And so, after a while, I began to feel really confident in some subjects. I even participated in class and contributed knowledgeable comments to the lessons. Usually, these were suggestions that Marie had made while we were working together, but I think it was only my friend Haisam who guessed.

But it was the approaching Christmas fair and The Rattletraps’ concert that was really stressing me out. Luckily, Etienne and Marcel wanted to keep the musicians’ identity a secret. Being masters in the art of cheesy ideas, they’d cobbled together a poster showing the silhouettes of three musicians with question marks instead of heads. They were stuck up all over the school. One day, when Marie and I were walking past a row of these posters, she asked me, “Do you know what kind of music they’re going to play?”

“Rock, I should think, or something of the sort…”

“You’ll probably laugh at me, but listening to stuff like that is absolute torture for my ears. I can’t bear it, just like I can’t bear liver. What about you, do you like that kind of thing?”

“Liver or rock bands?”

“Both.”

I nearly spilled the beans and told her that she was looking at the founder of The Rattletraps, and what’s more I played guitar and sang for them, but in the end I chickened out.

“I’ve never tasted liver,” I replied. “As for rock musicians, they’re just a bunch of jokers. As far as I’m concerned, playing music without being able to read the notes, well, I just don’t get it. It’s like swimming without water, for goodness’ sake! Or French skipping without the skip!”

I should have taken the opportunity to own up to everything. She probably would have teased me a bit, or maybe not, but in any case it wouldn’t have been much worse than that.

This business about the concert that Etienne and Marcel had organized was seriously beginning to worry me. They wanted us to come onstage dressed as Zorro and throw our masks into the audience during the first chords of a song called “Hittin’ the Wall” – words and music by me. They thought this was a phenomenal idea, but I couldn’t help feeling slightly ashamed at the prospect of connecting everything up to 220 volts and flailing around as though we had batteries up our bums, when for centuries there’d been geniuses – including deaf and blind ones – who’d dedicated their whole lives to coming up with sounds that actually hung together.