I had made only one friend, but I was trying to accumulate more, because to survive you needed no fewer than two, in case one was away sick. One day at lunchtime I was standing behind the canteen watching two boys fight over a black water pistol.

One of the boys said, “You can be the cop. I wanna be Terry Dean.”

The other boy said, “No, you’re the cop. I’m Terry Dean.”

I wanted to play too. I said, “Maybe I should be Terry Dean. It’s my name anyway.” They looked at me in that snide, superior way eight-year-olds look at you. “I’m Jasper Dean,” I added.

“Are you related?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then piss off.”

That hurt.

I said, “Well, I’ll be the cop then.”

That grabbed their attention. Everyone knows that in games of cops and robbers, the robber is always the default hero while the cops are fodder. You can never have too much fodder.

We played all lunchtime and at the sound of the bell I betrayed my ignorance by asking, “Who’s Terry Dean?”- a question that made my playmates sick.

“Shit! You don’t even know who he is!”

“He’s the baddest man in the whole world.”

“He was a bank robber.”

“And a killer!” the other one said, before they ran off without saying goodbye, in the same way as when you go to a nightclub with friends and they get lucky.

That afternoon I went home to find Dad hitting the edge of a cabinet with a banana so it made a hard knocking sound.

“I froze a banana,” he said listlessly. “Take a bite…if you dare.”

“Am I related to the famous bank robber Terry Dean?” I asked. The banana dropped like a chunk of cement. Dad sucked his lips into his mouth, and from somewhere inside, a small, hollow voice I strained to hear said, “He was your uncle.”