‘Yes, Ms Toner,’ we singsonged.
It was at that moment that my nose started to bleed. This happened to me quite a lot for no apparent reason. I put my hand up.
‘What did I just say?’ said Ms Toner, not taking her eyes off the horizon, only seeing my hand in her periphery and not my bloody face, ‘no questions until the end. Hand down.’
I put my hand down and up to my nose. The blood began dripping through my fingers and onto my new white shirt.
I put my hand up again.
‘I said hands down until the end, please!’ she spat again without looking at me.
I put my hand down again.
My nose was really bleeding a lot. Ronan, a stranger to me then, turned to look at me for the first time. Without a second’s thought he interrupted Ms Toner mid-sentence:
‘Miss! His nose is bleeding!’
Then she looked. Then she saw.
‘My goodness, are you alright? What’s your name?’
‘Brendan.’
‘And you?
‘Ronan. Ronan McCoy.’
‘Alright, take him to the nurse, it’s next door to the reception where you came in this morning. Do you know where that is from here?’
‘Yes, Miss,’ said Ronan and we got up to leave, Ronan leading the way and opening the door for me to follow with my dripping face.
Outside in the hallway I told Ronan I didn’t need to go to the nurse, I got nosebleeds all the time, I just hadn’t had one in school before. I said we should just go to the toilets and get some toilet roll and wait for it to stop.
In the toilets, Ronan peed while I stood in front of the mirror with my head tilted back, holding a blood-soaked wad of toilet roll stuffed up my nostrils.
‘How often does it happen?’ Ronan asked, standing at the urinals and twisting his head over his shoulder to look at me. I was standing over the sinks looking back at him through the reflection in the mirror.
‘Quite a lot. Usually in my sleep, though, so I wake up with my face stuck to a bloody pillow.’
‘Ha! Messed up, so weird.’
‘Ha, I know,’ I said because I supposed it was weird.
Ronan zipped up and came to join me by the sinks.
‘I’m Ronan, by the way, officially and all that.’ He was about to shake my hand but then he hit the tap and ran one hand under the cold water for two seconds, grabbed a green paper towel from the dispenser, scrunched it up one-handed, crumpled it into a damp ball, launched it into the air and kicked it with his foot towards the wire bin; it missed by a centimetre.
‘Oo! Close!’ I said.
Then he held his hand out to me again, but I held up my bloody hand. He didn’t care, he just shrugged and shook it anyway.
‘Do you play football?’ I asked him.
‘Yeah, love it, who do you support?’
‘Man U.’
But I didn’t support Manchester United, I don’t even like football. I only said Man U because in primary school we went on a school trip to Manchester and we saw a football match at Old Trafford, I think it was Man U v Newcastle. All the boys in my class had Manchester United scarves and I asked for one for Christmas that year. I’d kept it and still wore it sometimes because it made me feel like other boys my age even though I didn’t feel like any of them at all.
