He was excited because next week our mum was coming to visit us from Canada. She left us when we were little, and we hadn’t seen her since. It turned out that she’d sent letters and cards every birthday. But we moved so many times, flitting from paying the rent, that they never reached us. And then she finally tracked us down.

She was coming to stay – not with us, but in a hotel. She couldn’t stay with us because my dad had a new girlfriend, Jenny, and it would have messed with Jenny’s head.

So that’s why Kenny had been bored and excited.

And he wasn’t the only one.

I was just as messed up about our mum coming as Kenny, but I’d got good at hiding my feelings. Years ago, I’d hidden my feelings about my mum and everything for Kenny’s sake. But after a while, it gets to be a habit. You keep the feelings on the inside, like the way you hide a sweet in your mouth in lessons at school. Except the feelings aren’t sweet.

And there was another thing I wanted to stop thinking about. I’d had a girlfriend, and then I didn’t. I couldn’t talk about it to Kenny or my dad or Jenny. It was a sick feeling inside me all the time, like when you’ve eaten something a bit off.

So, yeah, I was in a state, too, and when my dad said I should take Kenny up for a walk on the moors, I was well up for it.

“It’s nice up there,” Dad said. We were sitting in the kitchen, having a cup of tea. Dad had just come home from a long night shift and looked knackered. “Your granddad used to take me up on the moors when I was a nipper, before he got sick,” Dad told me. “And it’s not like now, when you see people going for a stroll all kitted out as if they’re off to the South Pole. All we’d bring was a carrier bag with a bottle of pop in it and some jam sandwiches. And we’d walk until we got somewhere high, so you could see all the world below you – the fields and woods and hills. Until in the distance your eyes came to a dirty smudge, and that was Leeds.”

My dad didn’t talk much about his mum and dad. They’d died before me and Kenny were born. Granddad had been a miner, like my dad was before they shut the pits and everyone lost their jobs.

My dad was looking into the distance now, not across the fields but back. Back to the hill and the moors, and the pop and the jam sandwiches, and his dad.

After a couple of seconds, he went on, “At this time of year the larks will be singing.”