a gypsy and get all this loot’n all for free, eh? Beats workin’ for a livin’! ’Cause if I wanted to—’
The fire alarm blared out.
Samuel Swinyard frowned, annoyed. Not scared, ’cause there’s no such thing as a real fire alarm, only fire drills. We had one at school just last week. We had to walk out of French in an orderly fashion and line up in the playground. Mr Whitlock stormed round yelling, ‘Burnt to toast! The lot of you! TOAST! Deformed, for life!’ Mr Carver made a megaphone with his hands and shouted, ‘At least Nicholas Briar won’t be on his own any more!’
But the village hall alarm went on, and on, and on.
People round us began saying ‘Ridiculous!’ and ‘Can’t some Einstein turn the bloody thing off?’ Gwendolin Bendincks said something to Mr Castle, who cupped his ear to say What? Gwendolin Bendincks repeated it. What? A few people’d stood up now and were looking round, anxiously.
Fifty shouts exploded at the back. ‘FIRE!’
The village hall was instantly a tipping churn of panic.
Boiling hollers and fried shrieks swarmed over our heads. Chairs went flying and actually bounced. ‘Gypsies’ve gone and torched the place!’ Then the lights went out. ‘Get out! Get out!’ In that awful darkness Dad’d pulled me into him (the zip of his coat gouged my nose) like I was a baby. We stayed put right there, right in the middle of the row. I could smell his under-arm deodorant. A shoe whacked my shin. One flickery emergency light came on. By its glow I saw Mrs Rhydd hammering on the fire exit. ‘Locked! The ruddy thing’s locked!’ Wilcox’s dad was breaststroking people out of his way. ‘Smash the windows! Smash the sodding windows!’ Only Kit Harris was calm. He contemplated the crowd like a hermit contemplating some quiet forest. Colette Turbot’s mum screamed as a string of whopping pearls unstringed themselves and bounced under hundreds of feet. ‘You’re crushing my hand!’ Walls of villagers skittled over, down, around, over. A headless crowd’s the most dangerous animal.
‘It’s all right, Jason!’ Dad was squeezing me so tight I could hardly breathe. ‘I’ve got you!’
Dean Moran’s place is actually two tumbly cottages knocked together and it’s so old it’s still got an outside bog. Pissing into the next-door field’s fresher so I usually do that. Today I got off the school bus with Dean at Drugger’s End with him ’cause we were going to play on his Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16k. But Dean’s sister Kelly’d sat on the tape recorder that morning so we couldn’t load any games. Kelly does the Pick’n’Mix at Woolworths in Malvern and what Kelly sits on isn’t ever the same again. So Dean suggested we customize Operation in his bedroom. Dean’s bedroom wall’s papered with posters of West Bromwich Albion. West Brom’re always getting relegated, but Dean and his dad’ve always supported West Brom and that’s that. Operation’s this game where you take out bones from a patient’s body. If you touch the sides with the tweezers his nose-buzzer buzzes and you don’t collect your surgeon’s fee. We tried to rewire Operation with a giant battery so you’d get electrocuted if you touched the sides. We killed Operation and the patient for ever, but Dean says he got bored of it yonks ago. Outside we made a crazy golf course with planks, pipes and old horseshoes from the choked orchard where Dean’s garden stops. Evil frilly toadstools’d broken out of the rotted stump. A moon-grey cat watched us from the roof of the outdoors bog. We found two clubs but couldn’t find a single ball, not even in the bottomless shed. We did find a broken loom and the bones of a motorbike. ‘How about,’ suggested Dean, ‘we have a looksy down our well?’
The well’s covered by a dustbin lid under a stack of bricks to stop Dean’s sister Maxine falling in. We took the bricks off, one by one. ‘Yer can hear a drownin’ girl’s voice, some nights when there’s no wind an’ no moon.’
‘Yeah, sure you do, Dean.’
‘Swear on me nan’s grave! A little girl drowned in this well. Her petticoats an’ that pulled her under before they could rescue her.’
This was all too detailed to be bullshit. ‘When?’
Dean dumped the last brick. ‘Olden times.’
We peered down. Our heads were tombed in the quiverless mirror. Hush of a tomb, and as chilly.
‘How deep does it go?’
‘Dunno.’ The well elastics words down, then catapults echoes up. ‘One time me and Kelly tied a