He blinked his green eyes and brown lashes at me. A look of being hurt welled up in them. He could have shook his head or thumped me, I wouldn’t have blamed him. He pulled his lips shut and looked away.

‘You gonna help?’ I said.

He was thinking, but there was a shy look in his eyes I hadn’t seen before that made me like him. Like he recognised what I was saying, I wasn’t trying it on but where did that leave us?

‘I like you,’ I said. ‘And I don’t wanna fight any more.’

‘You don’t like Errol Clark,’ he said.

‘Do you?’

He stopped for a moment, looked away and back again, ‘You know he’s mad, don’t ya?’

Errol Clark did up his zip as we came in the boys’ loos, it was too quick, he got stuck and spilt a bit on his pants. He made both his hands into fists and faced us. It felt like we shouldn’t have cornered him. He was looking both of us up and down, trying to find a way through, his face stony and hard. I thought he was going to charge at me, but Ian Barrett shook his head, ‘You can’t beat both of us.’

‘We want to talk to you,’ I said. But we’d gone about it wrong from the way he was breathing. He was squeezed into his chest, ready to ram his way through. His shoulders were back, his chin up and his mouth was pressed shut so he breathed through his nose. His nostrils twitched and his eyes were glassy and bloodshot. ‘But not if you don’t want to,’ I said.

He said if we wanted to, come and try. He had big people could come and he wasn’t gonna talk to us. We should get out his way and not vex him, he could look after himself so we should mind out.

I looked at his trousers and the holes in his shoes, ‘Who looks after you?’ But I already knew he didn’t have anyone looking after him, he was getting himself to school on his own.

‘No one,’ he said.

‘Leave us alone,’ Ian Barrett said, ‘and we’ll leave you.’

We turned to go but he started shouting we were scared of him, cussing like he wanted us to fight him. We looked at each other but Ian Barrett shook his head.

So we left him there, screaming at us to come back, on his own in the toilets with the pee dripping down his pants.