‘A whole five pounds?’ he said. ‘Gosh.’

It was Games in the afternoon. Bigmac was the only one who played. He’d never been keen until they’d introduced hockey. You got a club to hit people, he said.

Yo-less didn’t do sport because of intellectual incompatibility. Wobbler didn’t do sport because the sports master had asked him not to. Johnny didn’t do sport because he had a permanent note, and no one cared much anyway, so he went home early and spent the afternoon reading the manual.

He didn’t touch the computer before tea.

There was an extended News, which meant that Cobbers was postponed. There were the same pictures of missiles streaking across a city that he’d seen the night before, except that now there were more journalists in sand-coloured shirts with lots of pockets talking excitedly about them.

He heard his mother downstairs complain about Cobbers, and by the sound of the raised voices that started Trying Times again.

There was some History homework about Christopher Columbus. He looked him up in the encyclopedia and copied out four hundred words, which usually worked. He drew a picture of Columbus as well, and coloured it in.

After a while he realized that he was putting off switching the computer on. It came to something, he thought, when you did school work rather than play games . . .

It wouldn’t hurt to at least have a game of Pac-Man or something. Trouble was, the ghosts would probably stay in the middle of the screen and refuse to come out and be eaten. He didn’t think he could cope with that. He’d got enough to worry about as it was.

On top of it all, his father came upstairs to be fatherly. This happened about once a fortnight. There didn’t seem to be any way of stopping it. You had to put up with twenty minutes of being asked about how you were getting on at school, and had you really thought about what you wanted to be when you grew up.

The thing to do was not encourage things, but as politely as possible.

His father sat on the edge of the bed and looked around the room as though he’d never seen it before.

After the normal questions about teachers Johnny hadn’t had since the first year, his father stared at nothing much for a while and then said, ‘Things have been a bit tricky lately. I expect you’ve noticed.’

‘No.’

‘It’s been a bit tricky at work. Not a good time to start a new business.’

‘Yes.’

‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing you want to talk about?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

His father looked around the room again. Then he said, ‘Remember last year, when we all went down to Falmouth for the week?’

‘Yes.’

‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’

He’d got sunburnt and twisted his ankle on some rocks and he had to get up at 8.30 every morning, even though it was supposed to be a holiday. And the only TV in the hotel was in front of some old woman who never let go of the remote-control.