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floor, her dresses drooping across the foot of the bed like people who had fainted, her underwear foaming and frothing out of her chest of drawers in little frozen waterfalls of cotton, silk and lace. The room I had been given was one of the smallest in the house, no more than eight feet square, and its single window gave on to arow of scrubby back yards and gardens, a car-park half buried in weeds, and the blank side-wall of a working-men’s club, but after the noise and overcrowding of the holding station I loved the feeling it had, of being an eyrie, a refuge, my own private domain.
    Sometimes, when Marie came home after an evening out, she would look in on me. Light would open in a triangle across my bed and she would lean down, placing her lips on my forehead or my cheek, and a scent would float off her, not just the perfume she wore, but alcohol, cigarette smoke, and cold, clean sweat from all the dancing she had done, it was the sweet smell of the night, a world I didn’t know as yet, and I would lie there with my eyes closed and my heart leaping, and I would breathe her in, right to the bottom of my lungs. When she straightened up again, her clothes would seem to whisper to me, then the fan of light would fold itself away, the door would shut and I would hear her stumble back into her room and kick off her shoes, two quick tumbling sounds across the floor, like dwarves turning somersaults, and a new silence would descend, thicker than before and deeper, more inhabited somehow, the silence of my breath mingling with my sister’s and my father’s, the silence of our dreams.
    Despite the promises I had made to other boys –
I’ll look for you, I won’t forget
— and despite the enduring clarity of my memories of those days, I thought I had left Thorpe Hall behind for ever, but this turned out not to be the case. I had only been living on Hope Street for a few months when I discovered that Maclean had been placed with a well-to-do family at the top of the town, and that he would be attending the same school as I was. The first time I saw him again, that autumn in the playground, I had no trouble recognising him, his wrists protruding from the arms of his blazer, his ears the size of dustbin lids.
    â€˜What’s your new name?’ he asked.
    â€˜Parry,’ I said. ‘Thomas Parry.’
    He nodded.
    â€˜What about you?’ I said.
    â€˜Simon Bracewell.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s all right. Now listen,’ he said, and he threw a furtive glance round the asphalt yard, then drew me close. ‘About Cody,’ he said. ‘We’re divorced now, but we’re still good friends. He’s living with a family in the northwest. His new name’s De Vere, by the way.’
    â€˜De Vere?’
    â€˜I know.’ Bracewell shook his head.
    I glanced at his left hand. ‘What happened to your ring?’
    Bracewell grinned. ‘On our last night we took them off and tied them together with a piece of wire and threw them in the moat.’ He looked down at the ground, and his face became serious. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever marry again.’
    Though we used to sit next to each other for lessons, we hadn’t been particularly close, but this now changed. In term-time he came round to my house at least twice a week, and during the holidays we spent whole days together. I was both intrigued and delighted by the way his mind worked. If it hadn’t been for Bracewell, for instance, I’m not sure I would ever have noticed Mr Page. There was a dry-cleaner’s on Hope Street, almost directly opposite our house. If you walked past the open doorway you could smell the fluid they used, which was called perchloroethylene and which would become – not inappropriately, I thought much later – the defining smell of my childhood. Mr Page ran the place. He had narrow eyes that curled up at the edges, and his mouth was the same – a