Afterwards was the first time I saw you naked in the light. Your arms and face were tanned but the rest of your skin looked like rice paper. Like I could put a finger through it. Like it would melt against my tongue.

I looked at it all. The skin between your hip bones, the way it scooped like a skate-ramp. The small little nest between your legs, ingredients for a fire. It was the fact that we were in a bed that got me. The fact that we were staying there.

‘You do realise you’re staring at me,’ you said.

‘Not true,’ I said. ‘I was staring into the middle distance.’

Your mosquito bites were raised. For a second, they shifted in my brain to snake bites. I wanted to suck the poison out. I wanted to protect you. It rushed into me, that feeling. You pushed your forehead into my arm. The tip of your nose was cooler than the rest of you.

You asked me about the first time I’d ever been with a girl. I told you about Rugi Thomas, who I’d known liked girls for ever.

‘But how did you know that?’ you said.

‘She was a bit boyish. You know. She’d start to undo her flies before she opened the door to go into the toilet. That kind of thing.’

You laughed. ‘Okay, Sherlock Holmes.’

‘You know what I mean, though. A tomboy, or something. The way she held herself. The way she walked. She wore big T-shirts. Everyone knew she was.’

‘And did they know that you were?’

‘Were what? I’m not.’

‘It doesn’t sound like anyone knew anything.’

‘She asked me if I liked boys and girls. Boys or girls.’

‘And you said.’

‘Wouldn’t she like to know.’

‘Well, obviously.’

‘It was weird and I wasn’t drunk but kind of drunk and I remember looking at her hands and arms more than I’d ever looked at anyone’s hands and arms before.’ I looked at you now. ‘So I said she could try it on with me if she liked but it would never work. And she said okay.’

‘Then what did she do?’

‘She walked off! Walked right away. Didn’t speak to me. I watched her. I tried to talk to other people but I watched her. Obviously. I couldn’t stop. Later I went to find her, and speak to her, and I said, “I thought you were supposed to be trying it on with me.” And she said, “Didn’t it work?”’

‘Right.’

‘And then she took me back to her home, and she lived alone, and I didn’t really think about it.’

‘You can’t just finish the story like that.’

‘It felt fine.’

‘There’s no way it just felt fine.’

‘Good. Or fine. No, good. I felt filled up with it.’

‘Do you think about her?’ you said. Said it softly. I couldn’t read your eyes. What that little flicker meant. Whether you wanted to be made jealous or not. I shook my head. You’d taken my hand, unbent my fingers, and took one in your mouth.

‘What about you?’ I said.

‘Do I think about Rugi Thomas?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t, ’cos I already told you,’ you said. I remember you shutting your eyes. Your eyelids like tissue paper.

‘I want to hear it again.’

You nodded and then you turned in the bed so your face was buried in the sheets.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I said.

‘It was my first time,’ you said again, your mouth muffled by cotton. Your eyes flicked up at me.

‘Well you’re a natural.’

‘You’re being cruel.’

‘No, honestly,’ I said. ‘Like a duck to water.’

There was a plastic cover over the bed. We’d left it where it was, but now you peeled it back and slipped under the covers. The sheets were ironed. Ironed lemons and the smell of years and years of not being slept on.

‘Why didn’t the owners come back?’ you asked me, stretching your body out into a small star. ‘If I had this bed, I would come back here.’

‘I think lots of people thought they were just leaving for a while, until things settled. Then no one could sell.’

Crick in my neck. I pushed at it with my knuckles until your hands took over. Our heads poked out from the duvet, and our arms, too, thick clouds of white under our elbows.

‘I had a brother,’ I said then. I wasn’t even thinking about saying that. It just came out. Maybe it was talking about people leaving. The thought of you leaving.

‘You told me. Blue like the colour, or for a different thing?’

‘A different brother. Older than me.’ It caught in my chest.

‘Is he…?’ You turned back to me. That breeziness again. ‘Oh right. Where is he?’

This time, I tried to say it lightly too. Because each time I said it, it did it again. Like a tiny fragment of him stayed alive and each time someone said he was dead, it cut a little bit more away. ‘Drugs or whatever. Nothing special.’

It wasn’t the right time to tell you. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it had been so nice that I wanted to make it bad somehow. I do that. I missed out the middle and told you the end. JD’s big back to the wall. The mess where his nose was. His nostrils one circle, his septum a little pink stub, his eyes even worse. The colour of the pupils had burst its banks.

You were frowning. Your forehead didn’t look used to that.

‘We still don’t really know what had happened,’ I said. ‘In the end, I had to get people from the building to help get his body down.’

I didn’t say that they had dropped him a few times on the stairs. How much I’d hated that.

‘Did he mean to?’ you said.

‘JD?’ I shook my head. ‘He was a million fucking dumb things, but he’d never have done that. Never wanted to do that.’

Kole said it was a bad batch, a batch with all these other things added in. He said that it had come from London, down on the county lines. He said he knew where the guy was staying, he said he’d go round that night. Kole said it was nothing to do with him. Nothing to do with him again and again, until Ma believed him.

We were still naked, and as hot as we’d been, that’s how cold we’d become. Salt and goosebumps.

‘What about you?’ I said.

Our ankles were jigsawed underneath the covers. I looked at your nipples, the pinker skin like a mountain range.

‘What’s wrong?’ you said.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, something. You just pulled your body away from me.’

‘Nothing. It’s just I just told you about how my brother…’

‘I know.’

‘No, but, I don’t…’

‘What?’

‘I mean, you’re a stranger. I don’t even know what you’re doing here.’

‘What do you think I’m doing here?’ Your hand padded over the bed, looking for mine. Couldn’t find it. ‘We just… And it was…’ You semi-shut your eyes and did this dancing smile.

‘Not that. I know that.’ I looked at you. Your hair was splashed onto the pillows. There was a word in the air between us. I didn’t want to say it.

Pity. It was the only word I could think of. Was that why you’d come here? That was the only reason people like you came here. But if that was what it was, where would that leave us? I wouldn’t know my way back from that.

‘Then don’t be silly,’ you said.

You pushed yourself into me. My hand found itself against the side of your belly. It was the softest skin I’d ever touched. Softer, even, than Blue’s. So soft I wondered if there would be some kind of powder on my fingers when I pulled them away.