I used to go to Titch’s house after school, or whenever Big Jacky had to be somewhere else, and we’d mess around together in the yard for hours with toy cars or magic putty or anything Titch’s mum could come up with to stop us from yowling that we were bored. Sometimes I’d stay the night at his house. She’d put us in the room with the big double bed, mumble the protective incantation of the Lord’s Prayer and then kiss us both good night. I always loved the bit when she tucked us in and whispered ‘sleep tight, don’t let the bugs bite’ before switching off the light and plunging us into darkness. For that, I was even willing not to make a fuss about Titch snoring as he lay on his back, starfished in his blue pyjamas, although sometimes I would close in his arms and shove him hard over on to his side.

The thing is, I knew him so well. I knew that he was lazy, and that he sometimes stole things he fancied from shops, although he never took so much as a piece of chewing gum from me without asking. He had been very greedy since he was little. By the time he was three his mum had to put all the biscuits up in a cupboard high out of his reach, because otherwise he would wolf them all down when she was distracted with cleaning the house. She told me that she used to come back downstairs to see a trail of empty packets and the telltale pink pastel crumbs of Fondant Fancies on the floor, and Titch sprawled out on the sofa quietly enjoying some kind of monumental sugar rush.

It was only later, when he was about twelve, that he started the shoplifting, and even then it wasn’t because he really wanted the things he took. It was the only real grab for independence that he had. He was a lot slower than the rest of us, and a little part of him knew that he was never going to join the Foreign Legion, or go hitchhiking round Ireland on his own, or chat up beautiful girls on holiday in French campsites and lure them laughing into his tent. He would never have put it exactly like that, of course, but he sensed it all the same. He was so close to his mother, so dependent on her bottomless love for him, that if he hadn’t occasionally practised some minor subversions to proclaim his difference from her he would simply have melted into her and ceased to exist.