then raised my finger to my lips to say ‘shh’ and pointed to the footprints in the mud, which, it seemed, were not hers. Now that I looked, I could see that the trail led inside the garage. Instinctively, I think, Roxy lowered her voice.
‘Someone’s been in here. One of the firemen, you reckon?’ she said.
I pointed at the small footprints. ‘It’d have to be one with very dainty feet.’
She gave her little bark of laughter. ‘Very good, Sherlock! But what about my laptop?’
I shrugged, and she pushed past me to the other side of the desk where she kept the computer. Then she just screamed.
And I mean screamed.
For all her small frame, it was a big shriek, followed by little gasps, ‘Ah-ah-ah,’ then, ‘Aidan!’
‘What?’ I was just standing there, unable to do anything because I had no idea what had caused her to shriek.
Roxy’s eyes were fixed on something under the desk, something I couldn’t see.
‘Th-there’s a … a person.’
OK, so what we should have done was calmly leave the shed-cum-garage, locking the door behind us, and call the police.
That would have been sensible. That’s what you should do if you’re ever in the position of finding a person hiding under your desk in an old workman’s hut.
Instead I stepped forward and seized the desk with both hands, tipping it towards me on two legs till it crashed over, revealing a smallish figure curled up in a ball like a scared hedgehog and visibly trembling.
‘What the …’
‘Who the …’
Slowly, like a leaf uncurling in spring, the figure lifted its head, straightened its back and looked up at us standing either side.
‘You!’ Roxy and I said in unison.
The boy from the cottage blinked hard at the light coming through the doorway and slowly stood up and said, ‘Memam … memam … memam …’
Just that. Babbling and blinking, looking first at me and then at Roxy.
She, of course, understood first.
‘Your mam?’
He nodded. ‘Me mam.’ He swallowed hard and carried on blinking in the light.
The last friend I had ever had was Jack McGonagal. It was Jack who changed everything.
You probably do not remember 1934. Me, I liked it. We had no refrigerator or telephone, but nor did most people. Televisions and computers had hardly even been invented and it would be another sixty or more years before everyone used email and the internet, and everybody knew everything about everybody else. Which was not entirely a good thing if you were trying to hide a secret.
By then, Mam and I had been living in Oak House for nearly eighty years. Mam had bought it in 1856 for £300 cash. You could do that then. It was all legal, and Mam and I had enough money.
It was certainly remote, and perfect for us. There were no housing estates nearby then. We grew stuff on a little patch of ground that had been cleared when the cottage was built. We had a goat called Amy and some chickens. (We did not give names to the chickens, because we sometimes ate them.)
Biffa loved it. The house had been empty for a while when we moved in, and there were a lot of mice. Biffa caught them all within a few weeks.
We read a lot, and – once it had been invented – we listened to the radio, which we called the wireless.
Once or twice a week, Mam would cycle into Whitley Bay on our rickety old bicycle, and sometimes I would go instead to fetch groceries. I made sure I went outside of school hours so that no one would think I was playing the wag.
There was a grocery shop in Eastbourne Gardens run by a couple, Mr and Mrs McGonagal. He was tall and thin with huge red ears and sharp eyes, and she was short and dumpy. They had a boy my age called Jack who helped behind the counter.
Jack and I eventually got to the point where we would say ‘hello’ and he once helped me put the chain back on my bike. I let him have a ride on it to pay him back and he said, ‘Where do you live?’
‘Hexham,’ I lied. I knew the routine. ‘I’m just visiting my aunt.’
That was the story that worked, if anyone asked – which they seldom did because we did not talk to many people. Hexham is a town about forty miles away: near enough not to be unusual, but far enough not to be familiar.
‘Where do you go to school, then?’ asked Jack. This was on a school-day afternoon, at about 4pm.
‘In Hexham,’ I said. ‘Only our schools are closed this week. It’s a local holiday.’
‘Cor,’ said Jack. ‘Jammy!’
And that was it: no further questions. I liked Jack. I gave him a backer on my bike down to the Links and we threw stones at a tin can. He could walk on his hands, and when he tried to teach me we laughed and laughed. It was fun.
It was quite a long time since I’d had a friend, and Jack seemed a bit lonely too. So, when it began to get dark and I would have had to cycle home with no lights (and risk being stopped by a policeman who would take me home and ask awkward questions), I said to Jack, ‘I am coming back here on Saturday: shall we meet?’
And so we did. There was a brass band playing on the bandstand, and we ate chips (which I bought), looking at the big white dome of the Spanish City pleasure gardens and Jack told me about his dad who had once shot a moose in Canada, and …
Why am I telling you this?
Because you have to understand how hurt I was when my new friend Jack – funny, skinny Jack with his knobbly knees and his baggy shorts – betrayed me, although it was not even his fault. Well, not entirely.
You see Jack grew older and I did not. It was always the way with friends, and it was always hard. I never got used to it.
After a year or two of knowing him, Jack started to wear long trousers. A year or two after that, he grew a wispy moustache, and his voice became deeper.
So far as he knew, I came to visit my ‘aunt’ most weekends. I had several periods when I said I was recovering from a mystery illness, which required longer stays to benefit from the sea air, and there were always the summer holidays.
Jack
