When the plaster came off I couldn’t smile properly. It looked ugly from the stitches and lopsided in the mirror, so I tried to smile only on one side of my face, but that didn’t work, it made me look sorry for myself. I didn’t feel like smiling anyway. There was a mood in the school like that’s what you get for fighting. No one looked at me like I had stitches hanging out my ear or a big patch on my cheek, they looked at me like I had it coming and Errol Clark had done it. But no one went over to him – there wasn’t a best fighter in the school any more, only a bad smell hanging over it and nobody was going to get involved.

The new teacher, Miss Lollard, wasn’t new any more. She said, ‘Concentrate on getting your sums right. The cut will heal.’

Shelley told me they were going to expel Errol Clark, but it wasn’t about me, it was Patrick’s mum complaining. Then I heard they were going to send Errol Clark to another school, but he went missing. The fight was over and I’d lost. There was no way of getting my own back and I had to face people knowing I couldn’t make it add up. Fighting wasn’t worth it, I was proof you couldn’t beat people up to make them like you. You ended up losing friends, and you looked like me.

‘How is it?’ my mum said, peeling back the plaster they put on once they’d taken the stitches out.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, looking in the mirror, ‘it doesn’t hurt.’

It did, it throbbed. And there was the purple-brown smell of the ointment they put on – and something else, that smell again my mum had when she wasn’t well that was like stale soap.

‘You’ll end up looking like Al Capone if you’re not careful,’ she said, and I couldn’t stop my smile making the crack of the scar look longer. I changed it quickly to the other side of my face. She watched it happen and held me in the mirror. ‘You’re still handsome,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s dance.’