through the cheese, then carry on chewin’, into you.’
Everyone looked at Tom Yew for the answer. ‘I get this dream.’ He took a drag on his cigarette that lasted an age. ‘I’m with the last bunch of survivors, after an atomic war. We’re walking up a motorway. No cars, just weeds. Every time I look behind me, there’re fewer of us. One by one, you see, the radiation’s getting them.’ He glanced at his brother Nick, then over the frozen lake. ‘It’s not that I’ll die that bothers me. It’s that I’ll be the last one.’
Nobody said a lot for a bit.
Ross Wilcox swivelled our way. He took a drag on his cigarette that lasted an age, the poser. ‘If it wasn’t for Winston Churchill you lot’d all be speakin’ German now.’
Sure, like Ross Wilcox would’ve evaded capture and headed a resistance cell. I was dying to tell that prat that actually, if the Japanese hadn’t bombed Pearl Harbor, America’d never’ve come into the war, Britain’d’ve been starved into surrender and Winston Churchill’d’ve been executed as a war criminal. But I knew I couldn’t. There were swarms of stammer-words in there and Hangman’s bloody merciless this January. So I said I was busting for a waz, stood up and went down the path to the village a bit. Gary Drake shouted, ‘Hey, Taylor! Shake your dong more than twice, you’re playing with it!’, which got fat laughs from Neal Brose and Ross Wilcox. I flashed them a V-sign over my shoulder. That stuff about shaking your dong’s a craze at the moment. There’s no one I can trust to ask what it means.
Trees’re always a relief, after people. Gary Drake and Ross Wilcox might’ve been slagging me off, but the fainter the voices became, the less I wanted to go back. I loathed myself for not putting Ross Wilcox in his place about speaking German, but it’d’ve been death to’ve started stammering back there. The cladding of frost on thorny branches was thawing and fat drops drip-drip-dripping. It soothed me, a bit. In little pits where the sun couldn’t reach there was still some gravelly snow left, but not enough to make a snowball. (Nero used to kill his guests by making them eat glass food, just for a laugh.) A robin, I saw, a woodpecker, a magpie, a blackbird and far off I think I heard a nightingale, though I’m not sure you get them in January. Then, where the faint path from the House in the Woods meets the main path to the lake, I heard a boy, gasping for breath, pounding this way. Between a pair of wishbone pines I squeezed myself out of sight. Phelps dashed by, clutching his master’s peanut Yorkie and a can of Tizer. (Rhydd’s must be out of Top Deck.) Behind the pines a possible path led up the slant. I know all the paths in this part of the woods, I thought. But not this one. Pete Redmarley and Grant Burch’d start up British Bulldogs again when Tom Yew left. That wasn’t much of a reason to go back. Just to see where the path might go, I followed it.
There’s only one house in the woods so that’s what we call it, the House in the Woods. An old woman was s’posed to live there, but I didn’t know her name and I’d never seen her. The house’s got four windows and a chimney, same as a little kid’s drawing of a house. A brick wall as tall as me surrounds it and wild bushes grow higher. Our war games in the woods steered clear of the building. Not ’cause there’re any ghost stories about it or anything. It’s just that part of the woods isn’t good.
But this morning the house looked so hunkered down and locked up, I doubted anyone was still living there. Plus, my bladder was about to split, and that makes you less cautious. So I peed up against the frosted wall. I’d just finished signing my autograph in steamy yellow when a rusty gate opened up with a tiny shriek and there stood a sour aunt from black-and-white times. Just standing there, staring at me.
My pee ran dry.
‘God! Sorry!’ I zipped up my fly, expecting an utter bollocking. Mum’d flay any kid she found pissing against our fence alive, then feed his body to the compost bin. Including me. ‘I didn’t know anyone was living…here.’