‘We’re going to shame the devil,’ Violette told him when they first met at the port in Dover.

Eddie can’t say that now because Gorman has brought him to a cabin overlooking the car park, where the men in suits were waiting, and Eddie doesn’t have a clue who they are. At first he’s relieved they’re British. Then he isn’t. So he keeps on lying by omission. Like when they ask if Violette has ever shown any violent tendencies, Eddie mentions her getting into a fight once in a while but leaves out the part where she held a switchblade to Marianne Attal’s neck. The shaps said it was a good thing the French bus wasn’t there at every campsite and that Violette, being one of the older kids, should be setting a good example, and that if she caused an international incident by pulling a knife on the Calais police capitaine’s daughter again, they’d send her back to the UK in a cab and ask her parents to pay for it.

‘Did Violette get on with the other kids on the bus, Eddie?’ a suit asks. ‘Did they like her?’

Not really, he wants to say. He definitely knows that Manoshi from Spitalfields and Lola from Folkestone aren’t exactly fans. Lola and Manoshi bonded on the ferry and plotted to get the best seats at the front of the bus, behind Serge the driver, but Violette got there first.

‘We’re sitting here,’ Violette told him, and that’s how it was for the next six days. Violette was a stickler for getting to the bus first, so Lola and Manoshi had to sit behind them, which Eddie didn’t mind, because he likes the pair. They’re in year seven, like him, and most times they’d say stuff that made him laugh, but Violette doesn’t have much of a sense of humour. Especially when she hears Manoshi telling Lola that Violette’s name contains the words ‘vile’ and ‘evil’.

‘Don’t make me have to slap you around, Manoshi,’ Violette warned over her shoulder. But Eddie thought she tolerated Manoshi and Lola better than she did the kids her own age at the back of the bus.

The thing with Violette is that she doesn’t like dumb people, so when an idiot asked if she owned a kangaroo she called him a dickhead of biblical proportions. And if anyone dared say ‘G’day mate’. . . (Who the fuck says g’day mate but dumb tourists, Eddie?) When Charlie Crombie made fun of the way she spoke, because Violette’s words sing with a whole lot of esses, Violette smashed him one in the face and later told Eddie that it bored her ‘fucking stupid’ to be mocked about her lisp because lack of originality bored her ‘fucking stupid’. Violette says ‘fuck’ a lot. But she also says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ more than anyone he’s ever met in his life. His mother would have liked Violette. Eddie loves her already, which doesn’t mean she isn’t the scariest person he’s ever met, but it’s exciting scary. Like how on the road to Mont Saint-Michel, she nudged Eddie awake and asked if he wanted to see roadkill, and she took out her phone and showed him the photos. Most of them were of kangaroos, fur and guts stuck to the bitumen, as well as other sorts of furry animals.