Why did you leave. Where did you go. Where the fuck did you go. You left me. You left me with her.

Matty stopped the tape and got out, crossing the road, fists stuffed in both pockets of the bomber jacket.

The shop had mannequins in the window, their arms at awkward angles, stuffed toys clustered at their feet. FINAL REDUCTIONS posters tacked onto the glass. A sudden memory of Rosa, taping up signs in the suit shop’s windows, pulling a silly, elastic face at Matty outside on the pavement, before Joe left.

Deep breath. Matty went to the neighbouring door and craned up at the window and those half-closed curtains. The sky’s wet brightness on the glass.

‘Excuse me.’ A woman’s voice.

Matty walked into the porch to make way, and the woman who had spoken frowned. She was holding onto a small, tear-stained child and had her other hand in her shoulder bag. A swift look up at the window and back down again as she brought out her keys. ‘Can I help you?’ She sounded tired, irritated.

There was a door buzzer to the side. Two names, written in different handwriting, one stacked above the other. Barnaby O’Shea. Jessica Ronan.

Jessica.

‘No. Sorry. Wrong door.’ Matty turned and entered the shop, spending five minutes looking at rails of second-hand clothing, before getting back to Shifty, a parking ticket wedged under the windscreen wiper.

Matty was no good at talking to people. Most people anyway. Never giving too much away, not too much eye contact until there was certainty of not being sneered at, gawked at. Even after that, it took a while to warm up, to work them out, decide whether they were worth getting to know or not.

‘You’re a right enigma, aren’t you?’ Heather had said early on, arching one perfectly over-plucked eyebrow. They’d first met at a jungle night five years ago, Matty having lost the couple of acquaintances from earlier in the night and dancing solo, earthed by the basslines, until accidentally colliding with Heather, all six foot one of her. She’d been clad in a massive padded leather coat and black latex bra, and came armed with a massive hearty laugh and a maternal air. ‘Always so mysterious.’

Shrug.

‘Yeah, exactly. That’s what you do. Lift those bloody shoulders up like that’ll explain everything. It’ll backfire on you, you know. Only so long before strong and silent just becomes mute oddball.’

The opposite of Joe, and of so many people here, who had his expressions, or ones like them. All those extra words. All right now and altogether and now then. Matty’s sentences were spare, nothing but bone. They’d shrunk even more, since Rosa.

***

‘Where have you been?’

‘Out. At a friend’s.’

‘For three days? You are still at school.’

‘I’m not there much.’

‘What? What did you say?’