I open my mouth to answer her question but then close it again. Jen waits, coiling my chest hair around her finger.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

She slaps my chest and rolls over.

***

When I was young and tucked up in bed I would listen to my mother crying in the next room. She never told me why she cried to the darkness and I never asked.

Outside my bedroom window was a derelict house where a man would sit in the gloom of the overgrown garden drinking and cursing at the moon.

I had my first sleep-over that summer. Matthew, my best friend, was in his sleeping bag on the floor when I chanced a look out of the window. The man was flourishing a bottle in his hand like a crazy conductor leading the stars in song.

“That’s The Child Catche...

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