‘He’s not coming back,’ said Busola. ‘What’s good about that?’

‘Sometimes I could murder you,’ my mum said.

I passed his house on the way to school. The net curtains were up but it was empty. I came back and it was dark. No one said anything at school. A teacher came up after a few days and said, ‘Do you know where Brian’s gone?’ I shook my head. No one said anything in the playground. It was like playing on my own and being deaf. I didn’t want to know what anyone said. I sat under the arches in the playground and watched everyone playing out in the sun.

After a while I passed his house and it was like only I knew anyone ever lived there. It was like a bomb had hit it and everyone had gone, and it was just the walls standing. It was dark and it felt dead, but I still had to get up and walk past it on my way to school and come back, past all the bomb sites where people used to live but no one knew who they were any more. My dad gave me some money to spend on comics and on a model aeroplane with a pot of glue and a pot of grey paint. I left the plane out to dry on newspaper in the backyard and Manus accidentally trod on it and threw it in the bin. I got it out and tried to piece it back together with the glue, thinking maybe I could cry about that. It didn’t work and I threw it away myself.

I was in the bathroom, trying to get the glue and the grey paint off my fingers, and think why things I made always got broken. I squinted at the flecks of paint on my nails in the running water, and made them go grey-blue in the light coming from the window. I thought about his eyes. We were up in the big tree, climbing out on to weaker branches that dipped under our weight. He had his knee over one branch and was holding on to the one above while he looked at me and put a finger to his lips and pointed down to his mum asleep on the grass beside the baby. I couldn’t remember the baby’s face, and I couldn’t move because my shorts were caught on a twig. He put his foot on my branch and pressed down to release me. I got my knee up and joined him and we hung for a moment breathing in the air through the leaves. It was going to rain, you could hear it spatter the leaves at the top, his mum was going to wake up, there was wind in the branches of the tree, they were moving, and I was feeling it was going to be a long way to fall.

Custard Out of a Tin