I tried to imagine what not knowing your dad was. I couldn’t, it was just blank.

‘My mum’s white.’

It was me who asked him, but I couldn’t get used to black and white like it was television when it was my mum and dad. I hadn’t thought of my mum being white. Only being my mum. It made me feel sick. It was the cigarette smoking. I rocked my swing back to stand up straight and sort my head out.

‘So what are you then?’ I said.

He chuckled and spat tobacco out on the ground. ‘Same as you,’ and he looked at me with his green eyes. If that was true, his face was looking yellow from smoking. ‘But I’m not on your side any more.’

I sat back down on the swing and took it in. No one was on my side.

‘Do you blame me for Errol Clark?’

He took a deep drag like he was drawing in all the different things that happened and breathing them out slowly between his fingers like it was all just smoke now anyway.

‘Didn’t help, did it?’ he said.

Everyone thought it was me, but it was him too. I’d dragged him into it. He was never gonna be on my side.

‘So what do you want?’ and he flicked the cigarette into a puddle.

I didn’t have a side for me to be on.

‘Why did he want to fight me?’ I said.

The rain was drying up, but it was still chilly and windy enough to make everyone go home. We were both in shorts, I could see goose pimples going up both our legs. It looked like chicken skin, but I was shivering and he wasn’t.

‘He was scared of you,’ he said, and stood off his swing to go. ‘You scare people.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. I watched Ian Barrett walk away across the playground, jumping over puddles with gusts of wind rippling the surfaces. He turned at the gate and shouted out, ‘You know he was my dad’s cousin?’ He swung the gate closed between us. ‘That’s why he came, but no one looked after him and his brother went to prison.’ He went round by the pub and left me there.

I watched the sky pass in the puddles. When I got up and leaned over one to look in at myself I was standing under grey-white clouds with blue patches. I put my foot into the dirty water and let it seep in through the hole in my shoe. It was cold. I felt my toes go numb. There were cigarette butts and metal bottle tops all round the swings. Brown glass smashed over by the fence, and clear glass scattered everywhere. I thought what would happen if I got my feet cut or fell over on to my palms.