Of course, not everyone gets to spend their life following their passion. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up here, back in dull old Malbry. The clay pits are gone, landfilled, link-fenced; but somehow the spirit of them lives on. Kids from Sunnybank Park still go to smoke their roll-up cigarettes; some of them climb the fence at night. What are they looking for in there? Nowadays, it’s decent enough, if not entirely wholesome. Gone are the fridges crawling with mold; the rocks; the cars half buried in the soil, their fins chopping the surface like sharks’. Now it’s just a grassy space, perhaps too bleak to be called a park, with a few little trees and a memorial bench that no one ever sits on. Perhaps they sense how haunted it is; and not just by Lee Bagshot. The living make better ghosts than the dead. I know; I’ve been one for twenty-four years.

After I came back to Malbry, I went looking for my time capsule, with the album, the Christmas card, and the pages torn out of my diary. I knew exactly where it was, buried under a big rock between the Pit Shaft and the Long Pond. Except that when I went looking, neither the Pit Shaft nor the Long Pond was recognizable anymore, the big rock had gone into landfill, and the time capsule was lost. I’m rather disappointed; I would have liked to read those pages again, to see how much I’ve really changed. Perhaps I haven’t changed at all. I look into my mirror at night and see a fourteen-year-old boy, wrinkled before his time, with disappointment in his eyes. But the real David Spikely is somewhere else; a demon that cannot be exorcised.

Harry Clarke stayed in his post for seven years after the scandal. I stayed on for a month or two, although, for obvious reasons, I stopped spending lunchtimes in his room. Goldie and I were both under strict instructions about that, and Mr. Speight and the Chaplain both kept us under discreet supervision. It was very frustrating. I wanted to know what (if anything) Poodle had said about me. But Harry never mentioned anything, and because he wasn’t my English teacher, I didn’t see him much at all. Just once or twice in the corridor, at which times he spoke to me just as he spoke to everyone else. I left Malbry in ’82; went to a school in Manchester. My grades were fair, but my health was poor. I developed alopecia. I lost my hair and eyebrows. My eyebrows came back eventually, but my hair did not; by sixteen I was totally bald, and looked like a man of forty.