That felt like the best deal I could get, so we did it again and I lost. I went down on my own and apologised to them saying it was probably in my sleep and I didn’t remember doing it but we worked out what must have happened and it was my fault.

They looked at me like they’d never met me before.

‘Thank you,’ Mr Brown said.

It occurred to me the most I’d ever said to them was yes or no, and thank you.

‘You speak well,’ said Mrs Brown.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘No problem, it’s only a lamp,’ and she sent me upstairs to get ready for the party as he was shaking his head.

It struck me going up the stairs that I really was in trouble. I’d stopped reading and I wasn’t talking. The only person to talk to was Busola – whoever she was pretending to be – and I wasn’t getting on with her.

‘Let’s make friends,’ I said.

She looked up and said, ‘What, with those people over there? We’re leaving.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you and me.’

She let out a cackle like a witch, and doubled up laughing. Instead of being with me she was against me. She looked up from the bed and there were tears in her eyes so I thought about the strain it was on her as well.

‘We’ve had that lynch mob after us, and you think you survived it without me?’

I could see her point.

When we got to the party there were four new children, two of them were dressed up as cowboys with those horses’ manes going down the sides of their legs, sheriffs’ badges, waistcoats and cowboy hats with stitching around the brim. So we were careful of them and stuck to Charles and his sister. Their dad had a beard and smoked a pipe, he stood off and watched us, but their mum was lovely with jellies and biscuits and party games. Charles was going to grammar school after the summer and was older and cleverer than us. That was the story, but to us he was kind and floppy and still just wanted to play and we were his excuse. We wrestled him down on the lawn because his sister said he was a big puppy dog and we had to stop him drowning in the pond.

‘What pond?’ I asked when we stopped wrestling to catch our breath. His eyes clouded and started to cry without him making a sound. We looked at his sister and she leant over to us and said Charles had jumped in and tried to kill himself in the river because he was unhappy, but their dad had jumped in and got him out.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Charles said.