We were playing in the hallway when his dad came in. He came backwards out the rain, blocking the whole doorway, banging and shaking his umbrella. He turned to us at the bottom of the stairs and stopped. He looked at Brian and looked up at Brian’s mum who came hurrying out with a tea cloth from the back kitchen. I saw the look that passed between them. I shouldn’t be there. He didn’t say anything, he just looked.

‘It was raining,’ she said. ‘They had to come in.’

I hadn’t been in Brian’s house before. All the days we’d played had been sunny up till then. We sat on his front windowsill and minded the baby in the pram with the doors open. We walked with his mum to the park and sat on the grass for picnics. We climbed trees and it never occurred to me I’d never been inside his house. His mum made us sandwiches and brought them out to us. She had a beehive hairdo before anyone else and wore miniskirts which my mum didn’t. She put him in long trousers when I was in shorts. I wanted my mum to be like his, but I didn’t mind she wasn’t because his mum was looking after me. She was standing over us to keep that man off. I’d never seen her scared like that before.

He didn’t say anything. He walked round us and went upstairs. I looked at Brian. He looked at his mum.

‘Go home now. Run all the way. Don’t get wet. Go on.’

I stood up and walked into the rain. I didn’t stop to look back. I ran, ducking the moving cars. I ran as fast as I could so the rain would bounce off me. I ran home and pushed past questions, and ran a bath and told my mum she couldn’t come in and see me. And I sat in it until it went cold, and looked back at what I’d seen.

‘This is a moonstone my dad gave me,’ he said. ‘It changes colour depending how you feel.’

I looked at his eyes. They were grey, aeroplane grey. They looked steady. I believed him.

I looked at his mum.

‘When you get stung by nettles look for dock leaves and rub them on. You always find the cure in the same place.’ Where she rubbed it on, my skin turned green and it stopped hurting.

I looked at my hand. It was brown. I looked at my willy. It was white at the edges of the cut. I held up the moons in my fingernails, the spongy white where I gnawed my thumb to the knuckle, the tips of my fingers, puffy and waterlogged.

I looked up at my dad coming in through the door and closed my legs.

‘Where have you been?’

‘Playing in my friend’s house.’