Puff was a scrum man, entirely hirsute, powerful and compressed, yet the most academic of the three of them. He became a wealthy dentist and stood unsuccessfully as a National Party candidate in an Auckland electorate. Chas King played at centre: very pacey and with a wonderful step off his left foot, but he loved women and parties above all, and the booze got him in the finish. Pearly had naïvely thought that they would become comrades for life, but by the end of the year he knew Puff little better than at the start of it and had come to dislike Chas. Living with people is an interesting and absolute test of compatibility.

Puff was a guy of intense focus and unrelieved personal distance. He trained and played as hard as anyone but spent the rest of the time on his studies or with his girlfriend — both occupations focused on his own room. Pearly admired his clear priorities, yet was both surprised and covertly hurt that Puff wasn’t interested in becoming a close friend. They could live together for a week, coming and going, with just the same brief, neutral exchange between them. They talked more at practices and travelling to and from games than they did in the flat. Puff was quite generous in his way. He was a year ahead of Pearly and had a small aging Ford that would transport the three of them to practices or the city centre. He had an ox tooth on the ignition key ring. Puff just didn’t need Pearly or Chas: he was passing through in a purposeful way, and they just happened to be going in the same direction.

Chas was a user, one of those people attractive at first acquaintance and in a crowd, but whose indulgent selfishness becomes apparent in day-to-day living. He shirked his share around the place, was often behind with what he owed despite glib promises, and brought back to the flat people who raided the fridge and left the living room in a mess. He wore Pearly’s clothes, too, although it was some months before Pearly realised it. His suspicion began when he noticed that shirts he’d washed had sweat stains and dirty collars when he came to wear them, and he found a movie ticket in the pocket of his leather jacket. Once, when he came back from a weekend at the farm, he discovered his one pair of good shoes had muck on the soles. Money went missing from his drawer and he stopped leaving it there, stopped leaving letters where they could be read, stopped leaving food sent by his mother in the kitchen cupboard. It was unpleasant to imagine Chas snooping in their rooms when they were away.