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Mark. After she left, he used to hang around here like a lost soul. He’d left school by then, but he was too young to be on supplementary, so he didn’t have any money to spend. He didn’t run with any of the gangs.’"

"‘Didn’t seem to have any mates at all, to be honest,’ Tom chipped in.

‘He just sat, out there on the walkway, the livelong day. Bouncing a ball off a wall, or reading a comic sometimes. And sometimes some of the younger kids would sit with him, on a weekend or after school, because he had the comics - the American ones, you know, with Spiderman and whatnot - and he’d let the little ones take them away when he’d finished reading them.

’

‘So that was how Billy got to know him.’ Jean’s tone became more sombre and her eyes defocused. This part she was remembering more vividly. ‘He’d sit with Mark for an hour or more, just talking about superheroes and superpowers. And he’d come in with an armload of Superman and Spiderman and X-Man and Daredevil-Man, and sit on that sofa -’ she nodded towards the living room, one skin of brickwork away on the other side of the wall that faced her ‘- for hours.

In his own little world.

‘Then I found the poem.’

Tom’s face darkened at the word. ‘Show him,’ he suggested. ‘Show it to him.’

‘I don’t know if I kept it,’ Jean said. And then, abandoning the subterfuge immediately, ‘All right.’

She got up and turned her chair round. Using it as an ad hoc stepladder, she climbed up onto the seat and reached into the space on top of one of the kitchen cabinets.

A moment later she got down again and handed me a sheet of paper: lined, folded into four, ragged along the left-hand edge where it had been torn from a pad or an exercise book.

I opened it up and read in silence. Twelve lines in small, neat handwriting with only one crossing-out.

If I could talk, I’d talk. It’s the easy choice.

But I can’t, so my knife has to be my voice.

I sing. Do you hear me sing? But what you don’t know

Is what that sounds like inside me, in the depths below.

I’m full of pain. Like a bottle full of coke.

I take the blade and it just needs one stroke.

It comes out, but it changes as it flows.

Water becomes wine. My wound becomes a rose.

The pressure is balanced, outside and in.

The torment is over, the future can begin.

In that moment I know where I belong.

So you see why I need the blade to make my song.

The crossing out was in the fifth line. I’m full of pain had originally been I’m full of darkness.