Amit looks at me with a pained expression. ‘He’s not worth it, Nate. That’s all.’ He shrinks into his chair.

Mr Clark is standing in the doorway, his chubby form exaggerated by his stance: hands in pockets spreading his cream slacks wide apart. He’s been hovering there for most of the conversation. ‘Come on, let’s all quieten down now, lads,’ he says. Just that. Nothing more.

‘Morcombe knows I’m kidding, sir,’ Nate says, freefalling into his plastic chair.

The bell sounds for the start of school as the remainder of 11C amble in. They take their seats around me. I would never have picked this desk right in the middle of the room, a location that has left me prone to threats and projectiles from every angle. But today, alone at a desk intended for two, occupying this spot has its advantages.

‘Here he is, the man!’ says Mr Clark, making a show of checking his Apple watch and not quite believing what it tells him. ‘He’s beaten the register. It can be done.’

Joey Mackie struts in with a couple of hangers-on in his wake, holding out his hand, which Mr Clark duly low-fives. ‘I’m impressed, Joe-boy,’ he says.

With just eleven months separating them, Joey and Nate have always been in the same form. ‘Like chalk and cheese,’ is the pathetic cliché favoured by the teaching staff for the two of them. Sure, Joey might be five inches shorter than his brother, stocky, and so dark he has a five o’clock shadow by mid-morning, but there the differences end. They share the same fine-tuned nose for weakness, the same enthusiasm for the uncontested fight.

If you met them, you’d probably imagine that they’d grown up in some grotty bedsit, and spent their childhood hustling at a boxing club. It’s what they’d love you to think, but it’s nonsense. They live in Acacia Way, in this big four-bed house that’s recently had Roman pillars put round the front door. And some days their dad gives them a ride to school in his brand-new Audi convertible; always with the roof down, always with his golf bag upright on the back seat, as if his clubs enjoy nothing more than a ride with the wind in their hair.

‘Check out Morcombe’s barnet,’ Nate calls to his brother.

Joey glances at me, unimpressed. He cuts close to my desk as he heads for his own. Swerving as he passes, he swings his rucksack into the side of my head. It catches me square on the ear, causing the sort of boiling pain that it’s impossible not to react to. I stare up at him, biting my lip. He blows me a kiss. It provokes a shrill round of ‘Mooor-cooombe’ from most of the room. The sound resonates within my skull.