upstairs window. I walked up the Great Wall of China and almost debagged myself on Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing, pointing up to the evening moon. Beyond was a tiny square of lawn set in a bed of mint imperial pebbles. I jumped on to this grass.
And sank up to my dick in cold water.
You prat, laughed Unborn Twin, you ponce you pillock you plonker.
Water sluiced out of my trouser legs as I scrambled out of the pond. Tiny leaves clung to me like globules of sick. Mum’ll go apeshit when she sees. But I had to put that out of my mind, ’cause over the very next fence waited the most dangerous garden of all.
The good news was, Mr Blake’s garden was empty of Mr Blake and the far side had monkey-puzzle trees and sword plants. Excellent cover for a Spook. The bad news was, a greenhouse ran the entire length of the garden, right under the fence. A ten-foot-high, unstable fence, quivering under my weight. I’d have to inch along the fence in a sitting position, tilll I was right at Mr Blake’s living-room window. If I fell, it was smash through a glass pane and slam on a concrete floor. Unless I got impaled on a tomato cane, like the priest in The Omen who gets spiked by a falling lightning conductor.
I had no choice.
The splintery fence-top sawed my bum and palms as I inched along it. My pond-soaked jeans were clammy-heavy. I nearly fell. If Mr Blake’s face appeared in any of the windows, I was dead meat. I nearly fell again.
I cleared the greenhouse and jumped down.
The slab made a kerklonky noise. Luckily for me the only person in Mr Blake’s lounge was Dustin Hoffman in Kramer versus Kramer. (We’d seen it on holiday in Oban. Julia’d sobbed all the way through and called it the greatest film ever made.) Mr Blake’s lounge was sort of womanly, for a man who lives alone. Lacy lamps, pottery milkmaids and paintings of African grasslands you buy on the stairs at Littlewoods, if you really want to. His wife must’ve bought it all before she caught leukaemia. I crept under the kitchen window and then down the garden in the far shrubbery till I got to a water butt. I don’t know why I looked back at the house right then, but I did.
Mr Blake, gazing out of an upstairs window. Sixty seconds before there’d’ve been no way he wouldn’t’ve seen me balancing on his fence. (Winning needs luck and bravery. I hoped Moran had fat reserves of both.) A Rolling Stones tongue sticker on the window pane’d resisted all attempts to scrape it off. Ghosts of other stickers surrounded that one. It must’ve been his son Martin’s room, once upon a time.
Creased Mr Blake just stared out. What at?
Not me. I was hidden by leaves.
Into his own reflected eyes?
But Mr Blake’s eyes were holes.
The last garden was Mervyn Hill’s. Squelch’s dad’s only a dustman but his garden’s like a National Trust property. ’Cause it was the end glebe cottage, it spread out more. A crazy-paving path climbed up to a bench under a trellisy arch of roses. Through the French windows I saw Squelch playing Twister with two younger kids and a man I guessed was their dad. Must be visitors. Squelch’s dad spun the spinner. Past the sofa was a TV showing the very end of Kramer versus Kramer where the kid’s mum comes to take him away. I plotted my route. A cinch. A compost heap on the far side’d let me vault over the wall. Crouching, I ran towards the trellisy arch. The roses brewed the air. ‘Shush up,’ a shadow-woman sat on the bench five feet away from me, ‘ooh, yer little tyke!’
‘Aw,’ said her shadow-friend, ‘littl’un kicking again, love?’
(I couldn’t believe they hadn’t heard me.)
‘Ow, ow, ow…’ Huff. ‘She’s excited to hear yer, Mum. Here, touch the bump…’
The gap between the trellis arch and the back wall was wide enough to hide me, but too thorny to let me pass.
‘You was a proper little acrobat, too, love,’ said the older shadow, ‘now I think back.’ (I recognized Squelch’s mum.) ‘Cartwheels and kung-fu it was. Merv was always quieter, truth be told, even before he was out.’
‘Shan’t be sorry when this little miss decides it’s time. I ain’t half fed up of bein’ a whale on legs.’
(Oh God. A pregnant woman. One thing everyone knows about them is if you give them a