There were two of them. I'll call them Gareth and Dean. Not their names, but close enough in flavour — two boys who had decided, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me, that I was worth their attention in the worst possible way.

This was one of the secondary schools I attended. I won't be more specific than that. What I remember most clearly isn't the bullying itself — that was dull and repetitive in the way that bullying always is — but the afternoon it escalated into something physical, and then into something worse: an official hearing in the teaching room, the three of us seated across from a member of staff, and the realisation that I had already lost.

I was doing karate at the time. Junior club, twice a week, the kind of thing that kids' parents sign them up for in the slightly naive hope that confidence will follow technique. I wasn't bad at it. Not gifted, but not bad. And I had, in the weeks before the incident, developed a bruise across my upper back from a sparring session — one of those slow, deep ones that starts yellow at the edges and takes about a fortnight to fully appear.

Gareth and Dean had shoved me. I'd shoved back. Someone had seen it, and the three of us ended up in the teaching room. Gareth — the more verbal of the two, the one who understood that the battle was rhetorical now — told the teacher that I had hit them first, and that the marks on my back proved I'd been in fights before. That I was, in short, the aggressor.

I explained about karate. I explained when I'd got the bruise and how. I was calm about it, I think, because I genuinely believed that the truth was self-evidently the truth and would be recognised as such.

It wasn't.

The teacher — I'll call her Mrs Arden — listened to both sides and then settled on Gareth's version. I don't know exactly why. Maybe it was the confidence with which he presented it. Maybe I came across as defensive where he came across as injured. Maybe she'd had a long week. But the decision was made in that room, in that conversation, and I left it with a formal warning and the particular rage of someone who has been found guilty of the truth.

What I've thought about since — not obsessively, but occasionally, the way you turn an old coin over — is what that moment taught me about how institutions process conflict. Mrs Arden wasn't malicious. She was trying to resolve something with incomplete information and two contradictory accounts. The problem is that "trying to be fair" and "being fair" are not the same thing, and adults in authority positions don't always know the difference. The first feels like diligence. The second requires something harder: a willingness to remain uncertain longer than is comfortable.

The karate bruise was, in retrospect, almost funny. It was evidence in my favour that looked like evidence against me. That's not a rare situation. It's the kind of thing that happens when you slot ambiguous facts into a pre-formed story.

I don't hold a grudge against Mrs Arden. That would be tedious and I've got better things to be tedious about. But I do think there's something worth naming in the dynamic of that room: the way that the child who speaks with the most apparent calm and certainty will generally win, regardless of what actually happened. Gareth had that skill. I didn't, not then. I've had to learn it, slowly and not always successfully, in the thirty-odd years since.

Gareth and Dean stopped bothering me shortly after. Whether the outcome emboldened them or simply bored them I never found out. I kept going to karate. I got better at it.