Three weeks go by. I’m living in a home in Kent. It’s like my life’s been tied up in a sack made out of mammoth wool. It’s thick and heavy and there ain’t no gaps to let in daylight. Everything’s going on around me, but I haven’t got the energy to open the sack to look out at it.

I don’t go back to a normal school. Social services send me to a pupil referral unit because they don’t think local schools will “meet my needs”. There’s ten of us in the class and the teachers do their best. We have to pass English and Maths or we have to do the GCSEs again.

A couple of kids in my class have already been in prison and they make it sound like a party. Just as well I’ve met other kids who’ve been inside and tell me otherwise, or I might believe them. One of my classmates finds out that I kicked a fed and starts to big me up. They want me to give the teachers stress. I don’t. But I don’t answer my name. I don’t do no homework. Everything feels so dark, I can only see a few things at a time. None of those things are English and Maths.

I’m still trying to keep Kandi in my head. I don’t want her to start fading, like Mum. I’ve even got some photos of Mum. I can remember the big things like my sixth birthday party and when Mum brought baby Kandi back from the hospital. I can remember when Mum got angry and shouted and scared us. But it’s harder to remember everyday things like what Mum would wear when she took us to school or what mug she liked for her tea. I haven’t got no pictures of Kandi because her dad took the albums. I don’t want her to disappear like Mum.

The other thought that fills up my head is that I’ll have to go back to the police station. My stomach knots up when I think about it, which is all the time. I see the knitting needle stuck in Blake’s skin and I want to throw up. I feel the shame that burned through me when I saw Kandi and her friends looking down from her window. I see my own foot as if it doesn’t belong to me kicking the police car and the fed. And the string in the neck of that mammoth-wool sack I’m in gets pulled tighter and tighter. On the weekends, I don’t come out of my room at all. I lie on my bed and let all those thoughts lie heavy in my head.