He looked so pleased with himself. Looked like a bad lad. If he weren’t my own I swear I’d have been frightened of him. Too cocky for his own good, curling his lip and smirking at me in his vest and his jeans and his boots with the laces undone. He looked like he were made of bone. Pure white, he seemed, like a statue come to life.

‘Why’d you run?’ I asked, and my voice sounded like a penny whistle; all high and trembly and out of tune.

‘I never ran. I said I were off. Thought we’d finished talking.’

‘You know that’s not how it was.’

‘No? Ah well, I’d stopped listening then.’

Twelve years old and talking to me like that? My dad would have given me a wallop for it and I’d have had no cause to complain. Maybe I hadn’t walloped Brian enough, or maybe too much. Or maybe all the wallops in the world would have made no difference.

‘You should have been at school,’ I said, and it sounded proper pitiful.

‘Aye,’ he smiles, all swagger. ‘And then you’d be flat under the wheels of that Paddy’s truck.’

‘But why weren’t you?’ I asked, and I felt the tears stabbing at the backs of my eyes again.

He ground out his cigarette on the damp trunk of the tree and turned to me as if I were wasting his valuable time.

‘I weren’t feeling well,’ he said, like I should have known. ‘I had one of me headaches.’

‘Did you tell the nurse?’

‘That bitch? She couldn’t care less. Just wants to put her fat hands on you.’

‘So you just walked out?’ I asked.

‘Aye. Got an early bus. I only missed a bit of spelling and I can spell good enough.’

I felt a sudden stab of pain down the side I’d landed on. It showed in my face and suddenly his whole self changed.

‘You hurting?’ he asked, and though he didn’t come toward me he did move aside to allow me under the protection of the branches. Up close he smelled different to how he used to. It used to be biscuits and soap and that earthy scent you get when you pull back the bark from a silver birch. Now he smelled like them. A man. Cigarettes and sweat and a rancid, unscrubbed tang that caught the back of my throat.

‘Me old bones,’ I said. ‘Came down a clatter.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, and maybe he meant it. ‘Didn’t have time to put a pillow down.’

I was holding my hands in fists. I wanted to put out my hand and rub his hair but the mood he was in he could have reacted like my hands were on fire.

‘It were good timing,’ I said.