The next morning I went to school early. My chick had died during the night. Its downy body was stiff and cold and its eyes were squeezed shut in an expression of concentration. I looked around the classroom. Empty. There was nobody to see when I switched the tag from my dead chick’s leg with the tag on Adam McDonagh’s chick, a vigorous little bundle. Having made the swap, I sat with my new charge at my desk. It was a lesson about life, though not the one Ms Lurie intended. My fascination with death had paled; how could it compete with life, the thrill of a beating heart?

The bell rang and students entered. They mobbed the cardboard pens. ‘One’s dead!’ someone exclaimed. ‘It’s Adam’s. Look, it’s dead!’

‘What?’ said Adam, barging over. When he saw the fuzzy corpse, he refused to accept it. ‘But… but…’ he said, faltering. He let out a violent, ugly sob. He couldn’t help it or disguise it, and it was followed by more sobs. His grief was liquid and convulsive, a force of mucus, tears and spittle. Ms Lurie could not console him, not for all the coloured stickers in her storeroom or the world. He shouted that he hated chickens and hated Ms Lurie even more and then he stormed out of the classroom and downhill to the road, where he tore the budding roses off the bushes by the fence.

Moses knew my secret. He’d seen the weakness in my chick. But he never let on to Adam, not even when they started to have more to do with each other, playing football on Saturday mornings. He kept my secret as I later kept his, and when we had our assembly at the end of the term, I stood centre-stage with the grown chicken and accepted the applause as if I had earned it.

The end of the year came with a run of sweltering days. Bea came back from her travels like Christopher Columbus; she gave me her report as if to the king of Spain. Her journeys had made her into a sophisticate and she thought nothing of wearing a crop top with her bike shorts. She showed me the sanitary pads she had taken from the plane. ‘They’re these amazing long cushions you put in your pants.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘What for?’

‘Oh, anything,’ she said.

We tried them out that afternoon on the motorbike. Beforehand, as she and Benny tinkered with the bike, I went inside in search of snacks and to grab Bea’s boots and socks. ‘Not the good socks,’ she added. But when I stood at her drawer, I faced an impossible dilemma: here were untold pairs of socks, an abundance of spots and stripes. I picked the least appealing, a plain white pair. As I went back past the dining room I saw Bea’s uncle eating lunch. Something about him checked my stride. I hadn’t seen him in a year, and he came into focus as a person in his own right; as someone making an effort, drawing himself up, summoning the will to go on with his work. I suddenly wondered what it was like to have his life, his burden of obligations, the care of the farm as well as Benny.