‘Yeah, but you look older than me.’

Although I didn’t think he did. Neither of us had turned seventeen. I’d started shaving in Year Nine, but he’d taken another twelve months. ‘He knows my Mum. If I buy them …’

‘Bullshit he knows your mum.’

‘He does. She goes in there for Pop’s smokes.’

Curtis wasn’t sure. He guessed the old guy in the deli didn’t really care how old he was. Sixteen was as good an age as any to get started. His mum came out the back door. We ducked, lowered our cigarettes, and he said, ‘Ssh!’

We watched as she unpegged the washing, looked around, called, ‘Curtis!’ then went back in, mumbling (loud enough to hear), ‘Little shit.’

The Burrells were blood neighbours: Curtis, who I’d travelled, tumbled and struggled through school with; his brother, John, who’d melted into the ether of juvenile delinquent homes, always returning like a bad smell before stealing something else, welcoming the paddy van (again) and disappearing for another three or six months; Anne and Gary, who seemed the whitest of white-bread parents, starchy, medium-sliced, obsessed with the fate of their two irregularly shaped sons. Children as loaves that hadn’t cooked in the middle, or had risen into un-sellable rhombi, or burned on the bottom.

Curtis, with his sharp teeth and little knob-ended nose, sucked obsessively on the last few millimetres of fag. ‘Your Pop’s gettin’ bad.’

I still had half a cigarette. ‘How’s that?’

‘I walked past him yesterday and said hello and he just looked at me.’

I stopped to think, to study the streaky sky, full of everything I knew about Pop. ‘He just takes a bit of reminding.’

Curtis sat up, put out his smoke and said, ‘I told him who I was. Curtis. Curtis Burrell, from next door, and he said: You don’t have to tell me, I know who you are, Curtis.’

‘You just gotta keep reminding him.’ Knowing this wasn’t really the case. Via Mum, via the doctor, who’d told her the circuits were crumbling and you had to get ready to deal with the fact: he was leaving us. ‘Something’s gonna get all of us,’ I said. ‘Like you, with the smokes.’

‘So what? You get a good fifty years, that’s enough. I have no intention of sitting in some home pissing and shitting myself and … forgetting.’

‘You may not have a lot of say in it.’

‘That’s why you gotta keep smokin’ a lot of these.’ And he grabbed my smoke and inhaled. I reclaimed it. ‘It’s a pity,’ I said. ‘It’s gonna be interesting when he …’

Curtis was watching me, thinking. ‘You’ll have to put a lock on the door.’

But this wasn’t him being mean. It was just Curtis. It had always been his way. At age nine he’d decided he’d had enough of childhood. He got up one day, went out for breakfast and said, Good morning, Anne, Gary.

Two open mouths.

How are you both?