I stop by an empty bus shelter. The light from it seems to shine through my head and make my thoughts glow. So what am I gonna say to Kandi? Well, thanks to Blake, I’m never gonna send the letter I wrote earlier. Because, serious, Kandi’s the only person I really need to say sorry to. We’d still be together if I could have held things down at school, didn’t run off my mouth, if I’d damn well said sorry to the teachers when I was asked. But, man, I just need to see Kandi full stop. It’s been so long.

I carry on walking. The road behind me is busy with traffic, but straight in front it’s just houses and pavement and street lights.

Kandi’s dad’s house is at the end of a terrace with an alleyway and a gate. There’s a street light by the front door. I just stay on the street thinking. Kandi’s room must be at the back. She told me once how she looked out the window and saw three cats staring each other out in the middle of the garden. She called them Bananas, McDonald’s and Skater Boi. Kandi said that if the cats came back, she’d try to take a picture of them for me so maybe I could knit them for her. I don’t know if they ever did.

The light’s on in the front room, but the curtains are drawn. I listen hard to see if there’s a TV going, but I can’t hear nothing. I also don’t want to wait here too long. That’s the secret. You have to be like Goldilocks’s porridge and get it just right. Move too fast and folks are gonna notice. Don’t move at all and folks are gonna notice. Always look like you know exactly where you’ve got to be and you know how to get there.

I walk towards the gate like I own it and push it. The gate opens. Man doesn’t lock his gate? This is London! You don’t make it easy for folks to come and thief your goods. Though Mum and me once lived in a ground-floor flat where the window frames were rotting away. The gap was so big we had to fill the space between the wood and the glass with a Pampers nappy – a clean one, of course. (It was good for catching the damp.) Anyone could have shoved the nappy away from outside, pushed their hand through the gap and opened the window. I suppose thieves reckoned that anyone who was blocking their window with a nappy didn’t have much to take.