‘I can’t imagine what was going through his mind.’ That afternoon, Mother’s voice was whimsical and amused; it was her three-glass-mood. ‘He could have nicked one of his testicles.’

‘Mum…’ – David pointed at his eggs on toast – ‘I’m trying to eat.’

‘Well, he could have. Or an artery. Tony, isn’t there an artery down there?’

Tony considered this. ‘Maybe? They’re everywhere, aren’t they? Arteries?’

‘Can you pour me another? Chablis? Fridge? No, really. I can’t understand it. And you’ve been sitting next to this boy for how long?’

‘All year,’ David replied through a mouthful of egg.

‘And you never thought to mention it?’

‘Maybe he liked it,’ Tony put in. ‘Nothing wrong with it—’

‘In school, Tony? Be serious.’

‘I didn’t like sitting next to him,’ David said tightly. ‘I never liked it.’ Having almost convinced himself that the wanking story was genuine, he felt genuinely aggrieved that Tony was making light of his traumatic experience.

‘Well what’s happening to the boy now then?’ she asked. ‘Is he excluded or…?’

‘Cold showers and shock treatment. That’s what they used to do in my day!’ put in Tony. ‘The poor boy’s probably being psychoanalysed to death somewhere right now… tell me about your mother?’

David picked up his plate, put it in the dishwasher. He liked to keep things clean. ‘I’m going out.’

‘It’s freezing out there, though, David?’

‘I need fresh air.’

As he left he heard her tell Tony: ‘Do you know, I think this episode has really got to him.’

‘Well, cheer up. There’s every chance that this Francis boy will end up like Jeffrey Dahmer. David will be able to say, I was there at the beginning! Sell his story. Get a book deal—’

‘Stop being glib. Is that bottle finished?’

‘Au naturellement.’

‘Is there another in the fridge?’

‘Bien sûr.’

‘Chop chop then!’

Mother was right, it was freezing outside, and David had left wearing only his school clothes. He didn’t want to go back to the house and see Tony again, so he went to the garage and put on one of his father’s tweed jackets – the one he used to garden in. Gratifyingly, it almost fit, perhaps it was a bit long on the sleeves, but that wasn’t too noticeable. David enjoyed wearing Piers’s clothes; he felt closer to him when he did. Sometimes he’d notice, and say something wry like ‘The clothes maketh the man’, or ‘I’m sure I’ve seen that jacket somewhere before?’ Whenever this happened, David felt a great contented warmth. He and his father had a very strong, unspoken bond. The only thing that would damage this bond – in David’s mind – would be embarrassment. David hated the idea of embarrassing his father; after all, Mum did enough of that… but that was Tony’s fault, not hers. Never hers.

David made his way down the drive and into the main village, quite a large village, and larger still since the new houses had been built on the northern edge. They weren’t council houses but they looked like council houses, and David knew that, for some reason, that was A Bad Thing. Father had been one of those on the parish council who had vociferously lobbied to have the plans rejected, and when he failed, he had resigned. He missed it though, David could tell. It had kept him away from the house, away from Tony. Now he had spare time, but he spent more and more time at work, or in his study. Tony had usurped him. David felt very sorry for his father because of that.

On the way to Jenny’s estate, he thought over the events of the day. What he’d done interested him because it had illuminated a talent for violence he didn’t know he had.

David wasn’t violent by nature; he wasn’t impetuous or tormented enough to be violent. What he did have was a deep-rooted dislike of bad manners. What Francis had said for example – yes, it was racist, unwelcoming, and just plain weird; but for David, the bigger offence was that it was simply bad form to say those sorts of things, to pick on the different, to mark them out. Usually David suffered silently through other people’s social foibles, but today was different. Today, David had Acted. He’d set right a wrong, and he’d got away with it. Something fundamental had shifted: in stabbing Francis, and saving Jenny from further embarrassment, he felt as if he had passed some crucial test, and the gates to his new calling were creaking open, slowly slowly, exposing a path he never even knew existed. A very Significant Day that would definitely make it into ‘Precious Memories!’ Perhaps overshadow every ‘Precious Memory’ he had.

David turned right through the graveyard that ran parallel to the main street. Crossing the street, he passed the Rose and Crown – where Mum and Tony would be later, hunkered down hilariously in the snug. Then he followed the stream, past the bakery, down to a small bridge which led to Dene’s Walk, the new builds, and behind them, the hills.

Then he paused for a few minutes, thinking about Jenny, making her solid in his mind.

She was a thin girl, with long legs and no tits to speak of. But it wasn’t right to think things like that. That wasn’t nice. Start again.

