We hung out until the encroaching shade had gathered in our spot. As we would do every other time we met, we chatted our own brand of crap. The likelihood of Noah’s Ark sinking, why everyone was famous in their past lives, if aliens really do just look like us but with funny eyes, that sort of thing. We share an inability to do small talk. We’ve never cared what was on telly last night. Her company – that first time and always – was like someone opening a window in my forehead, and letting a breeze drift through my musty brain.

After she’d left, as I gathered her cigarette butts from the ground to find a bin, I took one last look at that inscription. The carving seemed to be etched deeper by the failing light.

I made my way home, and I sat in my room watching the video to that Queen song. I stared into Freddie Mercury’s pale face as he sang – a man who knew he didn’t have much time left, giving it everything. For four minutes, music made sense to me like it once did. I remembered how something recorded a lifetime ago could feel like it had been stuck in a box just for me, and just for that moment.

I hadn’t known Kenny Burton, but I cried for him all the same. I cried because a life could be reduced to a piece of timber fading in the afternoon sun, to be slowly consumed by the elements. I cried because a good guy who never took the danger seriously had paid for that with his life. But mostly I cried at the terrible waste it is to live forever looking backwards, accepting that those were the days of our lives.

10.14 a.m.

He doesn’t like me. I don’t like him. Neither of us wants to do this.

‘Ollie,’ Mr Clark says, dragging out the last syllable like we’re mates in a pub and he’s getting the beers in. He leans forward and shakes my hand with a jerking action. He doesn’t quite look at me. ‘Take a pew.’

I ease myself down across the tiny wooden desk from him. We’re squeezed into the little foyer between the entrance of the Portakabin and the door to the classroom itself, a kind of temporary office for his morning of pep talks.

‘You’ll probably be glad to get this term over with, won’t you?’ he says, leaning back in his seat, rattling a biro between his teeth. I shrug my shoulders.

‘Look on the bright side: a few weeks of exams and you won’t have to worry about this motley crew,’ he says with a chuckle, gesturing with his thumb towards the slightly open classroom door. ‘Revision going OK?’