We thought his uncle was asleep upstairs, but he was sat in the front room with the curtains closed, bandages on his hands and a black nose where he got beaten up. He stood up and chucked his drink at us, we rushed back to the front door and got out on to the street.

Brian’s mum and dad had gone out but gave him a key to let himself in. The baby was asleep in her pram at the bottom of the stairs, and woke up as his uncle hopped out after us to the front door. We could hear her crying as he shouted after us running down to the corner. He was fatter and shorter than Brian’s dad, and had that voice street traders used that rang out round the corner, ‘...come ’ere ... fuckin’... bloody ... kill yer!’

‘Sorry,’ I said, wiping beer off my face with my shirt. My shirt had got wet as well.

He only had a bit on him, but wasn’t wiping it off because he was thinking with his tongue between his lips. ‘It’s all right.’

‘Is your sister all right?’ I said.

He looked at me and frowned. ‘They’ve gone down ... to see a policeman down the pub. They’ll be back in a minute.’

We’d gone in his house to see the bags and boxes packed up and get out the Johnny Seven gun he wanted to give me, because even though it’d lost all its ammunition it still made noises when you fired it.

‘Shall we run and get ’em?’

He shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘my mum’s trying to sort it out.’ He looked down at the ground and it was like there was a lump on his shoulders where he was bent over.

I touched his arm.

‘We haven’t got enough money to run,’ he said. ‘And I’m in school. It’s my dad who wants to go, he says the council want us out anyway, and my mum says we don’t have nowhere else to go.’

‘Is your dad like that?’ I said. ‘Like his brother?’

He got his knuckle and wiped some beer out his eye. Then I saw it wasn’t beer, he was crying and forcing it back.

‘He’s my dad,’ he said. ‘I love him.’

I put my head down. We walked on and sat up on a wall at the back of the London City Mission. We got turned away from there when we turned up at Christmas together and they said we hadn’t come to Sunday school so we couldn’t have any toys they were giving out. We used to climb up on the roof instead which was slanted and roll over, but we weren’t going to be doing any more climbing. We didn’t do anything for a bit, we just sat there.