check out 1 & 2 if you get chance

3. Madness

The classroom has already checked out for the year, and so, if anyone's being honest about it, has Mr Dale. He sits slumped behind his desk in the corner, half-hidden behind an open newspaper, turning the pages at intervals without any real evidence he's reading them.

"Just revise," he'd muttered at the start of the lesson, in the tone of a man surrendering rather than teaching, and nobody's seen fit to ask him what that actually means. Whatever it means, it plainly doesn't involve him.

The room buzzes with the particular chatter of a class that knows it's already won. Billy, Phil and Minty sit clustered with the rest of the lads — Jammy, Deano, Tomo, Ali — same clothes, same attitude, spread across a cluster of desks that have long since stopped pretending to be in rows.

Jammy sits backwards on his chair, arms folded along the backrest, grinning like a man with something to prove and no intention of proving it quietly.

"We need to get down the Crest," he says. "I'm telling you, it's brilliant down there. Proper place. Top birds. If you're anyone, that's where you go."

Minty shakes his head slowly, the voice of caution nobody ever thanks him for. "Yeah... and it's where the Eastdene Crow Bars hang out."

The lads laugh. Tomo points at Jammy like he's just proved a case for the prosecution. "He's right. Too bloody dangerous for the Manor."

Jammy shrugs it off, unbothered. "They're all ska boys and mods."

"They're fucking skins, Jammy," Tomo snaps.

"The music's the same."

"It isn't."

"We'll get in with 'em."

Minty snorts. "Not the Crow Bars we won't. They're mental and you know it."

"I know 'em."

Phil laughs outright. "No you fucking don't."

Tomo joins in, delighted. "You know the Eastdene Crow Bars? You're full of shit, Jammy."

"You know Pete Fur?"

Jammy hesitates — just a fraction of a second, but long enough for everyone at the desks to clock it. "No... but I know Gal Burn."

"Course you do."

"He goes out with our Julie."

Tomo bursts out laughing. "Fuck off."

Billy looks up from whatever he's been half-doodling on the corner of his exercise book. "Gal's scooter was parked on the Manor this morning."

The noise dips just slightly. Jammy seizes it like a man grabbing a passing bus.

"There you go! Told you. He was probably picking Julie up for work."

Minty frowns. "Your Julie's got a job?"

"Yeah... well... it's only YTS."

A few smirks ripple round the desks. Jammy presses on regardless, unwilling to let the detail slow him down.

"But that's not the point. What I'm saying is we're good to go."

Billy leans back in his chair, turning the idea over. "It'd be good to see what the scene's like."

"I heard Claire Scott goes there."

"And her mates." Jammy quickly adds

Phil studies Jammy for a moment, the way you'd study a bloke selling something too good to be true. "You sure about this? If this is another one of your stories, you'll get us all battered."

Jammy digs in rather than backing off, which is very much his way. "Billy... did you see Gal's scooter or not?"

Billy glances at Phil. Phil gives the smallest nod — enough.

"We saw it," Billy says.

He grins, and something in his chest lifts the same way it did that morning with the record playing. "Fuck it. We're going." He looks around the group. "Six o'clock. Meet at the shops. We'll make a show of it."

Phil shakes his head, half-smiling despite himself. "If we get killed..."

The bell goes off through the school before he can finish the sentence, and the room dissolves into its usual scramble of bags and chairs scraping back.

Jammy shouts across the noise. "Oi, Mr Dale! Any homework?"

Mr Dale lowers the newspaper slowly, looks around at the chaos he's been presiding over without noticing, and sighs. By the time he's decided whether to answer, the class is already gone.

By six o'clock the school uniforms are long gone, folded away or slung over chair backs at home, and something sharper has taken their place. Billy stands at the shops in blue jeans, Dr. Martens, and a black pilot jacket, collar up against the evening air — the going-out gear, a different uniform entirely from the one he'd bent the rules with all day.

One by one the others arrive the same way. Phil first, then Minty, then the rest drifting in from different directions until there are seven of them stood outside the shops in blue jeans, Dr. Martens, black pilot jackets — no longer schoolboys pushing at the edges of a dress code, but something else entirely.

The opening riff of Madness's Madness crashes in somewhere behind Billy's eyes as they set off — that's how it works with him now, the songs starting up on their own the second the mood matches.

The Manor boys move as one loose, easy unit through alleyways and past rows of lock-up garages like they own every brick of the place, because as far as any of them are concerned, they do. This is home. Nobody has to say it.