They went off into the bedroom and Jonny lit a cigar. It was to be days before the choking, throat-tingling smell of that cigar disappeared from the flat. I changed my shoes for trainers and put on one of Silver’s sweaters.

Two days before, Silver’s newspaper had carried another Lane and Barrie story—they had something about them, some so-called new angle, two or three times a week—and this one had the usual photographs, Andrew Lane anonymous behind his black beard, Alison Barrie looking lined and anxious, and the little boy Jason beautiful as only mixed-race children can be when one of the races is Asian. No new discoveries as to their whereabouts had been made, but Andrew Lane’s father had died and that was what occasioned the story. A whole article inside was devoted to how much money John Lane might have left and to whom and who would inherit his house: Andrew, his only child, was the opinion of the newspaper, speculating as to whether he would come forward to claim it.

We went out at the precise time, I calculated, that Max would be phoning my parents. In days gone by, before I became a delinquent, when he had had occasion to phone them, he always did so after nine in the evening. Fond as she had been of Max, nearer a brother than a cousin to her, Mum used to say he did it deliberately to stop Dad from seeing the start of the nine o’clock news. At two minutes past nine, when we opened the casement and climbed out onto the mansard, Max and my parents would be tearing me to shreds and spitting out the pieces.

I could almost hear the conversation, Max detailing my iniquities, Mum and Dad asking him where he thought I had gone, he telling them that as far as he knew I was at home with them, all of them concluding that I was a lost soul who would end up on the streets. But their conversation wasn’t as I had imagined it. Mum’s anger had gathered and accumulated and festered throughout the afternoon, Dad took his cue from her, and by the time Max phoned at two minutes past nine both of them were ripe to accuse him of irresponsible behavior and criminal negligence. How dare he turn a young girl out of his house with nowhere to go? And in what everyone knew was a rough area, no matter how pretty it looked? Mum had by this time changed her mind about Maida Vale being a “nice part” of London. How could anywhere be nice that was between Kilburn and Paddington Station? Max, of course, countered with a catalog of my sins and the result was that he didn’t speak to Mum and Dad or they to him for a year afterward.