Elton went to some dangerous-sounding comprehensive not far from Simon’s house. We all professed to envy him as, unlike Maylert, his was a mixed school and girls made up half of every class. While that was an education we were all sorely in need of, in truth only John stood a chance of securing a girlfriend, unless studiously ignoring a girl and awkward silences really were the key to the art of seduction.

‘What do you want for lunch?’ Mother’s voice was a fraction too bright, a touch brittle. She never made me lunch. I heated up a tin of mushroom soup. Or forgot to heat one up and wondered later why I was hungry.

‘Soup?’ I wanted to say that I wanted my life back. Instead, I trekked upstairs to my bedroom and fell onto the bed that I’d grown up sleeping in. Once it had been a three-year-old Nicky who bounced onto his first ‘big boy bed’, now an over-tall fifteen-year-old, too skinny, all sharp elbows and greasy hair, folded onto the much-punished mattress and stared at the ceiling. I lay there trying to ignore the dull ache of my hips and wrists. Too many thoughts tried to crowd in at once, with the net effect that none of them managed to get a space.

The next thing I knew it was dark. I sat up disoriented and a blanket slid from me. My bed. Still my bed.

A sharp noise broke the darkness. A pebble against the window. I stumbled across the room and flicked the light switch. My room. As I left it. A bowl of cold soup the only addition. I flicked the light back off and went to the window. Two figures stood at the base of the nearest streetlight in the pooled sodium glow. The taller one was John. He waved.

A minute later I was leaving the front door, zipping my parka as I went.

‘That was quick! Sleep in your clothes?’

‘Something like that.’ I looked past him. The girl was still leaning against the lamppost, breath pluming before her. She had black hair, short-ish, a black coat, pale skin. ‘What time is it?’

‘Coming up to midnight maybe.’ John shrugged. ‘Thought we’d come check on you. Nicky Hayes doesn’t miss school two days in a row unless he’s dying.’ He glanced back at the girl. ‘He look dead to you, Mia?’ He’d dialled his accent back to as close to common as it would go. Which wasn’t very close, but a one-eighty from the upper-crust drawl he used at school.

Mia looked at me as if John’s question weren’t rhetorical. ‘Some life left in him yet, probably.’ She was Elton’s friend. Our first and last encounter had been two weeks ago when he brought her unannounced to Simon’s house for the D&D session. Simon and I had gone into shock, unable to utter more than grunts, as if we were on stage in a school drama lesson waiting for the mockery. It had been the worst session ever. What she was doing with John, I had no idea. I kept staring from her to him like an idiot, trying to imagine how he had got her number. And then, armed with that, how he had had the superhuman courage to call her.

‘We’re going down by the river.’ John pulled a can of Fosters from his coat and pushed it at me. ‘Come on, we’ll puff some weed.’ He mimed drawing on a joint.

I took the can, finding it warmer than expected. ‘I guess.’ My stomach growled, a hollow hunger gnawing at me. I thought of the cold mushroom soup and felt nauseous.

John led the way. If you say ‘the river’ in Richmond you mean the Thames, the broad grey-green expanse of water that slides its way through London. Unless you’re John, in which case you mean Beverly Brook. It’s a stream that hurries across Richmond Park. And if ‘the river’ is too big a name for the brook, then ‘the park’ is too small a name for Richmond Park, which, rather than being two football fields and some swings, is a proper seventh-century hunting reserve with accompanying deer, whittled down to a square mile of forest and field amid the tight-packed chaos of the city.

At the park’s Wessex Road gates, a cruel hand reached in to twist my guts. Before I knew it, I was doubled up by the fence with one hand clutching the iron bars. I retched and retched again, acid burning my throat, spitting drool at the base of the gatepost.

‘Shit, you were ill!’ John backed away.

‘I’ll be OK.’ I straightened up. I felt like crap, my mouth watering, hands trembling. Never let it be said that I don’t know how to make a good impression with the ladies. ‘Come on.’

