I haven’t realized that I’m still staring, and Mrs Stewart catches me looking at her. Her mouth widens in another smile, this one especially for me. I feel my face burning as I quickly turn back to the boys.

‘Let’s remember this day for ever and ever,’ I say, holding out a little finger to each of them. ‘Let’s promise never to forget the day we were kings and queen of all of Vienna.’

The boys grin at me and take a finger each. ‘Promise,’ they say in unison.

Our fingers stay linked for the rest of the ride.

MAX

Max had never had a day like this. A day filled with so much laughter and happiness he was sure that if they opened the doors at the top of the ride he would float even higher than the wheel itself.

It wasn’t just the laughter that filled him up inside. He could have been anywhere in the world and it would have been a perfect day as long as he shared it with his two best friends.

Sometimes he tried to remember his life without Leo and Elsa. Even though they had only met when they’d started Volksschule a couple of years earlier, it felt as though they had been best friends for ever.

When he did think about life before his best friends the memories weren’t happy ones. He remembered being alone in his bedroom with his hands over his ears to shut out the sound of his parents arguing downstairs: his father ranting and shouting and his mother trying to calm him down. It was always about the same thing: money. The fact that they never had enough since his father had lost his job when the company he worked for went out of business.

Max’s mother always said that they had just enough to live on. But it was never good enough for his father. He was too proud to settle for ‘just enough’. And so he ranted and raged and blamed everyone except himself, and Max shut himself in his room and covered his ears and waited for the arguments to end.

Kindergarten was no escape. He wished his mother would buy his school uniform from the same shop as everyone else rather than sew it from cloth that didn’t quite match and was always slightly the wrong shape. The other kids laughed at him and Max learned to manage without needing praise or friends or smiles. By the time his father got a new job and they could afford a proper school uniform, it was too late. The other children saw him as an outcast, a joke. That had changed when he met Elsa and Leo. They didn’t judge him, and they were the only friends he needed.

But he wished his father would smile like this English couple, or talk to him and tease him like Leo’s father did.