His face lit up when he stopped me. He took out his earbuds – he said he’d been listening to something on Radio National – and told me he lived nearby, in a flat with his son. He took care of Benny, who had a disability pension, but he got a break on Tuesdays when the Samaritans woman came.

He asked after my parents, remembering their names. I didn’t ask about his wife. I don’t know if she was helping to care for Benny or was in his life at all. I knew by then what his property had come to: the sale of parcels of land in a piecemeal way at first, then finally the last clutch of fields with the houses. He’d been freed from one duty to assume another.

‘And you’ve done well,’ he said to me. He knew I had gone to Oxford on a scholarship and then moved to London. He was pleased for me, generously so. Facing him, I felt like a fraud, as if I was once again standing there holding a chicken, a living, thriving thing to which I had no right.

That stupid chicken. I had not stopped feeling guilty about it. I had swapped a dead chicken for a live one, one loyalty for another, and I couldn’t shake the thought that in doing so I had somehow opened the way to the ugly thing that happened next.

‘And how’s Benny doing?’ I asked hesitantly.

‘He has his moments. Don’t we all.’ Mr Noffey shifted and smiled. ‘You wouldn’t have seen him since the… accident.’ That slightest of pauses before he said accident made my heart plummet, as I realised he knew. He knew what the boys had done, and he knew that I knew too.

‘You can see him if you like. If you don’t need to go, that is.’ His brow furrowed slightly and a shadow crossed his features. He tried to give me a way out. ‘Or next time, if you’re in a hurry.’

I was afraid to go with him. I was afraid to see Benny. I felt responsible, complicit. But the troll under the bridge was finally offering me a way across. ‘No, I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I’d like to.’

He smiled again and said, ‘Alright then,’ and untangled his earbuds, then we fell into step together. He was not unhappy, I realised. That was the difference. It opened something in me to see him so transformed, because I understood what despair could do to a person, what a disfiguring force unhappiness can be.

That in-between summer, we had all glimpsed something of the lives to which we would lay claim. All except Benny, whose future was decided for him, taken away and twisted and turned into something else.