath out of you. Whatever I had come looking for—Scorcher, bless his predictable little heart, would presumably have suggested closure or some equivalent chunk of arsebiscuit—it wasn’t there. A sprinkle of snowflakes swirled in over my shoulder, lay for a second on the floorboards and were gone.

I thought about taking something away with me or leaving something behind, just for the sake of it, but I had nothing worth leaving and there was nothing I wanted to take. I found an empty crisp packet in the weeds, folded it and used it to jam the door shut. Then I went back over the wall and started walking again.

I was sixteen, in that top room, when I first touched Rosie Daly. It was a Friday evening in summer: a gang of us, a couple of big bottles of cheap cider, twenty SuperKing Lights and a pack of strawberry bonbons—we were that young. We had been picking up days on the building sites on our school holidays, me and Zippy Hearne and Des Nolan and Ger Brophy, so we were brown and muscly and in the money, laughing louder and wider, thrumming with all that brand-new manhood and telling amped-up work stories to impress the girls. The girls were Mandy Cullen and Imelda Tierney and Des’s sister Julie, and Rosie.

For months she had slowly been turning into my own secret magnetic north. At nights I lay in bed and was sure I felt her, through the brick walls and across the cobblestones, drawing me towards her down the long tides of her dreams. Being this close to her pulled at me so hard I could barely breathe—we were all sitting against the walls, and my legs were stretched out so near Rosie’s that if I had moved just a few inches, my calf would have been pressed to hers. I didn’t need to look at her; I could feel every move she made right inside my skin, I knew when she pushed her hair behind her ear or shifted her back against the wall to get the sun on her face. When I did look, she made my head stop working.