After school, the evening is warm and a bit hazy, with a salty breeze coming off the sea. Normally I’d love an evening like this. I’d walk Lady on the beach, have a ‘summer salad’ for supper with Gram, do my homework, watch a bit of TV, go to bed when it’s still a bit light.

There’s a lot to be said for ‘normal’. Normal is nice, normal is reliable, and unsurprising, and comforting. Now I am wondering if anything can ever be normal again.

I am treating this whole thing like I’m a commando on a raid, or something, and it is very far from normal.

First of all, I shower. I don’t want any tiny bits of dust or dirt clinging to me to give away my presence. I check my nose for snot, my ears for wax, my hair for dandruff, my nails for dirt trapped beneath them. You may think it’s gross, but tough: I’m not taking any risks.

Which is a stupid thing to say. What I mean is, I’m not taking any risks apart from entering someone’s house invisibly wipe their computers. That’s risk enough for me.

I brought some Dr Chang His Skin So Clear to school in my water bottle and I drank it at lunchtime. It hadn’t improved. It was still foul.

By the last period, I could feel the familiar gut-rumbling and I knew what was coming. The lesson was English, and Mrs West had allocated parts for us to read from Othello, which is Shakespeare. Tyrone Bower always gets to do Othello because he throws himself into it and doesn’t care about sounding like a complete clown, e-nun-ci-at-ing his Shakes-pee-ahh like he’s appearing at the Theatre Royal.

And I did something that – only a week ago – I would not have dreamt of doing.

Bored with Tyrone and his overacting, I had skimmed ahead in the text, and saw something coming up that I thought, well …

Here’s what happened. I would normally never burp in class. Who would? And what made me suddenly decide that now would be a good time?

I held on and held on, while Tyrone shouted his lines. He was even doing arm actions at his desk. I really couldn’t hold on any longer – it was giving me stomach cramps. If I say so myself, when it finally came, it could not have been timed better.

Othello, if you didn’t know, is the name of an army general and he’s crazily in love with a woman called Desdemona. Take it away, Tyrone:

Othello: If after every tempest come such calms,

May the winds blow till they have wakened death!

Me: Buuuuurp!

You know when you drink a cold Coke on a hot day, and guzzle it too quickly? It was like one of those burps, but doubled. It was loud, and perfectly timed. But that was nothing – nothing – compared with the smell, which was worse than ever.

People laughed at first, because of the line about ‘may the winds blow’ and its perfectly timed follow-up.

But then the odour began to spread.

Have you ever seen on the news when police fire tear gas at protesters? It was like that in Mrs West’s English Literature class. People were actually getting up from their desks and moving away, coughing.

And best of all, I didn’t get the blame. Everyone thought it was Andreas Hansen, who was sitting next to me, mainly because he turned and pointed at me, and no one – and I mean, no one – would ever imagine that I, quiet little Ethel Leatherhead, would do such a thing. I helped it by coughing a bit and looking accusingly at Andreas.

At least I know that the drink is working.