Over the Christmas holidays, Dylan considered these revelations and made a new year’s resolution to come out at school. Most of the young women teachers had already guessed, since their attempts to flirt with Dylan had been rebuffed. Only one of his older male colleagues seemed less friendly. The head teacher, a dynamic forty-something in her first headship, praised Dylan for his courage and said he’d be a good role model for the four boys in years ten and eleven who’d come out.

Mr Roberts’ coming out was the topic of conversation for a couple of weeks after the Christmas break. Jane Jones thought it was such a waste that someone as handsome and sexy as her Welsh teacher could be gay, and Shân Jenkins, who’d been ditched by the Aldi management trainee at a drunken New Year’s Eve party, thought she might try to seduce him. A clutch of the rugby boys cackled a bit, but that was mostly to disguise their own insecurity. In fact, most of Dylan Roberts’ students thought it was ‘dead cool’ that he was gay.

Seimon, though, was surprised… at first, anyway. He knew about gays and lesbians, of course; his parents had even been to a Civil Partnership – one of the very first gay weddings – a college friend of his dad’s: Miriam. She was nice, but her partner Kate was built like a wrestler, and a bit like a man – with hairy arms and legs, and always wearing jeans and check shirts. He didn’t really know any gay men, except the boys who’d come out at school, but like Graham Norton and Julian Clary on the television, they seemed so girly. He was taken aback when Mr Roberts came out because his teacher was so normal.

Seimon had been slow to discover that touching and rubbing parts of his body – well, that part especially, could feel nice, though he hadn’t done it often because he’d overheard some of the rugby boys say that wanking could cause a deformity and even blindness. In the days after hearing that Mr Roberts was gay he wondered if his teacher did it… and whether he did it with other men. Seimon became aroused by these possibilities. For about a week he tried not to think such thoughts, but one night, in the privacy of his room and feeling secure under the duvet, he petted and stroked himself and imagined Mr Roberts doing the same. In some unexplainable way, imagining Mr Roberts masturbating made the possibility of deformity and blindness less credible. After that he did it more often and before too long they were touching one another; even his classroom daydreams became sexual fantasies.