which was often. He was cornered in the playground one day by the school bully, Jason Wicks, when Nathan came to his defence. ‘Leave him alone. He’s never harmed you. Why should you want to hurt him?’
There was a chorus of laughter from Jason’s backing group. ‘’Cos he’s fat, and he s-s-stammers, and his mother’s a –’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Nathan, not angrily, but with a kind of set look on his face. ‘I told you, leave him alone.’
‘You’re going to protect him, are you?’ Jason bunched a big fist.
‘I’ll try.’
The fist shot out, knocking him against the wall. George moved to help him and then shrank away, too frightened to aid his champion. When Nathan straightened up, there was blood on his lip.
‘Now fuck off,’ Jason ordered. He had learnt both his manners and his vocabulary from his seniors at home.
‘No.’
This time, Nathan dodged the blow, grabbed the lunging arm, and drove it past him, with both his weight and Jason’s behind it. Knuckles rammed into the wall – Jason screamed as flint cut his flesh to the bone. ‘I’m sorry,’ Nathan said, ‘but in future, let George alone.’ The backing group could have jumped him, but they didn’t. Maybe they had read enough of the right books, or at any rate seen enough of the right movies, to know that this was how a hero behaved. George would have become his willing slave from that moment, if he had wanted one.
As for Hazel, she and Nathan were near neighbours, nursery playmates, squabbling companions, sharers in adventures both imaginary and real. Mrs Bagot worked in the deli, and Hazel was frequently left at the bookshop, in theory under Annie’s eye, the two children chasing each other up steps and stairways in rowdy games, or mysteriously quiet as Nathan showed her wonderful books with yellowing pages and illustrations shielded in tissue paper. Without his encouragement she would have read little: she came from a household where reading was something that happened to other people, her mother preferred the television, her father the pub. She was an only child, given to strange introverted moods when she wouldn’t speak for hours, or would climb a tree and refuse to come down, ‘watching’ she would explain later when asked what she’d been doing, or ‘thinking’. But she would always talk to Nathan. She had occasional outbursts of temper which alarmed other children, but these were rare. To look at she was a little below the average height for her age, sturdily built, with a lot of untidy brown hair which her mother was always trying to restrain in plait or ponytail or twist, but the shorter ends invariably worked loose, and Hazel would pull them over her face to hide behind. Nathan’s male classmates scorned her as a best friend because she was a girl, but it made no difference to him. Both his companions and his mother were learning that nothing anyone said or did made any difference to Nathan, once he had made up his mind.
But before George, even before Hazel, there was Woody. ‘Your imaginary friend,’ Annie called him, and Nathan accepted this, although with a note of doubt, since he thought ‘imaginary’ meant ‘not real’, and Woody was quite real. They would meet in the garden at Thornyhill – a garden that seemed much bigger than its actual size, with trellises overgrown with beanflowers, and herb beds, and rambling shrubs, and curious furtive statues hiding in leaves, and wild corners where wood and garden ran together and an infant Nathan found no boundaries to his playground. Annie learned not to worry about him: Hoover was always around, if he strayed too far. But even Hoover never saw Woody. Woody was very, very shy, an odd little creature with an elongated face, all nose, and slanting eyes that looked sideways from his head, like the eyes of an animal. His body was thin as a twig, his skin brownish and slightly mottled, varying in tone according to his background. Hair bristled on his scalp and straggled down his back. If he wore clothes, they were so close to his skin colour that Nathan never noticed. He explained that he was a woodwose, but if he had a name he couldn’t remember it, so Nathan called him Woody.
‘Have you lived here a long time?’ the child asked him once.
‘Always.’
‘How long is always?’
‘I’m not sure. Not very long I think, but I can’t remember being anywhere else.’
‘Do you have parents?’
‘Parents …?’
‘A mummy and daddy. I have a mummy, but my daddy is dead. And I have Uncle Barty, and Hoover. Who do you have?’
But Woody didn’t seem to have anybody.
‘Then you can have me,’ said Nathan.
They would crawl through gaps in the undergrowth into the woods, where his imaginary friend showed him the secret worlds in the hollows of trees, and under last year’s leaves, and they would watch new shoots growing, and the tiny lives of insects, and the green beginnings of things. Sometimes birds would come, and perch on Woody’s fingers – long, brown, knobbly fingers – or his shoulder, as if he were no more than a sapling sprouting among the roots. When Annie first heard of these explorations she was horrified. ‘He mustn’t go wandering off on his own like this. Anything could happen to him!’
‘He appears to be looked after,’ Bartlemy said. ‘You don’t have to worry. No harm can come to him here.’
And somehow, she believed him.
When Nathan’s friendship with Hazel grew he told her about Woody, but she never met him. And gradually, as he became more preoccupied with school and other activities, he saw less and less of his strange companion, and Woody faded with early childhood, until, without really thinking about it, Nathan came to accept his mother’s definition, that the woodwose had come from his imagination, and had no substance of its own.
When he was eleven Nathan won a scholarship to Ffylde Abbey, a private school run by monks about an hour’s drive from Eade. Annie had dredged up the long-forgotten Catholicism of her youth to enable him to apply: it was one of the best schools in the area, patronized largely by the sons of the rich and privileged, but with high academic standards for those who wanted to attain them and superb sports facilities for everyone else. Nathan went as a weekly boarder: the distance was too great for him to come home every evening. Jason Wicks and his gang jeered at him for being a swot and a snob, but they soon grew tired of it, since Nathan appeared genuinely indifferent to their mockery and never responded to provocation. At the new school he made new friends, and inevitably saw less of some of the village children, but his closeness to Hazel and George was unaffected. They would foregather at weekends in their special meeting place in the bookshop, known as the Den. There was a kind of storage space, like a very tall, thin cupboard, between two stacks of shelving, and they had discovered that if you climbed up inside with the help of a stepladder you would find yourself in a tiny loft area tucked under the slope of the roof, with a skylight through which you could scramble right outside. This was their secret headquarters where they would go to plan games and adventures, or just sit and talk out of the range of grown-up ears. They kept a biscuit tin there with emergency supplies, three mugs for coke or lemonade, and a lantern with coloured glass in the sides for dark winter evenings. Nathan had even made a cardboard screen to put over the skylight at such times, so no passerby would see it illuminated. Annie sneaked up there occasionally and dusted, when she was sure they weren’t around, to prevent them getting too obviously grubby. She didn’t think either Hazel’s or George’s parents would be pleased if an afternoon in Nathan’s company invariably resulted in grey clothing.
Sometimes on clear nights they would extinguish the lantern, and open the skylight to look up at the stars. ‘I wish we had a telescope,’ Nathan said. ‘Then we could
