you don’t take her seriously when she tells you that, at school, you will be exactly like all the other children in her class.  You giggle when she comes to your name in the register, and shout “Yes, Mummy,” instead of calling her Mrs Williams the way everyone else does. She looks at you over the top of her glasses, says your name again, and again, until you do it right. Thirty-four heads swivel and thirty-four sniggers swirl and settle like dust on the desktops. Your fingers fiddle with the inkwell, moving its brass cover back and forth, back and forth, crescendoing until your mother can bear no more.

“Lucy Williams, stop that noise,” she booms. There are more stares, more sniggers, and you sit stone still, seething. When the first lesson begins you fold your arms and refuse to do any work.

Your mother pulls you out into the corridor and whispers that, at school, she can’t have favourites. If you do something wrong, you must face the consequences. You stamp your foot and stick out your bottom lip, like you do at home when you don’t get your own way, but it makes no difference.

At breaktime your mother patrols the playground with a child’s hand in each of hers, and you are angry that neither of those hands is yours. You stare at the children whose hands are being held, with their smell of stale wee, their untidily tied ponytails and their hand-me-down clothes. You think you recognise one of your old cardigans.

You remember what your mother said about being charitable to children less fortunate than you, but you don’t feel charitable, or fortunate and later, in the cloakroom, you pounce on one of those hands through the coats and sink your teeth into it, breaking the skin. When you taste blood you feel like a lion who has hunted down its prey. Victorious, strong, special.

“Who did this?” your mother says, holding up the bitten hand of the howling child as everyone holds their breath. As the bitten, howling child turns her eyes in your direction you bare your teeth in a silent snarl. The child says nothing. You point at a particularly stupid boy that you don’t like, that nobody likes, a boy who is always in trouble.

“It was him,” you say. Your mother looks at you, and at the bitten hand, and at the boy who nobody likes, who is always in trouble, and even though you are certain she has seen the snarl she chooses to believe you. She sends the boy to the headmaster and he returns, some time later, sad, sore and snivelling with two candles of snot dangling from his nose.

“I’m special, aren’t I?” you ask your mother, at home that evening, as you slice into your steak and a little blood seeps onto your plate.

“You know you are,” she says.