The door to the takeaway opened and the girl slipped out.

Here we are. Look lively. Go get ’em, tiger.

Matty sat up, tugged some hair out from under the beanie hat, fingers going through the curls. Turned the tape off.

There was a beep from a car three parking spaces away, and as the girl walked quickly across the road, the gentle bump in her stomach became visible, and how her hand came protectively across it. When she sat down in the passenger seat, she leant over to kiss the driver, the light illuminating their briefly joined silhouettes.

Ah, well. You win some, you lose some. Plenty more fish in the sea and all that.

A few minutes, to let the car disappear. Matty shunted Shifty into gear, and drove off to find a place to park up for the night.

***

Matty had run into Johanna three years ago, coming the other way on Golders Green Road, having gone past the old flat just to have a look. Johanna had been pushing a buggy with a fat, dark-haired child in it, already one year old. She pretended to be embarrassed about it, saying something about the redemption of the firstborn and being lorded around on a silver tray, but she’d leant down and mopped the kid’s snotty cheek, her voice softening. She’d not bothered to take a phone number, or to say that they should stay in touch.

Friends. All the moving around had made it hard to keep them. Italy had disrupted things a bit, and Martin and Michelle had gone to Berlin at eighteen and were never seen again.

Matty drifted after school, out at sixteen, doing odd jobs for a while in North London, never more than a bus or a cycle ride away from the Ponds, before getting involved in a new climbing wall built in an old water-pumping station. The talent for limbering up things, jumping off things, diving into things, had remained. Eventually, an application to a massive kids’ camp had taken Matty to America, doing abseiling and gorge-walking alongside all the shit stuff like breakfasts and laundry. More camps followed, not just in the summer. Canada, America, back in the UK sometimes. Matty was never one of the warm ones, the staff members who put an arm round a kid who got The Fear while facing down a sheer rock face and – you were never too far away from the Jesus crowd at these places – little talks about how pleased God would be if they could just put one foot over the ledge. Matty would just sit and wait, tapping fingers on rivets until they’d decided, one way or the other. The fat kids, the tearful kids, the kids with double train-track braces and a nervous laugh, those were the ones Matty landed. And that was fine.