It was a sign. Dad had been abducted by aliens, aliens who had fireproof skin and could live on the sun, and he was being held in a giant refrigerator which was the only way he could stay alive, and he’d found that he could use his mind to trigger some of the buttons in the control room and he had concentrated and wham made the sun go black, just for an eyeblink.

‘Matty.’ A loud call. Again. ‘Matty.’

Dad’s voice. He was here. The massed leaves of three trees shifted. Matty stood, ankles stiff. Where was it coming from? Up there, in the sky?

Another call, and a dog the colour of dirty snow hurtled towards someone standing further up the hill. ‘Come here, Nancy,’ the man shouted, one more time. The syllables cracking like a baseball bat hitting a ball.

It wasn’t him.

He never said it right. It sounded more like a girl’s name his way – ‘Maddy.’ Soft, mushy consonants.

‘It’s “t”. T-t-t-t-t,’ Matty would say, clasping an elbow and making M60 machine-gun noises, the other fingers spraying bullets across his chest.

Dad would put on a sly face. ‘Shall I call you by your proper name instead, then?’

Folded arms. ‘No.’

Three different accents bumping against each other in one house. Irish, Italian, and Matty’s own London one, harder and clearer. Sometimes Mamma’s and Dad’s voices didn’t sound so far apart, like Ireland had slid off its moorings, sailed right round Portugal and over the top of Africa to Italy, and Matty would feel like an adopted child.

‘Oh my God, man, you are such a slag.’

Matty sat on the fallen tree trunk over the hill, halfway to the Men’s Pond, watching the dogs and listening to Kurtis Blow and his strutting words. The words of three big girls sauntering past getting mixed in with the rapping.

Strong, like a magnum force. Rough, like a new divorce.

‘You’re the slag. You’d have it off with anyone.’

Two black girls and one white girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, all with hair tied right on top of their heads. From St George’s. Matty remembered them from Open Day, linked together at the gate, their tongues shoved in their cheeks, a single fist pumping in front of their mouths.

‘I got off with him, I said. So slanderous.’

‘Slag-erous.’

They threw their bags down nearby and took their T-shirts off. One of them flung out a red checked blanket and the other two collapsed onto it before it was straight, undressing to bikinis. Long legs and lazy actions. They were like lionesses.

‘What you looking at?’

One of the black girls had sat up and was staring. Matty blinked and hopped off the trunk, grabbed the rucksack.

‘Hey, come back here.’

Matty began an Olympic-style walk away, head down.

‘Oi! We’re talking to you? You deaf?’