Carl and I had grown up at different ends of the same street. The houses were a bit smaller at his end. Instead of gardens they had yards with back gates through to the alley where we played football together. I would call for him every morning, where I’d stand in the hall while his mum and he tried to dress his younger sister Leia and two little brothers before we shepherded them along the road to school. Before Carl’s dad lost the fingers on his right hand he would have been away working on a rig, or still in bed if he was home. Sometimes he would take us sea-fishing when the tide was up, showing us how to whip the line out into the churning waves while the wind drilled into our ears. We preferred playing Subbuteo on my kitchen table but it was hard to tell Carl’s dad that. Carl would often knock on my door. It was quieter in our house – if my parents weren’t fighting. When we got older we didn’t want quiet. Carl’s parents didn’t find anything strange about us drinking at fifteen and so we began our nights in the living room with his mum, slurping cans, shouting at soap operas, singing along to Abba and Queen with her if there was nothing on TV, pestering Leia to bring her friends out to the beach with her later.

Now Carl was dead, Leia wrote in a Facebook post, from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.

This analysis began to be disputed.

What drugs? asked Tracey.

Accidental? wrote Lee.

And then, from Wozza, who had once held me upside down to shake the change from my school trousers: I’m not being funny but everyone knows that family likes their smack.

*

I hadn’t gone for a drink with Carl for years now, over a decade. He’d worked in the big supermarket that Mum went to every day. Perhaps I felt guilty that he saw my mother more than I did.

‘Some of us have more ambition, you know, Mum?’ I said once, when she’d told me again how polite and friendly he always was.

‘More ambition than to be polite?’ she asked. ‘Grow up, Paul.’

I’d run into him there, wearing his bright green shirt, and we’d talk for a minute or two, as he looked around as if he were about to be told off for skiving, or was looking for a good excuse to leave, even though, as Mum had told me several times, he was an assistant manager by then.

‘What’s it like down there now?’ he’d ask.