I picked my way down the steps – that light turned them depthless, treacherous – and started walking, along the front of the school and down the side of the boarders’ wing. My feet crunched in pebbles, and that morning’s jumpy reflex – head turning, checking for the gamekeeper siccing the hounds on the unwashed – was back.

I scrabbled through the mess for something good somewhere, couldn’t find it. Told myself if Mackey was right about Conway – course he was, Mackey has something on everyone, no need to invent it – then she had just done me a favour: better out than in. I told myself I’d be relieved in the morning, when I wasn’t wrecked and starving, when I hadn’t used up everything I had. Told myself in the morning I wouldn’t feel like something priceless had landed in my hand, been robbed away and smashed before I could close my fingers.

Couldn’t make it stick. Cold Cases waiting for me outside these walls and Mackey had been right, the smirky fucker: now I was the kid who couldn’t hack twelve hours in the big leagues, and he and Conway between them would make sure everyone knew that. Cold Cases had looked so shiny to me, my first day, such a wide glittering sweep of step up. Now it looked like a dingy dead end. This here, this was what I wanted. One day, and gone.

The only smudge of silver lining I could come up with: it was almost over. Even before Mackey’s backstabbing break, we’d been starting to go in circles. If he didn’t pull the plug soon, Conway would. I just had to wait out the last of their patience, then I could go home and try to forget today had ever happened. I’d’ve only loved to be one of those blokes who drink till days like this dissolve. Better: one of those blokes who texts his mates, days like this, Pub. Feels their circle click closed around him.

Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss somehow is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you’ve settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you’re going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.

Not just where you are: they tie you down to who you are. Once you have mates who know you, right down under the this-and-that you decide people want to see today, then there’s no room left for the someday person who’ll magic you into being all your finest dreams. You’ve turned solid: you’re the person your mates know, forever.