‘Where have you gone to?’ Nico’s voice interrupts my spinning fantasies. That girl’s got more spunk than I gave her credit for – all that crazy-ass running, playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can with the dude from four doors up. She was lucky all she got was a thump, you wouldn’t want that big fucker climbing on top of you and teaching you a different kind of a lesson. Funny how wrong first impressions can be. We’ve just been effing and blinding to our hearts’ content, both of us jumping up and down on her bed. She sure can run and she sure can cuss. Her talents are definitely not being put to the best use here.

I was the first to stop. Unheard of, but the juice in my batteries is still running low. Those drugs and that night spent in the wet sheets battling every kind of demon imaginable have left me pretty shaky. ‘I pissed myself in my sleep last night.’

She looks at me and shrugs. ‘They give you strong medicine. No your fault.’

It may not be my fault, but it still happened, I still pissed myself.

‘Do you want for me to help wash sheets?’ she asks. I nod. The two of us take the sheets off the bed and go to the kitchen, where I open the washing machine, stuff the bedding and a washing capsule into the drum and close the door. Nico’s eyes are huge.

‘Never seen one of these before?’

She shakes her head. I wonder how much new stuff she is having to process every day. We sit at the kitchen table and pour glasses of juice, lather soda bread with butter and raspberry jam, and then both of us fall silent, neither of us eating, as we listen to the wind outside, which is fairly whippy this morning and seems to want to get inside – it’s rattling the windows that much.

‘The man was so old he no get up out of bed,’ she says quietly, after a while, as if by whispering the words she won’t give them any power.

I choke. ‘I bet he could still get it up though, right?’ And I mimic my pinkie standing to attention, just in case she doesn’t get it.

She sucks air in through her mouth, a swallowed whistling sound. ‘His son looked us.’

‘Fu-uh-ck!’

‘I thought about Luca and Papa and sick almost was.’

‘Pity you weren’t – all over the two of them! Is Luca your brother?’

She balls up her hands. Putting up a good fight.

‘Lucky you! I always wanted a brother …’

‘I have two eithers. You have them!’

She is rubbing her eyes with her fists. I suddenly have a desire to hug her, weird, but I sit on my hands instead. ‘I had the maddest dreams last night.’

‘The medicine,’ she says.

‘I gave birth to a fish boy.’