Home had been a lot of places. Finchley, after Joe had gone. Rimini, for two years. Wood Green, to finish secondary school. The floors of friends, and the floors of near-strangers, here and there, once Matty had left home properly. Bedsits, slug trails on the carpet. Usually Heather’s box room with the skylight above the pub when in London, the rooms at the camps, constantly in youth-hostel mode. Canada and America, for three summers.

Now this funny little mustard-coloured bastard was home, at least for a bit. Home was definitely not where Rosa had been found, dead, six months ago.

***

Matty woke with the light, cheek pressed against one cool hot-water bottle. Shifty was gently rocking in the wind that was still going strong, several draughts filtering in through the cracks. Two guidebooks were stacked in front of the curtain – neither to be returned in a hurry – next to a pack of cards and a notebook.

The empty, sheer feeling that was hunger and loss. Matty pulled the woolly hat back down and curled up under the duvet, staring at the piece of paper serving as a marker in one of the books. Tried to sleep a little more, but knowing the water was out there was more effective than an alarm.

A small, dark line of it was now visible from the window, between hills the colour of dank fox. Matty watched it, drinking half a can of Slim-Fast in bed, knowing it was futile to leave until it had been tackled. ‘Yeah, yeah, all right.’ A stretch. ‘You win.’

It was best to be already wearing the wetsuit, not to tussle with it while the wind or rain was coming at you. It was like Harry Houdini in reverse: a wriggle in, one leg at a time, no panicking, hauling it over each shoulder, zip pulled up by its extension. Sealed.

‘I know why you wear that,’ Rosa had said once, when Matty was still sometimes at home, the wetsuit hung up and dripping into the bath.

‘Keeps the cold off.’

‘More than that. I know it is more than that. You think I am an idiot? It’s disgusting. Where did you swim today? There?’

It had all started at the Ponds. Not daring to go back to the Men’s Pond, Matty had gone to the Mixed Pond instead, sitting at the far end with the weed-smokers, becoming one of them for a while after the two years in Italy. And not just in the summer but at the edges of autumn and spring, when the water began to pinch. Inside, too, in Olympic-sized swimming pools where the sound bashed off walls and you were sliced into lanes. But it wasn’t the same. The hot, nostril-swamping stink of the chlorine, people clustering at the shallow end, everybody at the wrong speed.