Ma Myshkin had caught you back at the house, cheap yellow margarine from a stale ham sandwich on your cheap black suit. She sponged it off with a thin flowered handkerchief and said: ‘You’ll see him then?’

You open your eyes.

You feel sick and your fingers are burning.

You put out the cigarette and press the buttons in and out on the radio until you find some music:

The Police.

‘Mrs Myshkin?’

You are in a working telephone box on Merseyside, listening to Mrs Myshkin and the relentless sound of a hard rain on the roof -

‘Yes, he’s fine,’ you say.

The rain pouring down, car lights in the middle of a wet Saturday afternoon in May -

‘I will need to see you again.’

The kind of wet Saturday afternoon you used to spend round your Uncle Ronnie and Aunty Winnie’s over Thornhill way, eating lemon curd tarts and custard pies in their kitchen with his old British motorcycle in pieces on the cracked linoleum, afraid -

‘Can I pop round sometime early in the week?’

Sitting in the sidecar in the garage with Pete, listening to the rain fall on the corrugated roof, the shells in the wall outside so sharp and full of pain, listening to the relentless sound of the hard rain on the roof and not wanting to go home, not wanting to go to school on Monday, dreading it -

‘Tuesday, if that’s OK with you?’

That vague fear even then -

‘Goodbye, Mrs Myshkin.’

That fear again now, less and less vague -

She hangs up and you stand there, in a working telephone box on Merseyside, listening to the dial tone -

The dial tone and the relentless sound of the hard rain on the roof, not wanting to go home, not wanting to go to work, dreading it -

That fear now:

Saturday 14 May 1983 -

D-26 .

That fear here -

Dogs barking -

Getting near.