Less than an hour later, we were back in the garage, and I had discovered several things.

1. Dad’s patience was running low. I knew I’d been shirking the household jobs. I tried sneaking in the back door and up to Libby’s room without him hearing, but he was sorting out paintbrushes downstairs and called me. “Where the heck have you been, sunshine?” He only ever calls me “sunshine” when he’s annoyed. “I need some help: we have to get this place organized.” I promised I’d help him later and scooted off. Pressed for time, I hadn’t had a great deal of choice over clothes for Alfie.

2. Roxy’s mum lived in the front room because she couldn’t get upstairs easily. I’d have to ask Roxy what was wrong with her mum another time. (Is that what you say? “What’s wrong?” Or is it something else, like “What is the nature of her disability?” Who knows? I got the impression that it wouldn’t take much to set her mum off.)

3. Alfie was a boy. That is, not an adolescent yet. (You can tell these things when someone is naked and being helped in and out of the bath.) I’d guess he was about my age, so I asked him, “How old are you, mate?” but he didn’t answer. In fact he didn’t say a single word all the way through the bath, while I washed his hair and he kept his arm out of the water.

4. His other arm had two small scars on the biceps, each about five centimeters long, like an equals sign. I didn’t ask him about it.

5. He had a tattoo. I know! Eleven years old and a tattoo. It was on his back between his shoulder blades. It was a square cross, quite blurred, and big—with a pattern on it that was hard to make out. It looked like one that Grandad Linklater had done when he was in the navy years ago—all smudged and faded.

After he came out of the bath, I helped him dry himself and get dressed. I’d given him a pair of my underpants. They were too big, but it was better than him wearing Libby’s. Her jeans fitted him OK, except they had sparkly sequins in a line down the side of each leg. He didn’t say anything. The T-shirt was plain black, and what I’d thought was a sweater turned out to be a cardigan in pale blue and white, but he couldn’t put it on yet because of his arm. A pair of Libby’s striped rain boots completed a look that was—by anyone’s standards—completely bizarre.

If Alfie minded, he didn’t show it.

Back in the garage, Roxy had acquired bandages, and the gauze stuff that goes under them, some cream in a tube, cotton balls, and a bowl of water. Like the world’s gentlest nurse, she bathed Alfie’s burnt arm and smoothed the cream on it, pausing when he sucked his lips with the pain, then wrapped the bandage round, not too tight, securing it with a safety pin.

She had brought some apples. Alfie ate three, one after the other: core, seeds, everything.

When it was all done, he whispered, “Thank you,” and then—out of nowhere—he started crying. Great heaving sobs that shook his body. All Roxy and I could do was sit next to him.

Roxy put her arm round him and said, “Shhh,” like a mother would, and stroked his hair.

On and on it went, like a summer storm that eases for a few minutes, then comes back again, even more intense. In the end, Roxy was crying too, and I thought for a moment it was all going to set me off as well.

Eventually, though, the sobbing stopped, and he flopped back, exhausted, on the sofa. His mouth dropped open and his head shook slightly from side to side. And then that stopped and he was quiet.

His eyes were still closed when I said, “Do you want to come inside, Alfie? Meet my dad? We can make up a bed for you.”

He opened his eyes but didn’t move his head. I had said the wrong thing again.

“If you tell anyone that I am here—anyone—you’ll regret it.”

Then he closed his eyes. You would almost have thought he was sleeping—except that the tears kept coming, for a long time.