When the police had gone and boarded up the house again, I climbed in the toilet window you could reach by going through the bomb site at the back and getting over the wall. The top flap fell back and I was standing on dust and floorboards in the loo until my eyes got used to the gloom. It was dank-smelling out in the backyard with overgrown weeds and the stink of cat pee, but inside there was a smell of old people. I listened but I couldn’t hear anyone. The toilet bowl was cracked and stained, there was poo but no water in it. I started to go through the rooms. They were full of rubbish. Furniture was left but it was broken. There was a Crombie in a pile of dirty clothes and blankets pushed up against a wall in the back room. That was his bed. Empty bottles and chip packets were scattered about on the floor. In the front room there was a toothbrush with the bristles flattened and a dirty bit of soap stuck to a plate. He was living there. I didn’t go upstairs, the banisters were broken and there were some steps missing, it was too dark. I panicked and got out, scratching my stomach on a nail where the flap hooked shut from the inside. My legs were shaking and I couldn’t get over the wall, so I stood for a while in the backyard looking up at the house. I was afraid Errol Clark would look down from a window. A tree was growing up out the brickwork just under the roof. It was still. The sky was high up and clouds were moving slowly over as though the wall of the house was going to fall back on top of me. The house was dead and the windows were dark, and I was down underneath in the earth. I don’t know how I got out of there.

‘What’s the matter?’ Connor found me on the street, squeezing back out the bomb site under the corrugated iron.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘What you gonna say about that?’ He pointed at the cut in my shirt where it was torn across my stomach, there was a patch of dried blood along the edge of it.

‘Nothing,’ I said as I put my finger in it. ‘It got caught on a nail.’

He stood back to look up over the fence at the backs of the houses like he didn’t believe me, then turned and shoved his chin out, ‘What did Errol Clark say?’

I punched him hard on the face. He got me, banging my head up against the corrugated iron with his hand under my chin, holding my arm and kneeing me on the inside of my thigh. ‘You’re fucking mad!’ he said.

‘I hate you!’ I shouted.