I sat down in the same place I’d been sitting when he’d called Marie and me in that very morning.

“You’ve had a piece of luck!”

“Do you think so?” I said, pointing at the cotton wool in my nose, which was making me cross-eyed. It wasn’t what I called lucky!

“Yes. If your friend Marie hadn’t come to speak to the Head, I think you might well have been suspended.”

“She did that?”

“Yes. And to explain your aggressive behaviour she gave us this: it was in the snowball.”

He opened his fist and flicked a stone into his hand, like a tennis ball.

“Legitimate self-defence, then?”

“Possibly … but you’ll still get a warning about the ear.”

“Sorry to change the subject, but I found the answer to your question about Alexandre Dumas.”

His eyes lit up, as though we were finally coming on to a serious subject.

“And so?”

“And so, things are a bit complicated, according to my sources. But well, anyway, to sum up, I can confirm that he wrote all his books on his own. On his own from beginning to end. He was not the type to have ghostwriters, even though he wrote ghost stories! If you get me.”

“I knew it. What a guy! Not one of these constipated little writers you get these days who want a Nobel Prize for squeezing out a hundred pages.”

By the time I got home I had a splitting headache. A whole army was goose-stepping inside my skull, with the artillery and air power coming up behind. But I still went to see my blackbird in his shoebox. The breadcrumbs were gradually disappearing. It was a good sign. He must have been pecking at them while no one was watching. It made me think that wounded blackbirds must need to withdraw from the world too. I held him in the palm of my hand. It felt like holding a little portable heart. He was both really light and very heavy at the same time, which is quite hard to explain.

Dad got me some aspirin and I stretched out on the sofa, underneath a blanket, while he prepared the following month’s edition of the Journal. Then we turned on the TV. We selected a culture channel because now, with the education I was getting, and also thanks to Marie opening my eyes to culture, I couldn’t let things slide.