‘I’ll leave him alone today then,’ I said. ‘Maybe call in on him tomorrow.’ I bent to give her an awkward kiss on the cheek. She wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t our usual parting gesture. Her head was bowed and hot, the cheek damp and stiff, crusted with a layer of dried tears. I walked out on to the street.

I took a few steps. Then something made me look back up to Titch’s bedroom window. I hadn’t expected to see anything, I don’t even know what made me turn round. But what I did see nearly stopped my heart: a swollen, malevolent thing looking back at me, standing in the space made by a tugged-aside curtain. It took me a second to realise that it was Titch. His head seemed monstrous, the eyes shrunk to sunken currants, the face a blackened, purple mass of bruises.

Those watching eyes, I knew, had soaked up all the horror on my face. I stopped and raised a hand to him from the street. After what seemed a long time, one bandaged hand rose slowly in reply. I turned back then and kept on walking.

As I walked, I was trying to think what he had reminded me of. Something from childhood. The lonely monster, shut up in a tower. That, but something else too. Then I got it. When I was younger, we used to play with a kit called ‘Mr Potato Head’. You took an old potato, and stuck plastic eyes and a nose and stringy hair on it, and turned it into a bit of a character. For a couple of hours you’d prop him up in fruit bowls and push him around in empty egg cartons. But then you would go on to something else and forget about it, and two weeks later you’d find oul Mr Potato Head lying somewhere behind the bin, with his head turning all purple and yellow, and accidental eyes sprouting out of him.

So that’s what they’d done to Titch. Except he had felt and heard it all: every kick, every spike, every burning word. And he wouldn’t have understood why this evil had fallen upon him. For a packet of biscuits? Dumped by the bins to bloat and rot, my best mate, Mr Potato Head.

I couldn’t go back home. There would be too much chat out of Phyllis. By the time I usually came in Phyllis was always hungry for my presence, even though it was invariably unsatisfactory. She yearned for gossip and confidences. I found myself unable to provide these things. She could have wolfed down a six-course banquet of discussion, and I was only capable of passing her the occasional bruised windfall.