Gippos. Pikeys. You could get called that anyway if you looked a bit scruffy, or in the same way as getting called a spaz or a dickhead or a jerkoff. Matty knew better than to tell anyone, even Johanna, after that night in front of the TV. No one liked a gypsy, even if Dad wasn’t one anymore.

Matty had stayed up and watched the rest of the film, imagining Dad as the little boy from the 1950s riding on a horse or at the front of a gypsy caravan. Wearing a stripy waistcoat and a neckerchief. Maybe he hadn’t liked being called a tinker.

Now, Matty sat on the floor in the hallway, looking in the address book. Maureen Ronan wasn’t there. But then, if Maureen was married to Kevin, she’d have a different surname. Matty didn’t find any Maureens at all.

Shouldn’t they call someone? Surely they would want to know that he was gone, even if they only sent a Christmas card. Listening to Mamma loudly washing up her tea cups in the kitchen, muttering in Italian, Matty could not imagine asking.

***

It was better to hang around with Nicks. However odd he was, however much he thought that skateboarding was for dorks and didn’t go to proper school, he didn’t ask about Dad. He wasn’t really interested in anything apart from the water.

With the A–Z and some trial and error, Matty had worked out the best route from the flat to the Heath. Hoop Lane, past St Edward’s and the crematorium and the cemetery. Wild Hatch and the little white cottages with hearts cut into the shutters and iron rectangles on the windows. The overgrown alleyway, where you’d start really hearing the birds, chatting over each other in ten different languages.

Sandy Heath, Rotten Row, Spaniard’s Alley, and then into the woods. The smells would become hot and green, dog poo and nettles and perfume, legs getting scratched by brambles.

You could always hear the road, or planes, just. But sometimes they got mixed up with the wind and Matty could pretend that this was not London but the middle of nowhere. The arse-end of nowhere, Dad would have said. Even during the weekend it was easy to find places to be on your own. Nestled up under a big beech tree or lying down among the leaves. Good climbing trees too. After some hiding and some thinking, Matty would go the rest of the way – over the top and past the view and the Mildred Himoff Lewis bench to find Nicks.