Bee is pretty particular about who makes her dad look like a fool. ‘The driver of the French bus lived in North London in 2002,’ she says. Now she has everyone’s attention. Dupont isn’t happy. There’s more discussion about secrecy, and not letting the press in on anything. Once or twice the capitaine says something to her dad in the most god-awful English Bee’s ever heard. But then her dad responds in the most god-awful French in existence and Bee can’t avoid Marianne Attal’s eye-roll. Whose father is the biggest dickhead of biblical proportions? Violette would ask.

Then they get down to business. Marie Bonnaire asks Bee if she wants a translator. Bee says in French that she doesn’t need one. She’s become obsessed with the French language since going to the Gothenburg junior athletics meet in May. There she ran the two hundred metres in lane eight. Marianne Attal was in lane seven. Bee won the race, but had to be happy with second in the four hundred. After the other girls left the dressing rooms that day, Marianne Attal stayed behind and asked Bee for her phone number. Kind of demanded it. Like she knew something Bee wasn’t willing to say out loud. So Bee told her to sod off.

But her father and the capitaine and Marie and Dupont don’t need to know that. It’s enough that Marianne knows exactly what Bee is thinking and why she chose to be on a summer tour that began and ended close to Marianne’s hometown. Bee did her research when she got home from Gothenburg. Found an interview with the Pas de Calais junior sportswoman of the year. Marianne Attal was going to be a junior coach on the Calais junior football tour in August.

‘Bee?’ her father prods gently.

She looks up and finds everyone staring. Waiting.

‘Ils veulent savoir ce que Violette a dit à propos du chauffeur de bus,’ Marianne says when Bee doesn’t respond.

Two weeks of nothing and now this! Hasn’t she heard of Facebook? Instagram? Snapchat? Anything? Does she really have to make them witnesses to what Violette said about the French driver, just to get Bee across the Channel again?

She tries to work out what to tell them and what not to tell them. There’s the fact that things started with a fight between the Calais football tour and Bee’s bus on their first night at the campground. The kids Marianne was chaperoning had egged Bee’s bus. Charlie Crombie smashed a security camera so they could retaliate, writing the English national anthem all over the French bus. Rodney Kennington said it was a sure-fire way of letting on that they did it, but Crombie convinced them that the shaps were too stupid to go for the obvious suspects. Which was true because the Germans were blamed. They were on a summer tour of cathedral architecture and had been heard taunting the French and the English about the last World Cup victory.

Any which way, the shaps had said thank God the French were going in the opposite direction. But then they were all at the same camping ground again in Bayeux, halfway through their tour. Gorman thought it a good idea to organise a World Cup match between France and England. Having never travelled beyond these two countries, he believed they constituted the world. The French won that game. Blood was shed, mostly Crombie’s, and there was a rumble of sorts, and at one point, Marianne straddled Bee and they just stared at each other for so long. Violette went to kick Marianne off, but she grabbed Violette’s boot, which ended up in Bee’s face, which is how she got a black eye. Violette and Marianne had a C’est de sa faute à elle argument, and then the shaps put an end to it. For days, all Bee could think of was the straddle. And how perhaps the next time she saw Marianne, they would exchange phone numbers.