be contrary, Alexander,’ said his mother.
‘No, he’s right,’ said his father, raising one forefinger in judgement. ‘But don’t say you weren’t warned. You’ll get no sympathy from me if you get up there and find it’s too high. Do you want me to go on with you?’ his father asked, in a tone that Alexander took as a challenge.
‘Not if you don’t want to,’ Alexander replied, and his father pressed a couple of coins into his hand, as if he were handing over an important message for him to deliver.
A woman with curlers in her hair took the money. ‘Just for you, lover?’ she asked, letting the coins slide down her hip into the pouch that was slung across her dress. Alexander looked at his mother, who looked at his father, who was studying the wheel. ‘Shouldn’t really, you being a little ‘un,’ said the woman; then, after a teasing pause, ‘but go on.’ She touched his cheek with her inky fingertips as he crossed the steel ramp to the empty car. ‘Hold tight,’ she told him, pressing his hands onto the iron bar that she fastened across his belly, and then she turned towards the man in the sentrybox at the foot of the ramp and cried ‘Up and away,’ letting her voice trail off like someone falling a long distance.
With a jolt he rose backwards and in a second he was above the stalls and then pitching down towards them, through air that smelled of onions and hot sugar. His parents appeared and receded, and he looked over his shoulder, down on the tarpaulin roofs, which glowed like multicoloured lampshades. He saw the gigantic shadows of the stallkeepers quivering on the tents as he swooped towards his parents. At the top he looked across the fairground, and was fascinated to see how orderly it appeared from this height, but the wheel was now gathering speed. A wind was whirring in his ears. Becoming frightened, he closed his eyes. The car swung as it was flung over the apex, and swung again at the end of its fall. A woman in a car behind him let out a gleeful yell, urging the wheel to turn faster. Alexander screwed his eyes so tightly shut that he could no longer sense the fairground lights. He heard his mother’s voice say his father’s name. ‘Make it stop. Please make it stop,’ he prayed, and then it did stop.
The car rocked, suspended at the start of its descent. On the rim of the footplate a line of red lightbulbs bobbed like fishing floats, then came to rest. Under him something metallic clanged against another piece of metal. The wheel juddered forward an inch, another inch, another inch, and stopped again. ‘Alexander!’ his mother cried out. She ran into his sight, waving her arms; miniature black cars circled behind her, on a roundabout for small children. ‘Keep calm,’ she called. ‘Alexander. Can you hear me? They’ll get it going in a minute. Stay calm, Alexander. Stay calm,’ she kept repeating, but there was no need, for he was no longer upset, not in the slightest. He gazed over the Heath, where the blades of grass seemed to stand to attention in the headlights of the cars, and then he surveyed the fairground, carefully, as if it were an interesting picture spread out below him. Here and there stood groups of people who were looking in his direction; new groups were forming on every path, and from the farther parts of the fairground they were coming nearer. The hats and headscarves moved between the stalls like leaves flowing on water towards a drain. Over the wall of the park he could see the paths that ran under the black foliage of the trees. Wings clattered somewhere among the leaves, but no birds appeared; he imagined the grass alive with nocturnal animals, foraging on the slopes where people cycled in the day. The park was transformed into an enclave of forest, but he understood that he could only observe this forest and never be in it, because it would cease to be a forest if anybody was in it. He told himself that he would be happy to stay all night where he was, and see the sun come up over the houses, and the park become a park again.
He realised that the steam organ had fallen silent. The horses had ceased prancing on the biggest of the merry-go-rounds, but a girl remained seated on one of them, pointing straight at him and laughing. Alexander waved to her, and leaned forward to wave to the people gathered around the booth below. His mother had one hand to her mouth and with the other was waving to him with her fingers, while his father was chatting to the woman with the hair-curlers as if he were simply talking to an acquaintance in a shop.
‘Sit back,’ his mother called, making the motion of pushing at a door. His father glanced up and appeared to nod commendingly to him before resuming his conversation with the woman, who turned away briefly to shout ‘Hurry it up, for God’s sake,’ to someone hidden from view by the floor of the car. ‘Sit back, Alexander,’ his mother called, and it was then he noticed that a man with a panama hat was standing to her side, watching her as she gestured. Alexander watched the man follow her line of sight upward. ‘Alexander, please sit back,’ his mother cried. The man’s eyes were trained on Alexander’s face for a few seconds, then traced the track of his mother’s gaze back down to her face. ‘Alexander! Now!’ his mother demanded, unaware that she was being watched. Alexander lay down on the bench. He regarded the stars for a while, and fell asleep in the mild summer night’s air.
He awoke with a spasm of the machinery and found that he was slowly returning to the ground. The woman with the hair-curlers took him by the hand and passed him to his mother as though he had gone missing and she had discovered him. ‘You’ll be the death of me, young man,’ said his mother, sandwiching his head between her hands. ‘I told you it was dangerous, and then you make it worse. Messing around like that.’
‘I wasn’t messing around,’ he replied.
‘Give me patience,’ said his mother to nobody. She held him tightly against her side and sniffed. Under her arm he saw the man in the panama giving a small white card to his father.
‘We’ll consider it,’ his father was saying. The man raised his hat as they shook hands.
‘Hello, Alexander,’ said the man, bracing his hands on his knees to greet him. His eyebrows bounced up and down as he smiled. ‘You handled that situation with aplomb, I must say,’ he remarked, narrowing his eyes admiringly. With a thumb he scratched the bristles in the hollow beneath his lower lip. ‘Not to be flattered, eh? I like that in a chap,’ said the man. Obtaining no response, he straightened his back and turned down the brim of his hat. ‘Extraordinary,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr MacIndoe, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said the man, making a bow to each of them. ‘An extraordinary child,’ he remarked. He wriggled his neck to settle the fit of his collar and strode away across the fairground as if he were going to greet someone, but he walked past the tombola stall and kept going, through the wall of caravans, across the road and onto the Heath.
‘Who was that?’ Alexander asked.
‘Nobody in particular,’ replied his father, interrupting his mother before she could utter anything more than the first syllable of his name. ‘Someone who fancied a yatter, that’s all.’
The following Friday evening, at bedtime, Alexander’s mother told him that the next day they were going up to town, just the two of them. ‘A sort of adventure,’ she said. Tantalisingly she flourished the small white card, which had something written on the side that was not printed. ‘We’ll have a bit of a laugh.’ In the morning she made him wash his hair, and she washed her own as soon as he was out of the bathroom. When she came downstairs her lips were made up the way Mrs Darling did hers. They were going to see the man in the panama hat, Alexander knew, and this made him feel uneasy and vaguely ashamed of his mother. On the platform of the Underground station he noticed her surreptitiously checking the handwritten words on the card. ‘Where are we going?’ he shouted over the roar of the arriving train.
‘You’ll see,’ she replied, wincing at the noise and the gritty air. ‘It’ll be fun,’ she assured him, but she fussed at his hair as if she were taking him to an examination.
They came back above ground in a place that was not like the streets around his house. There were more cars here, and fewer shops. The paving stones were perfectly level,
