He's a little blurred around the edges in my memory these days.

I remember how he dyed his hair dark brown and let the roots grow out when he got bored of it. After a while only the tips of his hair were brown, the rest his natural blonde. I remember thinking how on most people it would have looked awful but somehow he managed to pull it off.

I never found out how he got the scar on his face. The story changed every time. It was thin, and ran over his cheeks and nose.

The last time I saw him his glasses were broken. So was his nose.

They never found the body.

Lots of people used to think he was gay, because he wore nail varnish and was friends with lots of girls. I don't know what he was. We never really spoke about it. He never had a problem with me, though, when I came out as bisexual, and he always used my non-binary pronouns. He was never bothered by the other boys' taunts about his sexuality. I presume he was straight, he only ever went out with two girls in the years we were friends. I went out with a boy and and girl, one of which I'm still friends with, the other I haven't spoken to in years.

I once heard two little year eights at school muttering to each other as they saw him pass.

"He's like a cream egg: hard on the outside and soft on the inside."

"How do you eat yours?"

"Oh, I just scoff it."

I remember sitting with him on the peer and eating ice creams (he loved the sea, and living so close to the beach, while the winters were bitterly cold, made the summers endless fun for the pair of us.) and he told me this story that stayed with me. He said,

"I never knew my granddad's real name until his funeral."

And I dripped my 99 all over my hands and spent a few moments slobbering on my fingers with almost indecent gusto. When I had finished I looked up and saw him watching me, smiling.

"Oh- sorry- what did you say?"

"I didn't know my grandad's real name until I went to his funeral," he said.

"What?" I asked, shocked.

"It wasn't like some secret identity or anything," he reassured me. "So what I thought his name was, what everyone called him, was Robin. At his funeral they said 'Robert'. I didn't know who they were talking about at first."

"How can that be true?"

I was sceptical- I remember that, because he was always telling funny little stories which rarely had elements of truth in them. But he didn't usually tell them to me; we were best friends.

"I know, it was so weird, it was like I'd never known him properly," he said. And then, after a moments hesitation, "that's why my middle name is Robert."

"I didn't know that."

I sensed that he wanted to be careful to disclose too much information about himself, which was strange to me, because I was always so open about my own family. It was like he felt that he'd said too much.

"Well, there you go," he sighed. "I never knew."

I looked at my hands and the ice cream pooling gently in the crevasses of my fingers. I didn't know what to say.

"Let's swim," he said suddenly, jumping to his feet and dropping his empty ice cream cone in a nearby bin.

(That's something else I remember very vividly: he never littered and always took great care over the recycling.)

As we swam and mucked around in the water which sparkled with crystals of light dancing over the surface from the glorious sunshine, I thought about that. Never knowing your grandparent's real name until it was too late to call them by it. I vowed to myself that day to make sure I spoke to my gran at least once a week. Who knew how long we all have left?

And it's a bit ironic, because he died less than a year after that day at the beach, and there was so much I didn't know about him, so much I still don't know, even now.