She was slim, not thin. Her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail, curly, and filled with strange colours, tawny, yellowish, gold. Her skin was – olive – he supposed you’d call it. A uniform, beautiful, matte olive, and next to her, everyone – even the acknowledged beauties of the school like Jeanine Finney – were pale, pockmarked. Criminally ordinary.

Where had she come from? It was a strange time of year to start a new school. She must have come from the city. Or abroad? He already knew that he was going to watch her, because he liked her so much already. David rarely interacted with the people he really liked; he just watched them, either on TV or in real life, thought about them, knew that he liked them, and left it at that. They didn’t have to be friends or anything. The irascible man who owned the Chinese take-away, for example – David liked him; he liked the way he pretended not to speak or understand English; he liked the way he feigned deafness when his squeaky daughter shouted the orders at him, but he’d never spoken to the man, and, save for ordering chow mein – he was training himself to eat Chinese food; he didn’t like it, but it was all part of his training – he’d never spoken to the daughter either. When he heard the man on the phone in the kitchen, heard that his English was fine – he even had a slight estuary accent – David was enormously pleased, and the man went to the top of his ‘Like’ list.

He paused at the end of the close. Looking around at the new houses, he understood his father’s offended dismay. Tiny, boxy, weak-looking things with windows set high and narrow like peevish eyes in a stupid face. The bricks were the nasty colour of oatmeal, and each identical door was topped by an improbable, flimsy-looking awning in plastic-coated wood. Each had a frosted glass window at the top where the bathroom was. Each had a patch of grass, about a few metres square, in front of the door, like a sad little welcome mat. The streets meandered around in concentric semicircles, but there was a spur of land to the east that jutted out of the pattern. All David had to do was work out what house she lived in – look for signs of moving: boxes, packing crates, bright lights shining through curtainless windows. Rooms emptily messy with unpacked belongings.

He closed his eyes, and Jenny, already buried down into the soft tissue of his brain, like a tick, led him down the middle of the deserted road towards exactly the scene he’d pictured – squashed boxes stacked carelessly in the desiccated front garden of the last house on the left.

On the rare occasions that David did something impetuous, the same phrase would canter through his mind – Don’t think, do. Don’t think, do. That’s what he was hearing when he plunged the compass into Francis, and that’s what he was hearing now too. He closed his eyes again then, opened them, and turned back, dodged between the houses, crossed the end of the neighbour’s garden, and headed to the hills. There he found a kind of grassy nook between two rocks that not only sheltered him from the cold, it also allowed him to see a little bit of what he was sure was Jenny’s door and kitchen window, while still being hidden himself.

Like always, his instincts had not let him down. He could only see one person in the house – Jenny’s mother, he assumed. The TV was loud. Loud enough to upset him, even at this distance. He needed to work harder on that. It was a weakness that could easily trip him up if he wasn’t careful.

He waited in the cold for an hour before hearing the sigh and squeak of worn tyres. Illuminated by the security light, he could see that Jenny’s hair had escaped her ponytail and was drifting, beautifully, around her pink cheeks. He could see her breath steaming, the light quiver of her slim fingers. He heard her tired grunt as she got off the saddle and leaned it against the wall. She wasn’t wearing her school uniform any more. Where had she been?

‘Mum?’

His flesh thrilled with the sound of her voice! Slightly gruff, throaty, with a local accent, but not harsh, not grating. Unconsciously David half stood up, to be closer to her, to hear her more clearly. Don’t think, do. And he scuttled closer to the house, into the garden, and crouched behind the bins below the kitchen window. If he made any noise, the sound of the TV would mask it.

‘Where’ve you been?’ the mother was saying. Through the open window, smoke billowed from her cigarette. ‘I’ve been worried.’ She didn’t sound very worried. The TV laughed and laughed and laughed, and David’s chest felt hot and his head started to throb. The woman shut the window then, and they must have moved into another room. Though he waited for another quarter of an hour, he couldn’t hear anything else intelligible from the house because the TV was on too loudly, and the noise was almost a physical assault. Why so loud?

When he got up, his head hurt and his legs were stiff with the cold. He’d need thicker trousers for next time, gloves too. Noise training too. If it was going to be this loud every time, he’d have to toughen up.

David made his way back between the houses, and onto the street. He breathed great gulps of silence, imagining it running down his throat, into his organs, his bones and filling him with calm. Calm calm calm. In the middle of the road, he found a pink Post-it note, like a crushed butterfly, and picked it up, knowing that it was important. Calm now, very, very calm, but alert too… he was doing splendidly.

He put it carefully in his pocket, and hurried home. As he passed the Rose and Crown, he heard his mother’s whoop whoop of a laugh, inevitably followed by Tony’s dirty snigger. His fingers caressed the Post-it note, curled in his pocket like a fortune cookie. He’d look at it tomorrow, after his training. He’d know what it meant then.