Ma got a job at a pub called The Chipped Pearl, which had a sign above the door that said its chips were famous. She brought home the menu to show us. ‘Look, peanut,’ she said to me. ‘‘‘Our Famous Chips, served with our Famous Gravy.” It’s basically a pub for celebs.’

It was only women who did the daytime shifts at the Pearl, and most of them had kids the same age as me. We played between the bar stools as our mums wiped down the wood and changed the kegs. In the morning, when the deliveries came, Ma would lift the keg above her head as she passed me. Her arms got stronger. She pulled pints like she was steering a ship. When she picked up empties, she’d have one on each finger, like a loose glass glove.

Of the other kids, there was a boy called Anthony, who touched his hair so much it was always greasy. He ate salt with his fingers, would put a pile in his hand and lick it off his palm. And there was Trix, a tiny girl with no pigment in her skin and the palest eyebrows. ‘Both on the spec-trum,’ Ma would say, in another one of her sing-whispered jingles.

Neither of those two matter, really. It’s just to say that the Pearl was also how I first met Davey.

It was his legs I noticed first. Sharp knees that pushed at the denim of his jeans. A restlessness that reminded me of JD. He looked – unlike the other kids – aware of the situation he was in. Fast-eyed, able to think, rather than just letting life happen in front of him. His mum would drink in there all day, and so one lunchtime, when her head was already down on the table, my mum said Davey had better come and sit with us.

He wouldn’t look at any of us at first. He just rubbed away at the little islands of eczema on his arms and tried to look bored. He said what Anthony was doing with the pickles was manky, and I decided, in less than one minute, that I wanted him to be my friend more than the other two. I could see in the way his eyes darted, darted away but always came back to me, that he felt the same.

We started off by being rude to each other. Davey taught me that. He said that being polite didn’t really get you anywhere, particularly round here. ‘Being a pussy is for gays,’ he said. ‘Fact.’

Our mums brought us food before anyone else came in to eat. Meat pie, with crisps. Pasta from the day before, with crisps. ‘Nah, bruv, like this,’ Davey would say, and taught me how to eat the crisps vertically, because of the bash when our teeth broke them in two and the knife-edges of the crisp hit the roofs of our mouths.

Ma would always present the food like we were at a restaurant, an imaginary silver presentation dome.

‘You’ve seen the film Hook,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I always forget you’re younger than me.’ She looked at me with this kind of vague expression, then took a sip from the pint of what she called ‘disco water’ that she kept nestled on the shelf of trinkets behind the bar. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘Hook. Imaginary food fight. That’s what I’m trying to say.’ She looked at me expectantly. That was another thing: even when she was like this, I never had to feel worried in front of Davey, because his mum was always worse. ‘It’s all about imagination!’ she said. ‘The beach? It’s paradise. This pub? The lap of luxury. The lap dance of luxury. It’s just the way you think about it. You – got the power,’ she said. Or sang, rather, using the broom handle as a microphone.

I looked at her. I looked at her drink.

‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to be the clever one.’