He goes to walk away, then takes a few steps back and stoops down so our eyes are nearly level. He says a thing and while I’m still thinking about it he’s gone, taking huge, nimble strides up the bank without a handhold. When he reaches the towpath, he turns around and raises both arms in the air. The bottle is still in his hand. The blanket is back around his shoulders, but he no longer looks like a moth. He looks like a man, off to do his business.

When I get to Primrose Hill, my phone tells me I can be home in thirty minutes. I put it back in my pocket, take a deep breath and break into a jog, because pardon my French, but I can fucking do it in twenty.

I’m eight minutes in when I realise I’ve called it home.

47

Danny

Jaz nosed the cab slowly through the streets I’d walked with Gentleman nearly every morning since Lou and Wolfie arrived. I thought about how much I’d come to look forward to the routine that had snuck up on me: those early-morning strolls with my dog, mulling over a stranger’s problem, trying out answers, hearing my father’s wise old voice in my head; the daily ritual of coffee and chat on the patio with my sister; the unwinding and winding of white gauze around her leg, over and over, day after day. Normal, insignificant acts, weighing me down, holding me steady. The smallest of anchors, the biggest of things I’d been missing in my life.

I watched the back of Jaz’s head, her shiny black hair springing lightly on her shoulders under the cap with the movement of the cab, and imagined being as brave as her at nineteen, serving up her heart on a platter to become a wife and mother. Except at nineteen, I’d been too selfish and self-centred to see the people I was squandering in front of my own eyes. My father, my sister, every girl I ever loved.

Nineteen and all the years beyond.

We turned left off Haverstock down towards Glenmore Road, and as we bounced over a speed hump I realised with gentle surprise that guy, that foolish, angry, motherless boy-man I’d carried around in secret for so long, was gone. And I hadn’t even noticed him leave.

But without him, I was ready. To be a brother, an uncle, a decent friend. A better man. And suddenly I couldn’t wait to get started.

‘Hey, Danny? That’s not your girl by any chance, is it?’

48

Wolfie

If Danny showing up in a black cab a hundred metres from Dom’s place is what Billy Ben-Hur meant by the good people staying close, it’s a pretty cool mic-drop moment.

When the cab slows down I just think someone’s getting dropped off, but then a head shoots out of the window and yells, ‘Oi!’ and there’s no mistaking that slightly less scruffy bonce (a word I’m planning on using at every opportunity for the rest of my life). Before the cab even fully stops, Danny shoots out of the back and everything around me feels like it’s speeding up, but I’m staying still.