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feel safe. I slip my arms around him, pull myself against his bulky chest. I’m cold now.
    ‘Let’s go back to yours,’ I say.
    ‘Let’s go home,’ he says, hand already hailing a cab.

April 1987 (eight years old)
    Lorcan’s fingers are caressing the neck of his guitar, back and forth, so long and thin and white as to be almost girlish. Everything about him has that elongated quality, his cheekbones high and fine, his brown curly hair straggling around the collar of his stripy flannel shirt. I know how the fabric will feel when my cheek presses against it, but right now I’m sitting at his feet, my gaze zigzagging up and down, chasing the chords he’s picking out. I daren’t look away. If I look away he might be gone, but if I concentrate hard enough I can keep him ensnared in my web. I’m a big, fat spider and he is my prey. You must never tell your prey that they’re your prey, in case they make a run for it.
    ‘Is that your song?’ I ask, as he lays the guitar down on the battered floral sofa we got from Molly’s mum and dad when her family moved house. He laughs, his face a Polaroid of the stupidity of my remark, and I search desperately for something better. ‘Is it The Beatles?’
    ‘No, darling, it’s classical guitar. Can’t you hear it?’ He picks out a refrain again, his blue eyes – almost as dark blue as my new, scratchy, uncomfortable school uniform – tracking my face. Can he see I’m more grown-up now? I try to make my listening face reflect how mature I’ve become in the months he’s been gone. I drink tea with breakfast, like Mum, and I read
Smash Hits
.
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘Did you play it on tour?’
    ‘
You
’
re
beautiful,’ he says, laughing at the grown-up description, this laugh very different from the knife-slice laugh from before. I look at him, counting all the bits that make him a whole person. He’s younger than other people’s dads, his skin smoother, his shaggy hair untroubled by grey. ‘My beautiful, beautiful baby. I missed you so much while I was away.’
    ‘I missed you more!’ I cry, risking springing up onto the sofa, my hot cheek pressed on the exact point of his chest I was eyeing from the floor. I can hear his heart beating through the soft fabric. It makes me more sure he’s really here, more than a mirage that I’ve conjured up with the sheer force of my longing. ‘I missed you every single day.’
    ‘Shall we make some supper?’ he says, standing up, long denim-clad legs unfolding from underneath him like a pair of stilts, my cheek left hot and bare. I wonder if I’ve been too ‘mushy’. He hates mushy. I dig my nail into my palm to remind myself, hard enough for it to really hurt.
    The kitchen is NOT big, in fact it is very small, with a very old oven and a fridge that rumbles like a hungry dragon and sometimes keeps me awake. Mum says if my friends say anything I should tell them it’s ‘vintage’ but the way our flat is makes me not especially want to invite people over. I don’t think they especially want to come anyway, not the girls I’ve met at my new school. I’m glad I’ve got Molly. She’s got a fridge with an ice maker, but she doesn’t care that I haven’t.
    He’s pushing a bloody bag out from the recesses of the fridge, triumphantly thumping it down on the rough wood of the ancient table that we got from his mum and dad. Everything at their house is valuable, which is different from expensive, and can mean it smells very old and doggy. We don’t go there very often, but I don’t really mind. I sent them a letter to thank them for paying for my new school, because Mum said it was polite, but they didn’t write back.
    ‘Steak!’ he says. ‘You can try it medium rare now you’re nearly nine.’
    The clocks went forward last week, and as I watched Mum stand on a chair and swivel the arms on the plastic kitchen wall-clock I wished that she would turn round and swivel me. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve,