He has no idea how right he is. I’ve known for a while now that I won’t be taking my GCSEs. I think of the stack of study guides Gramps has bought me, lying among the squalor of my room, unread, but cracked at their spines and gnarled at their corners so I don’t appear ungrateful. They must have cost him a fair few quid.

‘I’m proud of you, Ollie,’ he says, from absolutely nowhere.

This is not how we communicate. My once-best-friend Amit and his family used to hold mealtime conversations as if they were in some secretly filmed soap opera. Gramps and I, we do nothing of the sort. My mouthful of food seems to dry out, resisting all attempts at being swallowed. It’s eventually sluiced down with a gulp of coffee and a jaw-aching amount of chewing.

‘Thanks,’ I say, looking at the table.

He tips his head forward and fixes me with his stare. ‘And your Aunty Kaye would be very proud indeed.’

I force myself to hold his gaze, giving him a single nod in reply.

‘Just a few more weeks of graft and you’ll be made.’ He looks over to the wall behind him – the Wall of Ollie – expecting no doubt that he’ll soon have something to add to it. The centrepiece is the upright piano that I played every night from the age of seven. The lid remains open – for some reason, neither of us have thought to close it. The keys would be blanketed in dust were they not clearly part of Gramps’s cleaning routine. Arranged chronologically above are my school photos, one per year, ranging from age five to fifteen. The grin gains self-assurance with the passing years; the stance gets cockier. It’s a look that I couldn’t begin to fake these days. My music exam certificates are framed and hung, grades one to eight. There’s an enlargement from the local paper – me shaking hands with the mayor when she handed out awards at the end of middle school. Biggest of all, one of Gramps’s own snaps: I’m hunched over a baby grand, awash with the reds and magentas of stage lighting, the night I closed the showcase at the playhouse in town.

The report from my mock GCSEs is this year’s only addition to the shrine. It displays just my name, a list of subjects, a column of As. Nothing to hint at how close those grades came to breaking me, how I barely slept that week, how I had to learn everything word for word and shout it in my head over and over to hold it there until each exam was done, all so I could scrape the marks that everyone’s come to expect. And the ten years’ worth of previous reports covering that wall – nowhere do they tell you how easy it all used to be.