I glance at the clock. The eight minutes of solitude I promised myself has been ruined, and it’s overrun. ‘Thanks so much for stopping by,’ I say, ‘but I have things to do now.’

He gets to his feet and screeches the chair across the room so it’s blocking the door. He sits back on it with his legs crossed. ‘I’m not leaving till you tell me what’s going on, Morky.’

I really don’t have time for this.

The Backlash

Three and a half weeks ago

Monday rolled around too soon after that evening on the school field with Sophia. The glow of Friday night had dimmed by Sunday afternoon, leaving me with a memory in which I could hardly recognize myself. By four the next morning, I was awake, pacing my room in disbelief at the crime I’d committed on school property.

Tempting as it was, I didn’t bunk off. In the panic of the dawn, I was certain that my absence would look like a confession. So I went in as normal, my face fixed in the strained expression of a guilty man with no flair for acting. I pretended to be unaware of the younger kids who hurried in groups on to the field to giggle at the graffiti that had appeared over the weekend.

‘How very menacing,’ Mr Clark joked before calling the register, raising his voice above the caretaker’s jet-wash lance, which was assaulting the windows from outside. ‘We’re all going to die, lads!’

I was convinced my blush must have been obvious, my laughter, forced among everyone else’s, unmissable.

‘There we all were,’ he said, ‘imagining that we’d live forever. But no. At some point, we are all going to die. Somewhere there’s a little inbred street urchin who we should all thank for that insight. In other news, I hear that bears apparently shit in the woods.’

‘And the pope prays, sir,’ Amit added.

At the fringes of my vision, I watched each enormous letter in turn being slowly erased from the glass. A few faint streaks of red would remain, etched into the grain of the weathered timber below, but you’d only see it if you really cared to look.

Mr Clark took the register, sent us off to our first period and never mentioned the graffiti ever again. As I walked towards the main school block, Mr Jessop, the caretaker, was ahead of me. His narrow shoulders were hunched inside his boiler suit as he dragged his power washer behind him on a trolley.