Then, from the other end of the hall, raised voices. One man pushed another, and he recovered, said, ‘Wanna try?’ And his mate: ‘Finish the fuckin’ game.’

Mum’d be proud. I hadn’t told her this was how I was spending the last day of my holidays. ‘If John settles, it could make life easier for you.’

‘He won’t.’

‘At home?’

‘Struts around like he owns the place. Stands over Mum. Good if he did come here, give someone lip, get one of these over his head.’ He gripped his cue.

The three and two, in succession, but then I missed. Curtis countered with three more, and I realised he was winning, although he didn’t seem to care. Who needed two dollars? There were plenty of smokes under the cubby house floorboards.

‘I could kill him,’ Curtis said.

‘Why?’

He said it to tease me. ‘Plenty of reasons. It could get to the point that I didn’t care anymore.’

‘You wouldn’t handle prison.’

‘Of hurtful things we ought to be afraid.’

I waited. ‘You’d kill him?’

‘Why not?’ He looked around. ‘This place is fuckin’ horrible.’

The fatter turned to us.

‘Horrible!’

‘Well, piss off!’

We walked down the hill, past Hungry Jack’s, the Gleneagles sing-along shops, auto care, and an empty shopfront where Ron Glasson had once opened an outlet, but failed because of a lack of off-road parking (Pop had said any idiot could’ve seen that coming). Curtis kept his head down. I asked, ‘What’s he been up to?’

‘I’m not goin’ back to that shithole again. I remember it being fun.’

‘I agree.’

‘Things change, don’t they, Clementine?’

‘Yeah.’ As I smelled the child-happy smell of thick and endless exhaust.

‘And it’s like, you can’t go back. It doesn’t work, eh?’

Mrs Masharin was an excellent teacher. That is, she liked me. She had an accent part-Moscow part-Gleneagles, always wore her hair in a bun, sat very upright and dressed in Target frocks, but somehow made them seem special, posh, classy. She wasn’t so old that you couldn’t lust after her. Thirty, perhaps, with what might have been enormous breasts. Curtis had been the first to point this out, one recess after a hot lesson, and one or two loose buttons. ‘She’s got ’em packed in, but if you look …’

So I did, and decided he was right. Of course, Curtis took it further. ‘There goes the final button.’ As she tackled Steinbeck. ‘All it’d take is a quick fiddle with the latch and bam.’

‘Curtis, quiet, please!’

Now she was reading the results of our short story assessment. Colin Davies had made up a story about a Vietnam vet who goes nuts and blows up a small town.

‘I said I’d come back, and I did, but what was here? Who was waiting for me.’