Chapter Two. Part Seven.

At the end of the school day!

The Best Days of Our Lives…

One day, when eating at his favourite of favourite Chinese restaurants, Matthew James Fletcher got one of those joke fortune cookies that read “the best days of you life are behind you”. It’s true. The best days of Fletcher’s life, if you’re someone that considers your school days the best days, were behind him.

Fletcher’s school days were an increasingly distant memory assigned to the historical archives of his past. He, for a long time, really had no desire to revisit them.

Some two decades after completing his GCSEs, feeling the need to wonder down paths recently left untrodden, Fletcher found himself with a need to visit his former secondary comprehensive school.

The John Hunt School, since Fletcher had attended it, had been murdered with a nearby school and had been renamed the Sutherland Co-operative Academy. How posh is that? Really?

Fletcher, understanding there might have been a few changes to the school since his day, was expecting to see it the way he last saw it.

It was Tuesday, 18 July 1989. Fletcher, along with his two closest friends, Michael Robinson and Thomas Madeley, walked out of the school gates for the last time and never looked back.