What was London like now? he’d ask, in the supermarket. I’d say, oh, busy, expensive, dirty. It didn’t occur to me to try to describe the place accurately to him, how it had changed me, how I had loved being changed, how I knew there might come a point when I would not be able to afford to live here but could not imagine how to live back there. The supermarket we were standing in sometimes felt like the only place left in the town with any bustle to it. Each time I came home another pub was boarded up, another shop on the high street. They had recently found a huge cannabis farm above the old Woolworths, with thirty million pounds’ worth of plants maintained by two Vietnamese slaves who had never set foot outside in the town, who had never even known for sure if they were in England. I didn’t want to talk about my life as if I were bragging to him, even this fabulous life I lived in my crumbling flat on one of London’s most polluted roads. ‘Sorry. Better get off.’ ‘Sorry. Say hello to your mum.’ ‘Yeah. Say hello to yours too. Ta-ra.’

*

Don’t stick your nose in when you don’t know shit! wrote Leia. Carl was never into that. Me? That was TEN fucking years ago! We’re fucking GRIEVING here you prick.

I am a real voyeur of this type of conflict, which flares up all the time between Facebook friends from my old school. The cars they have failed to protect adequately. The construction machinery they haven’t locked up ‘when you know what pikey scum are like’. The husbands who have left their wives because their wives drink and eat too much and have got ugly, aren’t raising their kids proper. These things were pointed out. It looked malicious but it wasn’t just cruelty. We wanted disaster to be our own fault. To believe that catastrophe was preventable. A matter of right choices enforced with vigilant criticism. You had to be cruel to be kind. The alternative was bleaker.

Carl’s dad Mike lost three fingers from his right hand after catching them in a chain that wasn’t supposed to be moving. ‘You can barely hear each other out there,’ he told me and Carl. ‘The twat who turned it on said he’d shouted to me. I don’t think he did, but it’s fucking windy out there and the noise of the machines… You two need to pay attention at school, right?’ By the time the helicopter dropped him on the mainland it was too late. His colleagues had had to get straight back to work. They’d seen similar injuries before.