‘Starving,’ Ellie said. I could see that she was going to get over the awkwardness of all this pretty quickly once something nice to eat was put in front of her.

Actually, I was starting to feel peckish too. It’ll sound like boasting to say I could eat more or less what I liked without it making much difference to my figure, but it was true. Mum sometimes made melancholy little comments about it. Every now and then she’d go on diets that made her very bad-tempered; she wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t exactly trim either. She was mum-shaped, basically: she’d softened up and fleshed out after having us, and didn’t have the time or energy to go to the gym and turn the clock back.

Mark cleared his throat and asked what our days at school had been like. I didn’t say much because it didn’t seem likely that he was seriously interested in my History test, and I wasn’t exactly about to start telling him about spotty Toby Andrews having a crush on me, or my friend Jasmine being caught smoking outside school. But Ellie took the question and tried to run with it. Then she lost her thread halfway through, broke off and gazed into the middle distance as if waiting for inspiration to return to her.

Mum and I were used to Ellie’s long-windedness: Mark wasn’t. He didn’t show any signs of impatience, though. He definitely didn’t seem to be a total bastard, though that might just have been a cunning pretence.

‘… and then we’re going to have to do it all over again next week,’ Ellie said, finishing her complaint about being made to go cross-country running that morning.

‘Cross-country’s no big deal,’ I said. ‘You can usually get away with walking most of it if you run at the start.’

Mark frowned. ‘I’m not sure that’s the right attitude. Out in the real world, you have to compete if you want to win.’

I shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, at my school, nobody takes that stuff very seriously. Anyway, I’d rather hang out with my friends at the back than get all sweaty.’

My friend Jasmine was worse than me at absolutely everything, including PE, and couldn’t run ten metres without getting out of breath. But people liked her, which meant I got the reflected glow of her popularity and she got to copy my homework. It was a calculating friendship, but then, relationships at school were calculating, if you had any sense. It was like the Serengeti with a herd of impala crossing it; you didn’t want to be one of the unlucky ones who ended up isolated and got picked off. Heaven only knew how Ellie was going to cope when she moved up from the little primary school where she was now.

‘The other thing that happened was, Bella Montie went round telling everyone there’s a ghost in the girls’ toilets,’ Ellie went on. ‘She got them all worked up about it. Girls were coming out of there and crying and Jessica Thomas nearly fainted. But I know for a fact that there isn’t anything to be afraid of.’