There was music coming from her radio in the bathroom, with us swaying from side to side in her old-fashioned way that there wasn’t a care in the world and I was the best dancer she’d ever met, and it was just the two of us dancing cheek to cheek ... My dad came to the hospital and told me, as well as my cheek and my ear, my eye was bloodshot. I’d nearly knocked it out and they’d put a stitch in the corner. If I wasn’t so badly injured, he’d have beaten me himself, but for now I should recover and he’d be watching me. It made me feel safe to be in hospital, out of reach but looked after. And that was how it felt in the bathroom with my mum holding me up. I was all right, I was going to get better. But as we danced I had a flashback to Errol Clark in the loos with no buttons on his Crombie and his pants wet, crying out he could look after himself. I went stiff and couldn’t dance any more. My mum felt my arms go heavy, I couldn’t disguise what I felt because I didn’t know until then I was still carrying him, that I was on his side.

‘What is it?’

She looked at me seriously, so I told her about him wolfing down dinners at school and waiting for seconds, the look of still being hungry, about the holes in his shoes, not having socks or anyone to go home to, about not knowing how to be with people and being scared on his own. She frowned and pushed me away.

‘You’re too sympathetic,’ she said.

The news went round Errol Clark had been stabbed and was dead. He’d been found in a boarded-up house you could climb in by pulling back the corrugated iron over the front window. They’d found him there and taken his body away. He’d got into trouble with big people and that was what happened. He hadn’t been to school, but being dead brought him back and people looked to me to see what to feel about it.

I could still feel my scar when it itched, and see it the wrong way round in the mirror, but I couldn’t always remember what side it was on when I wasn’t looking. I was told it was going to fade, so I waited.