‘Sounds stupid,’ said one of the boys, and then the swing chair had lurched and Cherry had fallen off and her Madonna T-shirt got soaked from the damp night grass and she spilt her cup of Southern Comfort down the leg of what were already terrible jeans and everyone laughed, including her as she was so shit-faced she didn’t care.

By 4 a.m. most people had left and about eight of us crashed out on the sitting-room carpet in spaces between spilt alcohol patches and fag butts and empty Twiglet packets. I had attempted to crash in the bathtub, thinking I wouldn’t be disturbed as the toilet was in a separate room next door, but there was a manky soaking-wet towel lying in a puddle of something orange in the bottom, so the sitting room it was. My head was on a flowery cushion stained on one corner with red wine and I had pulled a smelly white cotton jacket with scrape-y buckles over me. I couldn’t sleep, as a boy was snoring somewhere down near my left foot, so I got up and walked to the kitchen where Cherry was lying flat out asleep on the lino in front of the fridge, a bottle of Southern Comfort rolling near her head. Three boys were kneeling over Cherry and one, who we’d talked to in the garden, had a large black marker pen in his hand. Her glasses were off – I later spotted them on a kitchen worktop under a half-eaten piece of toast – but he’d already drawn them back on her, black and thick, great round circles around each eye, right into the socket, plus a black bridge across her nose and one chunky arm up to her left ear. The other boys were laughing.

‘Problem, fuck-face?’ he asked me as I stood in the doorway.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Good. She’ll still look better than you when I’ve finished. And hers will come off – eventually. It’s permanent marker.’

The other boys laughed. The artist, his tongue out in concentration, steadily drew the second arm, up to her other ear. A ‘Fuck you’ came to my lips but I left it there. A strange feeling was coming over me. A feeling of relief, almost joy – that for once it wasn’t me. Another victim was in town. He drew a comedy moustache above Cherry’s top lip. I started to laugh, too. He drew two comedy clown cheeks on Cherry’s and filled them in pitch black – she looked like a weird cherub suffering from the black plague. I laughed some more. The longer I laughed, the better I felt, and I liked that feeling. I was one of them and it felt good. I’d had a big fat target on my back since the day I was born, and now it was pinned to Cherry.