The kid spat in his palm and Aysha shook on it and passed over the cash. She went up the concrete pathway to the house. Joey’s dad’s rust heap of a car was parked up on the long grass in the front garden, beside an old pink sofa with the springs hanging out. The nets up at the windows were coffee-brown, and the front door was so badly scraped that it was impossible to tell the colour. The wood around the battered faux-brass letterbox looked scorched. She knocked on the door.

‘Who is it?’ roared a male voice after a pause. She could hear the telly going.

‘It’s me. Aysha,’ she shouted back.

There was a scrabbling sound and then the door opened. Joey peeked around it, then quickly pulled her inside. ‘Don’t stand out there shouting the odds,’ he said, yanking her after him into the dingy sitting room.

Joey’s dad was on the sofa in front of the telly, dressed in his usual uniform of vest and brown trousers. Some daytime show was on but she could barely see the screen for the cigarette smoke in here. The room stank of fags, booze and male sweat. Aysha wrinkled her nose and tried not to breathe.

Ten, twenty years’ time, is this Joey? Is this what I’m going to end up with?

As soon as the thought crossed her mind, Aysha hated herself for it. Yeah, Joey came from a bad family. That wasn’t his fault. It didn’t mean he was bad, did it? She loved him. He was handsome and . . . but Jesus. This business with the old lady. He couldn’t really have been involved in that, could he? He was going to be a father soon. She needed a man. Not a fucking delinquent.

That was exactly what he looked like right now, standing there in his dad’s house with his hands stuffed in his jeans pockets and his eyes on the floor. He looked like a boy, scared when he’d been caught raiding the biscuit tin. Aysha thought of the men in her own family, rugged, big, tough. That they would ever be involved in anything as shabby as this was out of the question.

‘What happened, Joey?’ she asked him flat out. ‘What is this about the old lady who died?’

‘Fuck it, Aysh, I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said.

‘And what are you doing here? We should be at home.’ She couldn’t stand this place, or Joey’s low-life father. Truth was, it frightened her to see it and she avoided it whenever she could. Joey seemed far more comfortable here than he ever did at home with her folks. Maybe this was where he really belonged.

Joey was avoiding her eyes. His dad coughed loudly and reached down, popped open another can of beer, his gaze fixed to the telly.

‘Joey?’ persisted Aysha.