They had not, in fact, called him Emil.
For the first two years they had called him Zawadzki, in full, with enormous care, the way you say a word you want to make sound ridiculous — and then Freddie had worked out that it was funnier to get it slightly wrong every time, and after that it was Zavodsky and Zadowski and Zawaski and once, gloriously, for a whole term, Vodka.
He had a nickname by the third week of year eight and it was not any of those. It was Hoover. It came from a boy called Tom Ferris who left the school the following year and who never, as far as anybody knew, thought about it again, and the reason for it was that Emil's mother cleaned the stairwells of a block on Vicarage Road on Saturdays and had once been seen doing it.
It stuck the way only a bad name sticks. By year nine the teachers were using it.
His hair had been dark and thick and his mother had cut it herself at the kitchen table, which is a thing she did carefully and was proud of, and which he had let her go on doing long after he understood what it looked like.
In March of year ten Jonah Pike held his head against the radiator in the lower corridor while Freddie took most of the left side off with a pair of craft scissors from the art room.
They had not planned to take the rest. It was simply that once you have done one side you have made a decision about the other, and so Emil went home that afternoon with a head like something that had been through machinery, and his mother cried, and he told her he had done it himself for a bet.
Then he shaved the rest of it off in the bathroom at eleven o'clock at night so that she would not have to look at what had been done.
"That's better," Freddie said on the Monday, with real approval. "That suits you, actually."
The thing Emil thought about afterwards — later, for years, at three in the morning, in a series of rooms getting steadily more expensive — was not the corridor.
It was that he had lied to protect them.
He had stood in his own kitchen with his mother's hands on his ruined head and he had lied, immediately and fluently and without being asked to, because the alternative was watching her get her coat and go up to the school, and he had known exactly what would happen to her there and exactly what would happen to him afterwards.
He had been fifteen. He had worked all that out in the time it took her to say Emil, what have you done.
That was the year he stopped being a child, and none of the five of them ever knew that it had happened, because it happened in a kitchen in Watford with the door shut.