‘Mustn’t grumble though, eh? I’m gonna join the army anyway. You seen this?’ He gets his phone out of his pocket and turns it in my direction. The screen is full of greasy flesh colours and jerking movement.

I look away.

‘Not your kind of thing? Best looked at in private I guess. How about this?’

The next video starts shakily. It shows a street at night. Across the road, behind a row of parked cars, two men are running, the camera tracking their hooded heads. They come up quickly behind a third head, this one with a white or yellow cloth wrapped around it. It takes a second to realise it’s a turban, but by this time the head has disappeared beneath the roofs of the cars.

‘Hang on, I’ll turn the sound up.’

Behind the background noise of nearby traffic, and the breathing of the person filming, there’s a muffled thud, thud. It sounds like stamping. Then there’s a loud noise, halfway between a moan and a scream. The two heads, who have been standing where the turbaned man fell, come out from between the parked cars, running towards the camera, shouting ‘Go, Go.’ The camera goes shaky again, following the back of one of the hooded men, and then the clip ends.

There’s a few seconds of silence. I think I know what I’ve just seen, but I’m not sure.

‘Good, right? The prick didn’t know we were coming. No chance we’ll get done. And no CCTV on that road – my brother told me.’

Then it clicks. Alan’s face looks a lot like Carl’s, the man who hit me. Alan’s hair’s a bit longer, his jaw rounder, but the resemblance is unmistakable now.

‘That’s my brother, running off in front of me,’ he says, playing me the last half of the clip again. ‘He used to be in the army. Knows just how to do a raid like that. He says if I work on my fitness I could be invable as an infantryman.’

‘Invaluable. Prick,’ says the fourth head. I don’t know him. He doesn’t introduce himself.

‘Invaluable, yeah, whatever. He was a great soldier, my brother. Too good. They wouldn’t let him stay. He was too dangerous. You can’t have soldiers who can think for themselves, can you?’

‘Right, yeah.’ I don’t know what else to say.

‘But I’m not clever like him. So I’ll be alright. But this is good, right?’ Alan’s eyes are lit up with excitement. His finger hovers over the play button again.

‘Yeah.’

‘Al!’ An urgent voice from the stool nearest the door.

Alan is still sauntering back to his place as Mr Walters re-enters. He looks quizzically at Alan, then at me. I quickly open the textbook again, to a page I can’t even pronounce the title of, and start reading.