‘As I passed one of the houses, on my left, it had those cheap sash windows, and normally I wouldn’t look up and I don’t know why I did at that point, but something caught my eye, I don’t know, I saw, just for a second, a woman’s face at one of the first-floor windows.’ I paused again, interrogating my own memory. The picture was clear in my head. I wished it wasn’t. ‘It was too far away to tell what age she was but a grown woman, not a child or anything, but I could see, I think I could see, her expression was really frightened, her eyes were starting from her face and her mouth was open. Our eyes met.’

There was a silence while he waited for me to continue. The hand playing with my hair had become still.

‘I only saw her for a moment, a second really, but what made it strange was her face was at the bottom of the window, just above the bottom of the sash, not halfway up. I saw her for a second, and then a hand appeared above her and pulled the curtain across and she was gone.’

Another silence.

‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘that’s all, nothing else happened.’

‘What did you do?’ Matty asked, after a while.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I carried on walking. I was late to meet my friend.’ As I said this, I felt a little nauseous, mostly with shame, but also because I was wondering if he would think less of me now, because I was absolutely certain that in that situation, Matty would not have kept walking. Most people would, but Matty wouldn’t.

‘When I got to the Showcase I said to my friend, Katie, I said, well, I told her about it, but by then I wasn’t even sure what it was I had seen and I told her and said should I have done something about it and she said it was probably nothing and then she said, anyway, best not to get involved.’

The silence that followed was long. I wondered if he had fallen asleep.