‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked him, showing him the photograph of Mrs Flatman that I had at last decided, after much deliberation, to steal. I had a feeling I was sounding too eager for his verdict. His own style had always been more throwaway. ‘Have a look at those,’ he used to mumble, when he was feeling really expansive, as he thrust a page torn from The Boy’s Own Album of Torture and Humiliation into my chest. He didn’t care what I thought. He was simply doing me a favour. On the other hand, this was the first time I had been in a position to reciprocate his generosity; furthermore this was the first time that there had passed between us a picture not of some long dead central European refugee but of somebody we both knew. I thought that was quite a coup, myself.

I’d found him where he always was, making some fine adjustments to the knot in the rope around his neck. Only when he was comfortable, with his head dropped on to one shoulder and his tongue hanging out of his mouth, did he make any attempt to look at what I’d handed him.

‘Not much,’ he said.

‘Not much?’ I couldn’t have been more insulted if he’d been talking about my mother.

‘No, not much.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well for a start the tits are too fat.’

I was horrified. I hadn’t expected bad language. ‘They are not,’ I said.

Sam Hall inspected the picture for another moment or two, as if to be quite fair to it, then he returned it to me. ‘They are you know,’ he said. ‘And anyway she lives next door to you. Why do you want a picture of someone with fat tits who lives next door to you?’

I didn’t know which part of this question to tackle first, I can tell you. ‘But that’s the whole point of it,’ I returned, trying to tackle them all.

Sam shrugged, sending a tremor up his rope. He was a long way from understanding me. But he was curious to know how I’d come by the photograph.

‘I nicked it,’ I told him.

‘Does she know?’

It was my turn to shrug.

‘I bet she’d give you a thick ear if she found out,’ he said.

I had one last go at making myself understood. ‘That’s also the point of it,’ I explained.

He lifted his head and stretched it and shook it before letting it fall on his other shoulder. But he kept his eye on me all the while, as if I needed watching, like some pervert. ‘What do you want her to give you a thick ear for?’ he asked. ‘You can always get your mother to give you that.’

He really was hopeless.