Carl used to lie all the time. His dad’s fingers had been bitten off by a shark when he went for his morning swim off the oil rig. Joanne O’Reilly had shown him her fanny and asked him to touch it. An Olympic trainer had offered him a running contract paying exactly four hundred pounds a week if he’d stop smoking and would travel to Manchester four times a week. It occurs to me now that this sum, more than we’d ever considered in our lives, wasn’t that outlandish, and Carl was the fastest 100-metre runner in the district. Still… He did not travel to Manchester or stop smoking. He lied to us when he failed his GCSEs and pretended he was doing A levels at the sixth-form college when he was actually doing resits. There was no pleasure in catching him out in a lie. We’d always regret it, listening to the long implausible counter-facts we had not considered before we nodded and agreed with him: yes, we hadn’t thought of that. He looked so anxious as he tried to convince us. The fact that we would lie to him to save his face might have been doubly humiliating. He dropped out of the resits too, and took a job working at the fish-processing factory, which had outlasted the fishing.

Joanne O’Reilly was the prettiest girl in our year, or I thought so; she seemed to like Carl more than me but neither of us stood a chance back then. We would watch her in Maths class as she wrote the names of older boys on her pencil cases, on the text books we had to cover with wallpaper, and it wouldn’t have been much more painful if she had scratched their names on our arms with a compass needle. The older boys would never understand our girls like we did, our comrades, solvers of maths problems, destroyers of iambic pentameter, recipients of the same cruel humiliations at the hands of vicious Madames and Fräuleins. We thought about our girls sexually all the time, but secretly, and imprecisely; we knew the older boys would not know the things that were so alluring about them apart from their looks; the tapes they listened to, the band names they also wrote on their text books; the older boys would not know the difference between them except in the most trivial way; they could not identify them blindfolded by the sound of their laughter and the smell of their shampoo and chewing gum.

The older boys who we hated and became.

I wandered over to say hello to Joanne.

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