‘Very.’ He offered it to me. I put down my bag, took it and tried to copy his actions. He sat in his brother’s shady spot, lighting a cigarette, and seemed pleased. I wasn’t sure if this meant I should keep going. ‘You ever seen it like this before?’ I asked.

‘Not this bad.’

The Donnellans’ yard was its own disaster: fist cracks full of weeds and rat holes with snakes (Mum said she’d seen one). It had its own Mediterranean climate (in the shade of an olive tree) and libraries of old catalogues that had blown about for years.

‘Hard work, eh?’ I said to Peter.

He smiled, smoking with the fag cupped in his hand.

Fuck it! It was too hot for anything. I sat down and he offered me his smoke. I accepted, dragged, returned it.

‘I know all about you,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen you and Curtis, on the way home.’

‘Just have one occasionally.’

‘What would your mum say?’

‘She prob’ly knows.’

He didn’t care. Six years at law school had taught him that rules were only for the people who made them. ‘It’s a bad habit.’

‘I got a bad attitude.’

He smiled again, and punched my arm. ‘This isn’t the kid I used to babysit. You don’t remember, do you?’

‘Course I do.’

‘Yer mum’d come in and say, I gotta go to town, you wouldn’t do me a favour? And she’d present you two, and a pack of chips. Then I’d get out the Monopoly and you’d get bored and five minutes later you’d be chasing cats around the backyard and Mum’d be calling, Clem, leave them alone will yer?’

We started to laugh, but it was too hot.

‘Then you’d come in and we’d sit you down in front of the Channel Niners, and you’d be off again. I remember you on the roof.’

I could hear sirens from the main road. The world might be burning, ending, even, but there was no world beyond Lanark Avenue.

‘But then it got dark and yer mum wasn’t home so we bathed you and put you in yer jarmies and then it was even later, so we put you to bed, and I read to you. You don’t remember that, do you?’

‘No.’

‘David Copperfield. You just said there’s no pictures, but I read anyway, and you listened and fell asleep and later, when yer mum came in, I scooped you outa bed and carried you next door.’ He waited, and closed his eyes for a few moments.

Further down the road, people had run out of conversation and gone in. You couldn’t stop fire with words, so what was the point?

‘She was lucky she had you,’ I said.