Johnny’s father called it Rottweiler Heights. Johnny could hear them barking as he walked up the stairs (the lifts had stopped working in 1966). Everyone in the tower seemed afraid, and mostly they seemed afraid of one another.

Bigmac lived on the fourteenth floor, with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend and a pit bull terrier called Clint. Bigmac’s brother was reliably believed to be in the job of moving video recorders around in an informal way.

Johnny knocked cautiously, hoping to be loud enough to be heard by the people but quiet enough to be missed by Clint. No such luck. A wall of sound erupted from behind the door.

After a while there was the clink of a chain and the door opened a few centimetres. A suspicious eye appeared at about the height an eye should be, while a metre below there was a certain amount of confused activity as Clint tried to get both eyes and his teeth into the same narrow crack.

‘Yeah?’

‘Is Bigmac in?’

‘Dunno.’

Johnny knew about this. There were only four rooms in the flat. Bigmac’s family was huge and lived all over the town, and practically no member of it knew where any other member was until they were quite sure who was asking.

‘It’s me, Johnny Maxwell. At school.’

Clint was trying to push a fifteen-centimetre-wide head through a five-centimetre-wide hole.

‘Oh, yeah.’ Johnny felt that he was being carefully surveyed. ‘He’s down the pub. Yeah.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Johnny in what he hoped was a normal voice. ‘I mean, yeah.’

Bigmac was thirteen. But the landlord of The Jolly Farmer was reputed to serve anyone who didn’t actually turn up on a tricycle.

His way home led back past the pub anyway. He agonized a bit about going in. It was all right for Bigmac. Bigmac had been born looking seventeen. But Bigmac turned out to be outside anyway, leaning against the bonnet of a car. He had a couple of friends with him. They watched Johnny intently as he approached, and the one who had been nonchalantly fiddling with the car’s door handle stood up and glared.

Johnny tried to swagger a bit.

‘Yeah, Johnny,’ said Bigmac, in a vague kind of way.

He’s different here, Johnny thought. Older and harder.

The other youths relaxed a little. Bigmac knew Johnny. That made him acceptable, for now.

‘Don’t often see you up here,’ said Bigmac. ‘You drinking now or what?’

Johnny got the feeling that asking for a Coke would definitely be bad for his street cred. He decided to ignore the question.

‘I’m looking for Plonker,’ he said. ‘Wobbler said you know him?’

‘What d’you want him for?’ said Bigmac.

On the wall in school, or down at the mall, Bigmac wouldn’t have even asked. But there were different rules here. Like, in school Bigmac tried to hide how good he was at numbers, and up here he had to hide his ability to hold a normal conversation.