The plain urinal was more like a sheep trough. Brown leaves clogged up in its base. The smell of urine, surely as old as the summer.

This never happened, no one being here. Sometimes you could risk it, depending on the place. Head down, into a cubicle. It always felt dangerous. Disabled ones were best. Matty needed an individual sign – a thin stick figure with neither skirt nor legs wide apart, and horizontal, not vertical. Swimming.

A long boardwalk, stretching into clay-coloured water, with low hills further off. Forearm-length reeds banked up against the dark gravel. The yellow of the life-buoy casing was the only brightness in the view, though there was no red ring inside.

You weren’t supposed to swim alone, not long distance. You should always have a buddy, or boat cover. Let people know where you were. But loughs were good, once you got past the bank. No sharks to worry about, or seals. The fish stayed deep, well away. It was just you and the water.

Halfway back, Matty went vertical, bicycle-kicked as sluggishly as possible, listening to the sound of sheep blurring with a hedge-strimmer somewhere. This singular view, the lough spanning outwards at eye level. The world looked different from here, and it always felt better – easier to breathe, the ache of having to hold this body up floating clean away. Water didn’t judge.

Post-swim cigarette, held with the end tucked inwards, shoulders feeling broadened and tough. The hedge-strimmer grew louder, and turned into a motorbike, appearing on the roadside and curling round this way, slowing as it passed. It wasn’t Trevor, thank God. Matty had taken off first thing on that morning, not used the shared bathroom, gone light-footed past the door from which a stoutly rasping snore emanated.

Rain came in again, the green-grey of everything. Matty-colours. The wardrobe had stayed the same since the age of fourteen, as soon as they’d come back from Italy. Dark, wan, neutral. Grey-brown hair, usually under a cap or a woolly hat, a few curls poking out at the front.

‘You could dye your hair,’ Heather once said.

‘Not really my thing.’

‘It’s just a bit … flavourless, you know?’ Her false nails ruffling it up.

‘Mate. Get off.’

‘Ooh, touchy.’

‘You don’t even have any.’ Heather went to a barber’s every other week for a grade zero.

She’d sucked her top lip into her teeth, a loud sound, mock-desultory. ‘I’ve got divine Nubian princess looks on my side, haven’t I?’

Matty had shaved it all off one autumn, just to see the look on Heather’s face, but it had been too cold in the water. Everything became about that.

Matty put a towel under the hanging wetsuit, and opened the guidebook. It was mostly castles, monasteries, ornate crosses, but it was still nice to read. To learn.