I knew Thaddeus hadn’t come home. The police had been round, but that was because he was always in trouble and going off. He was in my class and always getting told off for mucking about and not listening. But he was all right, he had a mop of hair like mine, bushy and reddish, that all got tangled, and made the girls like him because he pulled faces and made them laugh. We got on because we looked like brothers and we knew we weren’t. He had lots of brothers and sisters at home and was always following his mum around, but because he was small he couldn’t always get to her so he’d wander off with a set look in his face like he was going to find her somewhere else.

I watched his mum as she leaned on the headmaster’s arm to speak and nothing came out. She stood there shaking, in floods of tears, coughing and trying to breathe, but no words coming, just the struggle for air going on in front of us. The headmaster slumped in his grey suit and hurried her out of assembly into the corridor. The doors banged shut and we heard a wailing sound as she was being led away that felt like someone being dragged where they didn’t want to go, where there was nothing to hold on to. No one said anything, the teachers moved us quickly back to our classrooms, with the sound of people’s legs moving and the squeal of the chair legs as they sat down.

The next day she was at the school gate. It wasn’t a change, she always brought her children to school and talked to the other mums. It was where she used to tell them she could do childminding. She was always nice to us and chatty, pushing a baby in a pram. I never knew exactly who was hers and who wasn’t because she had lots of children with different dads and they didn’t all look the same. I knew Thaddeus, and he looked like his sister Sandra, but then her house was full of children she was looking after, and you didn’t know who she was just minding. At school she had her hair scraped up in a bun and didn’t smoke, but when she was home she kept looking for a space to put a fag in her mouth and have a smoke so she could get a break. She looked at me once, watching her, and said, ‘You’ve to steal a life sometimes.’