It wasn’t melancholy in the room that day: more like quiet solidarity, and I felt bad for not going over to them, to give a specious word or two for a junk trial. Charlotte kept on looking at me: probably wondering when I would talk to them. But in my head there was a high sort of pressure. When I’d woken this morning, with only a few hours of sleep after the trip to the cemetery, my peripheral vision had all but gone. In the past this had been a warning of a headache, or, even worse, a migraine. But I thought perhaps it was the last augury of the fast: that I was on the verge of seeing anew.

At one point I caught Charlotte with her hand outstretched. Jenö said something, she shook her head, and from her fist out sprang a tiny man made from newspaper. He laughed.

The fast made me wobble the grommets and hairpins I was forcing into a sculpture, but I couldn’t hold everything as I wanted to. Over a meagre breakfast – I had dreamed, after the graveyard, of buttered toast and croissants big as hammers – I had wondered if everything Walter had told me was, at worst, a lie; or, at best, a complete invention: not only that they’d kissed, but that Jenö had kissed him. Neither had he left me with anyone to corroborate the story. Only we three knew. And I had promised not to breathe a word of it.

Irmi came in later; I wondered where she had been; she wasn’t one for skipping class. She looked at Charlotte rather mutinously. She set up next to me, unloading what she’d found at the dump; metal washers and bicycle handlebars.

I wanted to tell her what I knew, but I could not imperil the secret; not when everything was so finely balanced.

‘I saw Mr Sommer leave the Director’s office,’ she said immediately after sitting down.

‘How’d you know it was him?’

‘The bruises gave him away.’

‘And?’

‘He’s ancient, Paul, he’s ancient. Why would Jenö ever believe a man that old would be a threat?’

Walter hadn’t mentioned Mr Sommer’s age: not in the cafeteria, not in the cemetery. But then why would he have? This new fact cast Jenö in a terrible light.

Most of the student body came to the Swan on Saturday when word got out that neither Walter nor Jenö would be expelled. The school tribunal had – unsurprisingly, at least for the four of us – been a brilliant success. In the pub Walter regaled us with his version of the trial (doing the voices of both Sommer and the Director and even an exaggerated form of Jenö’s Bavarian twang) while we waited for Charlotte and also Jenö, who had been detained the longest, and who was the star of this show.