at all but that it was a million different colours all conspiring together to create a pale blue and that the sky was conniving and lying, that the sky was in fact much cleverer than us and that maybe everything we considered to be insentient was in fact cleverer than us and laughing at us. I looked at the leaves in the trees and questioned their greenness. Are you really green? I asked myself. Or are you actually tiny little particles of purple and red and yellow and gold all having a party and laughing, laughing, laughing. I glanced at Phin. I said, ‘Is your skin really white?’
He looked at his skin. He said, ‘No. It’s …’ He looked at me and laughed out loud. ‘I have scales! Look! I have scales. And you!’ He pointed at me with great hilarity. ‘You have feathers! Oh God,’ he said, ‘what have we become? We’re creatures!’
We chased each other round the roof for a minute, making animal noises. I stroked my feathers. Phin unfurled his tongue. We both expressed shock and awe at the length of it. ‘You have the longest tongue I have ever seen.’
‘That’s because I am a lizard.’ He rolled it back in and then out again. I watched it keenly. And when it came out again, I leaned in and trapped it between my teeth.
‘Ow!’ said Phin, grabbing his tongue between his fingers and laughing at me.
‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘I’m just a stupid bird. I thought it was a worm.’
And then we stopped laughing and sat in the plastic deckchairs and stared, stared, stared into the whirling aurora borealis above and our hands hung down side by side, our knuckles brushing every now and then, and each time I felt Phin’s skin touch mine I felt as though his very being was penetrating my epidermis and bits of his essence were swirling into my essence, making a soup of me and him and it was too too tantalising, I needed to plug myself into him so that I could capture all of his essence and my fingers wrapped themselves around his fingers and he let me, he let me hold his hand, and I felt him pour into me like when we went on a canal boat once and the man opened the lock and we watched the water flow from one place to another.
‘There,’ I said, turning to look at Phin. ‘There. You and me. We’re the same person now.’
‘We are?’ said Phin, looking at me with wide eyes.
‘Yes, look.’ I pointed at our hands. ‘We’re the same.’
Phin nodded and we sat then for some time, I don’t know how long, it might have been five minutes, it might have been an hour, our hands held together, staring into the sky and lost in our own strange chemically induced reveries.
‘We’re not having a bad trip, are we?’ I said eventually.
‘No,’ said Phin. ‘We’re having a good trip.’
‘The best trip,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The best trip.’
‘We should live up here,’ I said. ‘Bring our beds up here and live up here.’
‘We should. We should do that. Right now!’
We both leapt to our feet and jumped down through the trapdoor into the tunnel above the attic. I saw the walls of the tunnel throbbing, like the inside of a body; I felt we were in a throat, maybe, or an oesophagus. We almost fell through the trapdoor into the hallway, and suddenly it felt like we were in the wrong place, like in Doctor Who when he opens the door to the Tardis and doesn’t know where he is.
‘Where are we?’ I said.
‘We’re down,’ said Phin. ‘In down world.’
‘I want to go back up.’
‘Let’s get the pillows,’ said Phin. ‘Quick.’ He pulled me by the hand into his bedroom and we grabbed the pillows and we were about to climb back up into the tunnel when David appeared in front of us.
He was wet from the shower, his bottom half wrapped in a towel, his chest bare. I stared at his nipples. They were dark and leathery.
‘What are you two up to?’ he asked, his eyes switching forensically from Phin to me and back again. His voice was like a low rumble of thunder. He was tall and absolutely hard, like a statue. I felt my blood turn cold in his presence.
‘We’re taking pillows,’ said Phin. ‘To up.’
‘Up?’
‘Up,’ repeated Phin. ‘This is down.’
‘Down.’
‘Down,’ said Phin.
‘What the hell is wrong with you two?’ said David. ‘Look at me.’ He