They didn’t have any hip-hop on Live Aid. It was all big bands, poodle-hair. ‘Yeah. He’s all right.’

The three of them had watched it at home with fish and chips on their laps, the week before Dad disappeared. ‘What does he bloody look like?’ Dad had said, nodding at Adam Ant.

‘You’ve got a leather jacket,’ Matty had said.

‘Not with tassels, I haven’t. It’s a load of nonsense.’ He’d waved a chip at the screen. ‘Starving kids in Ethiopia aren’t going to see a whisper of that money.’

‘I think he is an attractive man,’ Mamma had said, quite bluntly.

‘Ah, sure. Well, you would.’ Neither of them had been looking at each other. ‘Not a bloody whisper.’ He still got up later, when Duran Duran were on, and called the BBC hotline to make a five-pound donation.

‘Have you been smoking?’ Johanna said. ‘You really smell of it.’

Matty shrugged and Johanna grinned, incredulously. ‘You’re going to be like one of the greasers from The Outsiders. Hold on.’ She got up and left the room.

Matty was allowed to stay for tea. There’d be proper vegetables, even if they were always mushy. Kosher food didn’t seem to taste any different – they still ate meat and potatoes and chips and things, although Johanna had once got Matty to describe the taste of a bacon sandwich to her, her eyes all sparkling. At least she was easy to talk to, unlike most girls. Matty had told her about the Titanic, the string quartet still playing even though facing ultimate death, and how drowning in the sea was different from drowning in freshwater, and that they would have got hypothermia and felt pretend-warm and died happy.

‘Close your eyes,’ said Johanna, coming back into the room with an aerosol can covered in flowers, and spraying it right at Matty.

‘Agh.’ A hedgehog-roll, on the carpet. ‘What are you doing?’

‘My mum will smell it on you. Won’t yours go mad?’

Matty coughed, more than with the cigarette, before uncurling.

‘I’ve got hairs on my fanny,’ said Johanna, sitting down again. ‘Well, one hair. I found it the other day. Have you? Got hairs?’

Matty stared at the screen. Freddie Mercury was playing his microphone stand like a guitar. ‘No.’ A lie. There were some down there, and a few little crimped ones in each armpit. It was horrible.

‘Do you want to see?’

‘Um. No, thanks.’

Now Freddie Mercury was beginning to play a real guitar. Doing ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’, another song that Dad liked singing while twirling Mamma around the kitchen, in what seemed like two hundred years ago.

‘Do you want to go to your new school?’ said Matty before Johanna did something scary like take her tights off.