But his dad hadn’t stopped. As Tim lay there beneath his Donald Duck duvet in the dim yellow light from his bedside lamp, his dad told him how, one day, the boy in the story had gone home and rummaged through his mum’s cutlery draw. How he’d found the biggest, sharpest knife he could and hidden it in his school bag. He’d only meant to scare them off, of course. He hadn’t meant to do anything, not really.

But then when the big boys found him the next day out on the school field and he’d pulled the knife out of his bag, that rubbish bin inside him had finally burst. He’d felt powerful standing there with the knife, he’d felt better, and all the shame and hurt and anger had spilled out of him in one big wave.

Some of the big boys had been shocked by the knife, but the tallest one – the same one who’d stood there in the toilets, laughing as he pissed all over the boy’s school trousers – had made the mistake of stepping forward to take the knife away from the boy. The boy had panicked, lunged forward, and before they all knew what was happening the big boy’s stomach had sprouted a wooden hilt. He was screaming and pawing at that hilt, trying to get it out, and the blood was pumping out around it in sticky red torrents. Kids were screaming. Teachers were running over. Eventually, there was the sound of sirens. And the boy in the story just stood there looking at the knife, his eyes glassed over, with nothing but this big emptiness inside him.

Tim didn’t remember all the stories his dad had told him when he was younger, but he remembered that one well. What he remembered most about it, though, was how his dad had looked at the end of it. The light sheen of sweat on his skin. The way his mouth hung open, almost hungrily, making the skin of his cheeks look strangely slack and loose. How the light from Tim’s beside lamp made his eyes appear yellow in the gloom.

There were other stories, too. Other islands of bright time on the dark landscape of Tim’s childhood. He knew now that some of them had been variations of regular stories – a twist on Jack and the Beanstalk in which Jack gets thrown from the top by the giant and breaks his neck, dying in a pool of his own blood; a version of Sleeping Beauty in which the Prince decides to smother the girl in her sleep rather than saving her; a particularly nasty take on Hansel and Gretel, in which the children never escape from the witch’s hut and Gretel is forced to watch Hansel get cooked and eaten in front of her.