Matt looks pissed off not to have had the chance to tell the full story. I tune out while Tim plays the grown-up again, explaining what’s what, and I am suddenly so tired I could lie down on the lino now and sleep for twenty-four hours.

But I won’t leave until I know if Joel has made it.

As A & E fills up, the volume increases too: shrieks of laughter, singing, sobbing. Two more of Joel’s mates have found their way to the hospital and we’re crammed into the smaller waiting room. One of the lads asks what I’m doing there, but Ant silences him with a warning look.

At two-ish, I try to call home from the payphone but there’s no answer. They’ll all still be at the Pier Players’ New Year Bash. My big sister, Marilyn, tried to persuade me to go – Come on, there’s costumes and everything – and the fact she thought dressing up might be a clincher just proves how little she knows me.

What if I had gone with them? I catch my breath and my palms tingle again. No one else would have known what to do . . . Except Tim, of course.

But he froze. It was me, or no one.

A nurse finally tells us there’s no point waiting, that Joel has a long night ahead and only family will be allowed in to see him. The others slope off, but Ant and Tim and I huddle under the porch outside, the cold like a slap in the face.

‘I don’t want to go home,’ I say. ‘Not when he’s here.’

Ant lights a cigarette. ‘You could come to my parents’ caff. They’ll still be up. They were catering for a big party tonight.’

‘My mum will be wanting me home,’ Tim says.

‘She’s got this disease called lupus,’ I add, before Ant starts calling him a mummy’s boy. ‘She needs a wheelchair sometimes and Tim looks after her because his dad’s not around.’

Ant shrugs and takes another drag on his cigarette. If he already knew, he doesn’t let on.

The doors to the hospital slide open and a man stumbles outside. It takes me a moment to realize why he’s so familiar. When Joel got signed to the Dolphins as an apprentice in year 10, they printed a picture of him with his parents in the Argus. All the girls in our class agreed Joel’s dad was cute for an old guy, that he’d passed on his looks to his son.

The man is Joel’s dad, except now he looks at least a hundred years old.

His hand reaches into his jeans pocket, but when he removes a packet of cigarettes, he just stares at them, as if he’s forgotten what they’re for.