A muffled trumpet sounded from one of the glebe cottages.
‘Yeah, but…yer don’t think it’s a wind-up?’
Making us wait might be some sort of secret test. If Moran gives up, pointed out Maggot, you’ll look a better Spook. ‘Go home, if you think so.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. I just meant…hey! Shooting star!’
‘Where?’
‘There!’
‘Nope.’ If you have to learn it from a book, Moran doesn’t know it. ‘It’s a satellite. It isn’t burning out. See? Just going in a straight line. Might be that Skylab space station, losing altitude. No one knows where it’ll crash.’
‘But how come—’
‘Shush!’
There’s a wilder corner where broken slabs’re stacked under corkscrewed holly. Mutterings there, I heard, for sure. Now I smelt cigarettes. Moran followed me, saying, ‘What is it?’ (God, Moran can be a pillock.) I stooped to enter this tent of dark green. Pluto Noak sat on one stack of old headstones, Grant Burch on a pile of roof tiles, John Tookey on a third. Wished I could’ve told them it was me and not Moran who’d spotted them. Even saying ‘Hello’ to hard kids is gay so I just said, ‘All right?’
Pluto Noak, Lord of Spooks, nodded back.
‘Ooops.’ Stooping Moran head-butted my arse and I stumbled forward. ‘Soz, Jace.’
I told Moran, ‘Don’t say “soz”.’
‘So you knows the rules?’ Grant Burch flobbed. ‘Yer gets a leggy over this wall, then yer’ve got fifteen minutes to get across the six back gardens. Once yer done, yer legs it to the green. Swinyard ’n’ Redmarley’ll be waitin’ under the oak. If yer in time, welcome to the Spooks. If yer late, or if yer don’t show, yer ain’t Spooks and yer never will be.’
Moran and me nodded.
‘And if yer caught,’ added John Tookey, ‘yer ain’t Spooks.’
‘And,’ Grant Burch pointed a warning finger, ‘and, if yer caught, you ain’t never even heard of Spooks.’
I defied my nerves and Hangman to say, ‘What’s “Spooks”, Ploot?’
Pluto Noak granted me an encouraging snort.
The holly shivered just as St Gabriel’s chimed a quarter to nine. ‘Starting positions!’ Grant Burch looked at me and Moran. ‘Who’s first?’
‘Me,’ I said, without glancing at Moran. ‘I ain’t chicken.’
The back garden of the first cottage was just a marsh of triffidy weeds. Straddling the wall, I gave the four faces in the graveyard one last glance, swung over and plummeted into long grass. The house said, They’ve gone. No lights, an unfixed drainpipe, slack net curtains. All the same, I crept low. Some squatter might be watching, with the lights turned off. With a cross-bow. (That’s the difference between me and Moran. Moran’d just tromp across like he owned the place. Moran never takes snipers into account.) I climbed up the plum tree that grew by the next wall.
A coat rustled, just above my head.
Idiot. Just a placky bag, flapping in the branches. That trumpet started up again, dead close now. I slithered off a knobbly branch and balanced on the next wall. A doddle so far. Better yet, the flat roof of the next garden’s oil tank was just a foot below me, and screened by coal-blue conifers.
The tank boooooomed, thunder underfoot.
The second back garden was miles dodgier. The curtains and even half the windows were open. Two fat ladies sat on a sofa watching Asterixes and Obelixes on the European It’s a Knockout. The TV commentator Stuart Hall was laughing like a Harrier jump jet taking off. The garden had no cover. A badminton net dropped over the threadbare lawn, that was it. Plasticky bats, bowls, an archery target and a paddling pool lay littered, all dead cheap and Woolworths-looking. Worse, a camper van was parked round the side. This roly-poly guy with an upside-down face was playing his trumpet in it. His cheeks swelled bullfroggishly but his gaze was fixed down his garden.
Notes went up.
Notes went down.
Three whole minutes must’ve gone by. I didn’t know what to do.