‘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.

It happened on a Sunday at the swimming pool. Benny was standing behind the block, waiting to dive. He watched the kid in front make a slick efficient entry and didn’t notice Moses and Adam sidling up and exchanging glances. As he stepped onto the block, they mouthed, ‘One two three,’ and pushed. They were a half-moment too early to push him clear into the pool, and his foot caught on the edge. He tripped, windmilling forward. It was another Chaplin sequence, this time in lurid colour. Benny’s block was near the side, and the angle at which he fell meant his head struck the edge of the pool. So did his arm; I winced to think of the graze. Then he was facedown in the water and his head was bleeding, releasing an ink-red plume into the turquoise pool.