I’ve never had that dream again. It’s Daniel who still comes to me. So was the boy Jason Patel? Was seeing him in tears a premonition? Hardly. Jason looked like a white boy, his skin was the color of cream and his brown hair was straight. Only his eyes showed his Asian origin on the mother’s side, dark brown irises floating in a white-blue like mother of pearl.

The dream was forgotten, to surface again in memory a month or two later when I encountered Jason himself. First, I had other things to think about. I felt virtuous going off to college when there was strictly no need for me to do so, the lecture I might be expected to attend and Caroline Bodmer’s tutorial not taking place until the afternoon. In fact, I went to neither. A message from the principal awaited me and was handed to me with a lowering look the moment I arrived in what, with fearful presumption, GUP called the Undergraduate Common Room.

Everyone had been on tenterhooks about their work assessments and whether they’d be considered good enough to come back the next year. Sometimes I thought dismissing me might be the answer to my problems and sometimes that this would be the worst that could happen. When the principal said, in highly uncompromising terms, that I could hardly be assessed on my course work since I had done none and I wouldn’t be welcome back in October, I felt a marvelous lightness of being. They had done it for me, I need not do it, I need never see the place again, it was over. I even relished looking for the last time at the horrible view from that walkway, the old, still soot-blackened warehouses, the new cuboid blocks of council flats, the ancient shot tower, the chimneys, the lock-up garages, the building sites and rubble heaps, the gray wispy grass between scabby brick ruins.

To tell Max or not? To tell Mum and Dad? As it turned out, the only person I told at that stage was Silver and then we were interrupted by Liv who came into his bedroom without knocking to ask if the money had come from her parents.

“Give them a chance,” Silver said. “It’s not much more than twelve hours since you gave them my bank details.”

By this time she knew what the policeman had come about and that it hadn’t been about her. She was having second thoughts. Why had she panicked and phoned her parents?

“It is all your fault,” she said to me. “Now they are knowing where I am.”