WE ALL WENT ON the roofs, the five of us and sometimes others too, Morna and a girl called Lucy and her boyfriend Tom, Morna’s friend Judy and an older man (too old, we thought him) called Owen. But we five were the real roof people, the Famous Five, Lucy called us. The others, in varying degrees, were afraid when they were up there. Basically, to enjoy the roofs, you had to be someone who loved heights, who was what Silver had a name for: “acrophiliac.” Morna and the rest weren’t among their number. Judy was almost the reverse, a girl who had problems with looking out of top-floor windows but who came onto the roofs once or twice in the hope of testing herself, of conquering a phobia by exposing herself to it. It didn’t work. The second time she went through Silver’s window and out onto the roof of No. 15, she squatted there, hugging herself Liv-fashion, her eyes tightly shut. Silver had to bring her down. She was tiny, not five feet tall, and thin with it. Silver carried her down, first in his arms, then in a fireman’s lift. And I, who was never afraid while up there, was terrified he might fall and I lose another lover to the heights.

The rest of them walked gingerly on the slates, trying to tiptoe or slide. The chasms between blocks made them draw back as from some awful sight of blood or ruin. Owen was unable to face climbing the gable facade with its nailhead bands, even though a fall would only have brought him down onto the roof of the detached house. Morna was the best of them, adventurous enough once she was up there, though complaining all the while of our ideas of entertainment when pubbing or clubbing would have been so much more to her taste.

We five all had different reasons for going on the roofs. When she was up there Liv felt free and safe. That seems a contradiction in terms, for the rest of us were all aware, however much we loved it, of an element of danger. Liv felt safe on the roofs while she’d have been in peril in the street. On the roofs no one could find her, seize her, bring her to justice.

Paranoia gripped her and, with time, strengthened its hold. The money she had brought with her she kept hidden in a secret place in the flat. No one knew where, not even Jonny. Because she hadn’t been out she had spent nothing in all that time. She had never asked one of us to buy her anything. She used Silver’s soap and toothpaste and shampoo and washing powder. It never occurred to her to dip into her hoard and recompense him.