Mum’s voice from the hallway breaks the silence. ‘All done. Thank you, Mr Walters, for your help. And can I just say thanks again for looking out for Josh. He’s really responding to the Biology work. It’s brilliant you’ve taken an interest.’

‘Just doin’ ma job.’ His cowboy accent is truly awful, but Mum laughs delightedly. ‘I’ll be on my way now though. See you tomorrow then, Josh. Mrs Milton.’

As he leaves, Mum puts out a hand to pat the air a few inches from where his arm had just been. Turning, she walks back to the kitchen. ‘Thursday already, eh? You been home long, Love?’

‘Yes Mum, since school finished.’

I haven’t. In a bid to avoid Alan and Vince as instructed, I’d gone back to the burial ground again and sat for a while by Dad’s tree as it got dark. I’d apologised, in a kind of half-whispered, half-thought way, for how much I’d let him down in the last few years by not doing anything about his murder. I told him how he must have been ashamed of me for not recognising what he’d done, and for how I’d just carried on as usual without realising that he’d died in an ongoing war which I hadn’t even known about. I’d explained that I knew now, and that I was going to change. The rising wind had howled its approval, and I’d pushed against my nose again, wincing through the pain and making it bleed fresh onto the tree’s deepening roots. Just a few drops. Perhaps now he’d come to me in my dreams.

I’d told Dad what I was learning, and read to him some stuff from the websites about the movement of the mob and the anger. About how we are being weakened from within, and about how we need to expose the lies of society through humour – I know now why the frog, Pepe (I know his name now), is such a powerful symbol.

I’d told him about the things I’d been learning from the White Lions site and others, explained how the mainstream media aren’t reporting on all the actions that are happening up and down the country in an accurate way; about how their words like ‘hate crime’ and ‘racially motivated attacks’ are being spun by their mainstream bias because they are owned by the same people who want to eradicate us. I’d told my dad exactly what Carl tells people on the site. ‘This is why we use their tactics, Dad. Fakery and irony and treating nothing we do as serious. If we do that, they can’t pin us down and we stay one step ahead.’

‘But it is serious, deeply serious. But we always remain, on the outside, unserious. It’s by treating our beliefs as a joke that we show how serious we are.’