Harry frowns. ‘I can’t, Mum. I got homework,’ he says, hoping to remove the necessity of meeting with that weird woman after school, particularly as Virginia had introduced them, and Virginia is not his favourite person right now. He needs to speak to her urgently about the Duke of Edinburgh thing.

His mum is starting the toast, chomping gingerly with one hand on her stomach, just in case.

‘Why didn’t you do it last night, you lazy sod?’

He looks straight at her. ‘I was looking after you, Mum, cooking your supper and stopping you from… hurting yourself.’

Suddenly her face crumples. Her eyes fill and her mouth creases into a round ‘O’ of grief.

‘Hazza, I promise you, it won’t always be like this…’ she sobs.

Harry feels weary. Here we go again, he thinks. There was a time when he would have dissolved in her arms, grateful, hopeful. But not any more.

‘I… I’ll get a job, I’ll tidy the house, I’ll cook for you, I promise. You do believe me, Hazza, don’t you?’

She wears her desperation like a child, lips trembling, eyes leaking, her entire body tight with the promises that she, in that moment, genuinely believes she will keep.

Harry stares at her, at the grey sheets, the yellowed duvet, the blanket draped across the window, the shreds of wallpaper where she has clawed at it in drunken rages. And he feels nothing. It’s as if all the feelings – the fear and disappointment, the bitterness and shame – have worked their way through him, draining away into the cesspool that is his life. He blinks.

‘’Course,’ he says.

School is as tiring as ever. The effort of remaining in with the in-crowd is exhausting and by the time he’s racketing down the corridor, a filled rucksack impeding his exit through the double doors, he’s had it. For years, school was a good place, a place where he always knew what would happen, and the boundaries, annoying though they were, never shifted. That has all changed since Jamie Smith arrived. Before Jamie, Harry’s crew – a mixed bunch of what they affectionately called ‘Lads’ and ‘Sads’ from the two main areas surrounding his community college, the Lav Hill council estate and the middle-class Meads development – rubbed along together pretty well. The Lads taught the Sads how to be cool, modelling uniform breaches and showing them how to smoke in the toilets without detection, and the Sads showed the Lads that being smart didn’t mean you were a loser. They even persuaded them, by example, to occasionally do middle-class things, like clubs and the Duke of Edinburgh Award. But now, things are different.

Harry pushes again at the doors as the weight of human traffic behind him wedges his rucksack even more firmly in the ridges between them.