The new radio studio (Mr de Weerd’s idea) had started broadcasting across the school grounds every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at recess and lunch. Light classics, mainly, courtesy of Ms Field’s expansive Comoesque record collection, but the powers that be had conceded, allowing a pop segment (Spandau Ballet, Boy George), an electronic music corner (there were other Kraftwerk fans) and Mrs Masharin’s literature salon.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘It will be fine,’ she replied. Not even it’ll, just it will. That’s what I was up against.

Dwayne Schuit had been made producer. He sat at a control desk outside the studio. Dwayne of the Komputer Klub (‘Fun Programming in Basic’), debating and chess club. Dwayne, who’d missed out on a private education, but wore a tie and jacket to school anyway. Quoting Python ten years before anyone else; topping Year Eleven Latin (narrowly beating Curtis) and Classics, making it clear he wanted to study arts. He said, ‘Nearly ready, Mrs Masharin.’

I clutched the pages of my new novel. She’d read the first few chapters, declared them genius and said, ‘I insist, a reading for the Wednesday salon.’

‘No, I don’t reckon.’

‘This week, you see, everyone will hear and love.’

Maybe she thought I was some sort of Black & Gold Gogol, but I knew this couldn’t help my reputation, what there was of it. Curtis sat beside Dwayne, looking in, grinning. I mouthed a fuck off and he bit his lip. A strangely out-of-place Rachmaninoff vesper played to a yard of 1100 Darrens and Kerrys as I thought, Please, let it be over quick.

Mr de Weerd was a marvel. Back in Holland, apparently, every school had its own radio station. When he’d arrived at the beginning of the year (on an exchange) he’d told Curtis’s class, ‘I don’t understand where the culture lies.’ They’d got a big laugh out of this. Curtis had said, ‘It doesn’t lie anywhere,’ and (I guess) de Weerd had wondered what the hell he’d got himself in for. Then (so I’ve been told) he’d caught Wendy going her hardest behind the hall with a Year Nine. Sports day: a muscle-fest in the century-plus sun. The change room fire (two burned down). A teachers’ strike. George Bullock’s Torana through the school fence. By which time he would’ve known exactly where it lay.