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& Fitch type. I’d never been what I’d call cool. I wondered if we stuck out there. It was more of a uni hang-out, and downstairs it also sold weird vintage stuff – lamps, furniture, toys, a few clothes – and there was a café. The chairs were moulded orange plastic and on the tables there were pages from Japanese comics under perspex. The people at the next table were calmly rolling cigarettes that may have been a bit spliffy, although they weren’t smoking them. We drank cappuccinos and shared a brownie, and I’d asked Jonahto talk a bit about his own family by then.
    ‘They think they’re cool and permissive,’ he said, ‘and I used to think they were too, but the older I get, the more I think they’re a bit more traditional than I used to.’
    ‘Or they just seem like that because there’s more stuff they don’t want you to do than there was before,’ I said.
    ‘Oh, I don’t mean with me, I mean with the world in general. But that’s a problem for you, though? Pointless rules?’
    ‘Maybe it’s just different for girls.’
    ‘I’m sure it is,’ Jonah said. ‘But it’s harder if it’s not actually your dad telling you what to do, just someone else.’
    ‘He’s such a phoney,’ I said. ‘He tells me people will “call me names” if I stay out late with boys. I just find it creepy.’
    ‘It’s like he’s too interested in your sex life.’
    Yes, that was how I felt, but as I didn’t really have one of those, I blushed and carried on.
    ‘He’s got strong ideas about how people are going to see me, morally. He’s really into telling me how I’ll be seen by boys, but he as good as lives with my mum now – he’s got his own flat, but he’s never there – and they’re not married. What a hypocrite.’
    ‘Is he some kind of God-botherer?’ Jonah said.
    I hadn’t heard the term before. ‘You mean a Christian?’
    ‘Yeah. Any religion, really.’
    ‘Yes, I think so. You’re not, then?’
    ‘No, we’re not big on religion.’
    ‘Your family?’ I asked.
    ‘No, everyone you met at the pictures. Me, Dom, Steve. Lewis. It’s been a bit of a culture shock, in fact, coming to your school because people tended to be more of our mind back at Malton Road.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘You know everyone in the sixth has to do general studies at A-level here?’ he asked, and I nodded. ‘We’ve started off with something called “study of contemporary British society” and a lot of people have been getting a bit
eager
in the debates about religion.’
    ‘
Really?
’
    Jonah shrugged. ‘They set up a talkboard about it on your school intranet, you should take a look.’
    ‘Who set it up?’
    ‘Well, it’s part of the course, so the teacher, oh, what’s his name, not Bailey . . .’
    ‘Mr Billingsley?’
    ‘That’s it, Billingsley, he set it up. We’re all supposed to keep throwing ideas about, carrying on the discussion between the classes. We realised pretty early on that it was very easy to offend some people, and whatwith us being the new boys, we took the discussion somewhere else. We set up a Facebook group called We’re All A Bit Afraid Of The Sam Bond Nutjobs, but they found out about it so we took it down.’
    ‘Was this all pretty serious?’
    ‘Well, that group wasn’t. But yes, people have been quite seriously pissed off.’
    ‘Maybe it’s just people want to argue with you because there’s that thing of our guys needing to be convinced about you lot. Like you said, they can be a bit chippy?’
    ‘It’s not that,’ Jonah said. He picked some brownie crumbs off the table, where they’d been freckling a little Japanese rabbit superhero, by pressing them with his fingertips. ‘I think my mates and I do feel quite strongly about this as well, to be quite honest. If you think about it, so many of the world’s problems are caused by religion, religious intolerance, hatred of one religious group by another religious group – look at Palestine, Iraq, look at