The moment passed. I raised my head, propped myself up on both elbows and listened again. Nothing. No sound of him anywhere in the flat. I rose and picked up a hoodie of his that was on the floor, pulling my arms into the sleeves and zipping it up. I opened the bedroom door quietly and stood for a moment. Still no sound. He might have left – but I would have heard him do that, surely, it would have disturbed me. And anyway, there was a sense of him there, a feel of his presence, somewhere. I knew it because I was being careful.

I walked through to the sitting room, where the darkness was lit by odd shapes of light from various electrical appliances and the kitchen counter jutted out at a hard angle. Only when I had walked past the kitchenette and into the sitting area proper did I work out why the air was cold. On the far side of the sitting room, the double doors that led onto the tiny balcony were open. The balcony was so shallow that if you stood on it, your toes would reach the edge while your heels would still be touching the doorframe behind you. It looked out over the communal gardens to the block, although gardens was a generous word for what was a square of grass bordered by a wooden fence, a couple of benches.

Sitting on the floor, looking out over the garden with his legs over the doorframe and his bare feet on the balcony, was Matty. His knees were raised, his forearms resting loosely on them, a thoughtful pose. He was completely still. He must have heard me emerge from the bedroom but he did not speak or turn around.

I walked closer to him, my bare feet soundless on the carpet. I stood behind him, no more than a metre away, and looked down. I couldn’t see the badger-streak of white at his temple from where I was standing but I noticed, for the first time, that there were the faintest signs of his hair thinning at the crown. It was as if his much older self was layered over his present self, in that moment, in that pose. Still motionless, he seemed at once an old man and a young boy, sitting on the floor, thinking and waiting for something. In the Matthew of now, I could see Matthew as a child and Matthew as an elderly person, the whole of him encapsulated in that one translatable posture.