The boy looked impatient. ‘Name.’

Matty told him, looking down at both palms, which were covered in a faint dust of pond-stuff.

The boy repeated it slowly, as if trying it out for the first time. It didn’t sound right coming from his mouth.

‘Who are you?’

‘Nicks.’ Like Nicholas, maybe? Or it could be his surname, like Nixon, the second Vietnam president. Matty was good on war stuff – sitting up late with Dad on Saturday nights in the dark, the video player hired for the weekend. The Green Berets or The Deer Hunter. He liked Vietnam films especially, usually borrowed from a friend and really grainy, like watching through a snowstorm. He let Matty snuggle next to him as the screen flared. ‘Don’t tell Mamma,’ he’d say, softly, but his voice all alive. Their secret. ‘Now this,’ he would say, pointing the top of his beer bottle at Christopher Walken’s quiet tears while Robert de Niro shouted opposite him, ‘is a performance.’

‘Where d’you live?’

‘Here,’ Nicks said, as if that were a stupid question.

Here. One of the swanky houses close by, even on the little road just outside. The one with the coloured bottles in the window, or the tall fence with the alarms, or the one with the big Dulux dog. So he was a rich boy. He looked scruffy, but sometimes posh kids did, their mums and dads letting them run around and grow their hair.

‘Is your dad here?’

‘Nah.’ Nicks flashed over a glance. ‘Like yours isn’t.’ He continued jabbing sticks into the ground.

Matty looked down. He sounded quite knowing.

‘Come on,’ said Nicks, that conversation snapped shut. ‘Let’s scram.’

‘Where are we going?’ A gentle, hopeful warmth, deep down. He didn’t really care who Matty was.

He grinned. Bright white teeth. ‘You think this is the only pond?’

‘We’re not allowed in there.’

‘Says who?’ Nicks was jiggling about in front of the fence, shaking his shoulders and tossing his head from side to side.

Matty pointed to the sign, which said, rather starkly in red paint on white, NO SWIMMING.

‘Tss.’ Nicks stuck two fingers up at the sign. ‘You the swimming police?’

‘No.’

‘Come on, then, arse-face.’

Patches of warmer water and cooler water. Matty was a crocodile, nosing along at eye-level. Nicks floated just ahead on his back, doing occasional lazy kicks and humming, not very tunefully.

This pond was smaller, the trees gathering round the water as if wanting it all to themselves. They had climbed the fence, though it went straight into holly bushes and now Matty’s arms were covered in criss-crossing scratches, like the trails of just-hit bomber planes.

Could Dad have swum here? Maybe he liked the quieter ponds, not being watched by the lifeguards. The police would never think to look. Matty rolled over to look at the sky, waiting to see if the gravewater feeling came.