You’ve made a complete mess of your life.

It’s for your own good.

I’m trying to help you.

He shivered, and stared downwards. The letters on his ticket flickered and danced and refused to turn into words.

“Can I see?” She took his ticket from him. “You need to change at the next station.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

He studied her in shy glimpses. She reminded him of Giles’ mother. Small and soft, fair wispy hair. The train was slowing.

“Okay,” she said briskly. “This is me. And you. Up you get.” She chivvied him out of his seat, handed him his ticket, saw him off the train.

“Thanks,” he mumbled again, not daring to meet her eyes. He was terrified of needing help or asking for anything. Since he was three years old, getting in the way had been the unforgivable crime.

“I’ve got a son your age,” she said vaguely, and he stared at her in astonishment.

“Are you Giles’ mum?” he called out as she disappeared across the platform; but she was already gone.

A sudden jerking stop, a sign right outside the window. Another platform to negotiate. His rucksack caught in the closing doors. The stillness of the ground was too much, and he was painfully, shamefully sick in a bin. He could hear the sound of judgement being passed, and blood singing in his ears. As he straightened up, he heard seagulls.

… On the other side of the harbour, a rose-coloured house stood by itself. In a high window, a tiny light hung like a red star.

A worm of memory wriggled at the back of his sodden brain.

“Steady there,” said a man, helping Davey aboard the boat. Dazed and mystified, whiskey swimming in his blood, Davey sat down on an iron park bench screwed tight to the wooden deck.

Where was he going now? On the quay was a shelter with walls of cool, cream-coloured concrete. He would have liked to rest his hot cheek against the wall and close his eyes, but instead he was on a rickety ferry that smelled of diesel fumes and sweaty humanity, going – somewhere. No-one else shared his bench. Did he now look so wild and unkempt that nobody dared sit next to him?

You’re a total fuck-up from start to finish.

I don’t know why I even bother any more.

The seagulls sounded like crying children. He was crying too, no tears, just a contortion of his face and a keening sound that escaped in gulps and bursts. The sea-spray had the approximate taste of tears but with more complex afternotes, like a good wine.

The boat sat alarmingly low in the water. Was it safe? Were there people who checked these things? The man in the wheelhouse smoked a cigarette and stared across the water. His expression reminded Davey of long-distance lorry-drivers at service stations; a professional surrounded by amateurs, inhabiting a different world.

The bump and scrape of wood against stone, ropes thrown and tied up. The same man who had helped him onto the boat now helped him off again. Davey marvelled at the unselfconscious way he touched Davey’s hand and elbow. At school, physical contact was governed by unbreakable rules. Shoulders and upper arms were alright, as long as you slapped hard. Legs were for kicking. Heads were for capturing in a headlock and thumping. Penises, bizarrely, were acceptable, in certain situations. Hands and forearms were too close to holding hands, therefore a shortcut to social death. He tried to remember the last time he’d been touched gently by someone who wasn’t his mother, and remembered a nurse bandaging his arm one night in casualty. “How did this happen?” she’d asked him, and when he’d stammered out something about a broken glass, she’d smiled cynically and shaken her head. He still had a jagged, silvery line to remind him.