I knew that after I’d left her alone that night in the café, if she saw me now she would just walk away before I could say anything. She had that ability, once someone finally crossed a line.

One day I sat down at the battered little wooden desk in my room back at the Whartons’, the legacy from one of their long-departed sons, and wrote her a letter. I explained it all: the death of Big Jacky, how I had got my scars, Titch’s death, and even – in abbreviated, codified form – my run-in with McGee. I felt better for it, whatever happened. The secrets between us had begun to corrode our affection, rusting it with patches of mistrust.

When I had finished describing what had happened, I wrote plainly at the end: ‘I’m sorry. I love you and Raymond and I want to be with you and stay with you. I hope you will let me. There will be no more messing around.’

I meant it. I never liked those adults who were in and out of children’s lives, schmoozing them and then disappearing, returning with great fanfare like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny rolled into one and then buggering off again, stopping only to explain with stumbling, mealy-mouthed phrases that things were ‘complicated’. I had been that person to Raymond, and I didn’t want to be like that again. Big Jacky had never mucked me about. He loved me steadily and without question, in his own way.

I posted the letter and tried not to hope too much. Eve might have met someone new, and who could blame her?

The following days merged into one another, mined with different varieties of unease. At night I took consolation from picturing Phyllis in the warm company of Julie, who thankfully lived in another part of town. I kept the thought of Eve and Raymond at bay. It was too highly charged to hope for or even think of, like a package just outside a pub that might explode if you touched it. I thought sometimes about how to construct a life around their absence, one that didn’t have them in it but somehow ticked on successfully anyway, and I couldn’t quite make it work.

Everywhere I looked in London, I could see people who had fallen out of a life that almost worked into one that leaked malfunction from every small action. They fell so far that their shadow-lives became invisible to everyone else, even in the full glare of daylight. They laid out beds in stone corners of the city, using doorsteps for mattresses and straining plastic bags full of grubby possessions as pillows. They pestered passers-by for cash with stories as crumpled as the back of their shoes, and I wondered what had brought them here.