That morning was filled with those ritual pleasures. The squeak of my bedroom door-handle stirring a tiny fraction of my consciousness, heralding the arrival of the coming day. Mum entering my room, walking over and running her hand through my hair, stroking me from my forehead to the back of my neck – never the other way around. Mum whispering, ‘Good morning, Louis, darling. It’s time to get up, sweetheart,’ as if I were still two or three years old. That moment, hovering between sleep and waking, that lethargic state in which dream and reality are blurred. Then the sound of the electric shutter being rolled up, the sun’s rays striking my face, a groan, I turn over and bury my head under the pillow. Mum goes out. Sleep enfolds me once more; I pick up the thread of a dream, of which I’ll have no recollection. Mum comes back in, her voice more insistent, not so soft, firmer. Like every day. She knows this ritual inside out too. The same for years. Even if it’s become a reflex, we both recognize what the mood of the day will be like from the tone of a syllable uttered, the length of a guttural sound emanating from the sleepy adolescent bear. The mood of the day is happy. It’s Saturday, we know it. We have plenty of time, even if Mum says we don’t. I know the plan for the day, I know Mum, I know she wakes me up early to give me time to surface.

I’ll digress, here, because I know you’re saying to yourself, It’s strange, this twelve-and-a-half-year-old kid using all those big words, isn’t it? At any rate, I can tell you my mates in class 8C of Paul Éluard High School think I’m a freak. It’s weird being in with fourteen-year-olds at twelve-and-a-half, anyway. I don’t make a big deal of it, but that’s how it is and that’s how I talk and I can’t do anything about it, and at school they make fun of my turns of phrase, calling me a geek, so thank you very much, but don’t you start . . .