For a second, I’m able to imagine it: dodging the Mackies and their knives this afternoon, standing sentry by the front door each night, forcing myself through an incomprehensible mass of exam questions just to return in the autumn and face it all over again – the one prize for a successful defence of my life against impossible odds. The thought crushes my insides.

‘Reckon so,’ I tell him.

‘Good man!’ He gives me two thumbs up.

He glances at his watch. His disappointment that only four minutes of the allotted ten have passed is obvious.

‘The sixth-form years were my best times here,’ he says. ‘Great days. You’ll love it.’ A smug smile forms, the one that always accompanies a tale of his time as a student.

In the main hall there’s this big wooden board hung above the stage. It lists the past head boys. You’ll find his name up there: 1999 – NOEL CLARK. Six years as a student, a few years away to get his degree, then back here ever since. The guy has spent most of his life within the walls of Five Oaks Secondary. And you know the worst bit? He’s actually proud of it.

‘Might have been the happiest days of my life,’ he goes on. ‘I was head of football, head of rugby, head of cross country, head boy.’ He counts them off on his fingers, making a show of tiring of the list.

‘Wow,’ I say with a solemn nod, as I suppose someone might if they hadn’t been told this a hundred times already.

I detect a shuffle of feet next door, a screech of chair. I need to wrap this up fast.

‘My class back then were a bit like this bunch of reprobates,’ he says with the same sickly grin. ‘We messed about a bit, liked to play around.’

I don’t say a word. He reaches behind him and retrieves a picture from atop the battered filing cabinet he’s wedged against. ‘Stumbled on this the other day, Ollie.’ He turns the enlarged photograph to face me.

It’s the photo they took of our class a year and a half ago, the day I was elected representative to the school council.

‘The day you kept us out of Special Measures!’ I forget how many times Mr Clark has made this ‘joke’.

The short-lived school council was hastily put together in readiness for an OFSTED inspection. We held a few raucous debates in the hall for the benefit of the inspectors crawling through the place. For all the good it did – the school still got stamped with a big fat ‘Needs Improvement’.

‘Don’t you want to be this guy again?’ Mr Clark asks, waving the picture in front of me.