The other time had been when Shay locked the two of us in. He’d left us there for what was probably an hour; it felt like days. Kevin had been two or three, and he had been too terrified even to scream. He had pissed his kacks instead. I had told him it would be OK, tried to kick the door down, tried to pry the boards off the windows with my fingers, and sworn to myself that someday I would beat the living shit out of Shay.

I moved the torch in a slow sweep. The basement was a lot like I remembered it, except that now I could see exactly why our parents might have had issues with us hanging out here. The windows were still boarded up, badly, with thin stripes of pale light falling in between the slats; the ceiling was bulging in a way I didn’t like, and great chunks of plaster had fallen away so that the beams showed, bent and splintering. The dividing walls had buckled and crumbled till it was basically all one huge room, and in places the floor was collapsing in on itself, sagging into the foundations—subsidence, maybe, with nothing to prop the house up on the end-of-terrace side. A very long time ago someone had made an unimpressive effort, before giving up on the place altogether, to patch up a few of the more major holes by shoving slabs of concrete into them and hoping for the best. The place smelled like I remembered—piss, mold and dirt—only more so. “Ah, man,” Kevin muttered unhappily, hovering at the bottom of the stairs. “Ah, man . . .” His voice echoed off into the far corners, bouncing off walls at odd angles so that it sounded like someone was murmuring, away in the dark. He winced and shut up.

Two of the concrete slabs were man-sized, and whoever had put them in had slapped lumpy cement around the edges, for the satisfaction of a job well done. The third one was even more half-arsed: just a lopsided chunk, maybe four feet by three, and fuck the cement.

“Right,” Kevin said, a notch too loudly, behind me. “There you go. The gaff is still here and it’s still a dive. Can we go now, yeah?”

I moved carefully into the middle of the floor and pressed a corner of the slab with the toe of my boot. There were years of grime holding it in place, but when I put my weight down I felt a very faint shift: it was rocking. If I had had some kind of lever, if there had been an iron bar or a chunk of metal in one of the heaps of debris in the corners, I could have lifted it.

“Kev,” I said. “Think back for me. Those rats that died in the walls: was that the winter I left?”