Daft question, I know, but until fairly recently I really wanted to. I didn’t exactly think through the practical side. I mean, it’s not like we could live in separate houses, is it? I guess Seb could go and live with Dad and his girlfriend and choke on her fruity perfume, but he’d only wail, ‘That’s not fair!’ and cry, like he always does, and somehow it would end up being me living in Middlesbrough with Dad and Melanie.

There’s a photo of us in a frame on the kitchen windowsill, and I’ve got my arm round Seb’s shoulders. We’re in the old back garden. Once or twice Mam has looked at it and said, ‘You used to be such good little mates,’ with a sad expression, and I usually try to be nice to him after that, but he always – I mean always – spoils it.

And then there was the time I hit him. Okay, okay … bear with me. It wasn’t my fault. Have you ever hit someone? I mean properly, when you’re angry? Say when someone tries to grab the game controller from your hands when you’re just about to reach the next level of Street Warrior?

Take it from me: it’s very easy to hit someone with a game controller a bit harder than you mean to.

That was not long after Mam and Dad split up, and we had moved to the tiny house in Tynemouth. Mam tried to make a thing of it, like adults do. ‘We’re going up in the world, boys!’ she said, because Tynemouth’s a bit posh compared with Byker, but I knew she was putting it on. Moving from a house with my own bedroom to having to share with a whingeing snot-ball isn’t my idea of ‘going up in the world’ and, when I complained that all my friends were staying in Byker, Mam said, ‘If they’re real friends, they’ll come and see you, Malky.’

They never did. We don’t have a car and Mam wouldn’t let me ride on the Metro on my own till I was ten, and by that time I hadn’t seen Zack and Jordy and Ryan for ages.

A new school then, nearly two kilometres from my house, where the kids all talk differently, and they play rugby instead of football in the autumn term. (I hate rugby.) But I could have dealt with all of that.

Everyone – Mam, Valerie the school counsellor, Mrs Farroukh – thinks that what they call my ‘behaviour issues’ are all because of Mam and Dad, and the move, but they’re not.

They’re all down to Sebastian. If it hadn’t been for him, none of the bad things – the crocodile, the Stone Age, Adolf Hitler – would have happened.

He would have woken up as normal.