He hears Janice muttering, ‘Jesus Christ, Will,’ as he drops to his knees and lowers his face to the floor. The navy suede slip-ons have an oddly musty smell, with a tang of what hopefully isn’t dog shit. There’s a mushroomy note to the taste of them as Will obeys the request for ‘a bit of tongue’. The soles are grassy, crunchy with grit.

‘Good lad,’ the guy says after a good minute or more. He pats Will’s head. ‘Apology accepted.’

He sinks his remaining half-pint of beer in a single draught. ‘We were leaving anyway,’ he says, launching his cue so it bounces across the table. And the two of them are gone.

‘My boys are your age,’ Janice tells Will. ‘They’d have sorted them right out.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Call yourself a man?’

‘Everything OK?’ Mick Touch asks, bowling through the bar in their direction. ‘What have I missed?’

Janice shrugs and leaves them to it.

‘It’s OK now,’ says Meera. ‘No biggie.’

She gives Mick a run-down of events, sparing the most demeaning details.

Once they’re alone, Mick reaches an arm round Will’s shoulder. ‘Willy boy, Willy boy!’ he says, roughly shaking him. ‘What we gonna do with you? Not one for playing the hero, are you?’

Will looks at the floor, noticing how his hands are still shaking.

‘You gotta act a bit braver than that when you’ve got an audience,’ Mick says, his tone worldly-wise. ‘Good old Janice was ready to give you a white feather there. You know about white feathers, Willy boy?’

Will gives an embarrassed nod. It’s a reference he understands from GCSE history: how there were women who would hand a white feather to a young man who was slow to sign himself up to go to war.

Mick Touch is something of an enthusiast for military history, often to be heard expressing how ‘they should bring back national service’, or that what this country really needs is another world war, a chance for us all to come together and fight for death or glory. Although if anyone deserves that white feather, it’s probably Mick Touch himself, who spent the last ten minutes rooted to his chair in the office upstairs, watching the snooker table incident unfold on CCTV, his finger lingering over the panic button next to his desk.

‘If I’d have been here,’ Mick says to Will, ‘God knows what I’d have done to them.’ He raises a clenched fist close to his chest. ‘Wouldn’t have been able to control myself.’

Starting Over