We got all the equipment loaded into the van that Matty had borrowed from his work, and declared the evening a success, celebrating our first live gig with a couple more pints of snakebite and black. Pete was almost as drunk as me, I realised, loosening up as the night went on, losing his country-bumpkin shyness and joining in the banter with the boys at the bar. By the time the skinhead barman called last orders, we’d all had so much snakebite that none of us seemed to be in possession of knees anymore, sagging and staggering and bellowing our songs as we pushed our way out of the pub and wobbled towards the squat. Matty was too drunk to drive, so he said he would pick up the van in the morning.

Samantha wasn’t home when we got in, but my first main concern was monitoring Pete’s reaction to my new abode. He didn’t baulk at the rubbish-tip front garden, with the sofa lying on its back like an old drunk, all its rusty springs on display, or at the boarded-up downstairs windows, but he did a double-take as we got inside and Matty switched on the hurricane lamp in the hallway, which illuminated the damp, peeling walls and bare floorboards.

‘Are you redecorating?’ he asked dubiously as I steered him towards the stairs, pointing out the broken treads and the missing banisters. He stepped gingerly up them as Webbo guffawed behind us.

‘Yeah, darling, this place will look divine by the time the interior designers have finished next week! New carpets are arriving tomorrow, and the chandeliers are being flown in from Paris, and—’

‘Oh shut up, Webbo!’ I said, seeing Pete’s shoulder blades jam hard together as he stiffened his back in embarrassment, chin jutting forwards; a well-worn gesture. I half expected him to click his heels together and salute at the same time whenever he did it. It harked back to his time in his early teens in the Salisbury Sea Cadets (I never understood why Salisbury had Sea Cadets being, as it was, firmly inland). Pete had hated every minute of it, so the back-stiffening was, I thought, some kind of Pavlovian reaction; parade equalling mortification.

‘Why’s there no electricity then?’ he asked.

‘You never been in a squat before, mate?’ Marsh enquired cheerfully.

Pete stopped in the upstairs hallway, so suddenly that I bumped into the back of him. He turned and stared at me. ‘What, you mean you don’t pay rent? You’re living here illegally? Oh my god, Mez! What’s the matter with you? Mum’ll have a conniption fit!’

I rolled my eyes and dragged him into my bedroom, which was illuminated by the sodium-orange glow of the street lamp outside the window. ‘Sit,’ I commanded, pointing to the bare mattress. ‘Mum doesn’t need to know it’s a squat. It’s fine. Stop being such an old woman about it.’