We came to the dirty bank along a wooded path so dark I could barely see the trees. Without the pervasive London glow, even following the path would have been impossible. I hobbled along, wincing at the shooting pains in the long bones of my legs. It’s amazing how much harder it is to dismiss a discomfort when someone changes the label on it from ‘growing pains’ to ‘leukaemia’. Mia walked ahead beside John and they exchanged a mutter every so often. Sleep still had its last hooks in me, and their words floated under my hearing, incomprehensible.

‘That’s a brook?’ Mia seemed unimpressed by the few black yards of water between us and the bushes on the other side.

‘In America they’d call it a creek.’ John had been to the States for his two previous summers. Perhaps he was unconscious of how quickly he referenced that fact in any conversation. He rummaged in his coat pocket again and brought out what looked like a cigarette with a middle-aged spread.

‘You don’t smoke,’ I said.

‘It’s herb, man.’ John sounded like what he was, a posh boy trying to impersonate a Rasta, and failing badly.

‘I thought you were joking.’ The words escaped me before I realised how many cool points I had just blown away in front of the only girl I knew. ‘Did Elton . . . ?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ John snorted.

‘Elton’s dad would kill him if he touched this stuff.’ Mia smiled. ‘His mum, too. And his brothers. John bought it off me. I know a guy.’ She shrugged.

‘I . . . don’t have a light.’ John patted his chest as if a cigarette lighter or matches were the sort of thing he might reasonably expect to find in his inner pocket.

Mia sighed and produced a flame from a silver lighter, cupping it with her other hand.

The glowing tip of John’s joint tracked toward his face. He put the cold end to his lips and puffed a great cloud of smoke. ‘Great.’ He creaked the word through his effort to suppress a cough and offered the joint to me. ‘Try it.’

John’s look of amazement when I actually took it was comical.

The voices of a dozen responsible adults rose along with the hand lifting it toward my mouth. Their protests rang in the back of my mind: Mrs Green, a favourite teacher in my second year, shrill, denouncing; Mother, stern and disappointed; Mr Stanley from chess club, disapproving. I blocked them out. I had cancer. The biggest C. Why not live a little? Taste what was on offer before the fates swept it all beyond my reach.

I put my lips where John’s had been and inhaled. I might not have smoked, but I knew how to do it. Smoke filled my lungs like cool fire. I held it there until a tickle sprang up and became a demand and I coughed it out.

‘Easy, Nicky-boy!’ John never talked like that. This was for Mia. He slapped my back hard enough to stagger me toward the water.

I caught a foot on a root and almost pitched into the brook but managed to regain my balance with nothing worse than muddy shoes. Coughing, I went back, something angry on my tongue . . . but the figure standing on the path stole away whatever I was going to say.

‘There’s someone back there,’ I said, not taking my eyes from the black shape in the shadows.

John shrugged and passed the red ember of the joint to Mia. ‘It’s a free country.’

‘You see him, though?’ It didn’t feel right: the man on our path, motionless, watching, made monstrous by the inky tree-haunted spaces around him.

John looked again. ‘It’s just some guy.’ He sounded uneasy, though, bravado gone.

‘We should go.’ Mia pinched out the joint, serious. She knew something was wrong.

‘Sure.’ John led us off, eager now. Not back the way we came, but along the path that tracked the river. I followed, last, and the cold night seemed to echo around me. From the corner of my eye I saw phantoms, couples walking arm in arm, boys chasing each other, a woman with a dog, as if ghostly impressions of the park’s visitors had returned to repeat their day’s walks. None of them lasted if I turned to look at them, breaking apart like John’s clouds of smoke. My head felt too heavy and the world kept rotating when I stopped moving. One drag on a joint and I was high already?

‘He’s coming!’ Mia, her voice tight. I glanced back and saw the man advance, one black shape detaching from another, and the faintest gleam from a bald skull.

‘Run!’ John broke into a sprint.

It’s a free country. The phrase whispered itself around me as I tried to run, too, brushing away the ghosts of a mother and child ambling down the path.

After that a panic took hold and we were all three fleeing with the focused urgency that is the gift of real fear and is stolen away when fear grows into terror. A swift nightmare of bushes, clawing branches, and blind corners followed.

‘Jesus!’ John leaned against the brick gatepost, hauling in his breath. ‘What were we even running for?’ He tried to laugh but started choking.