Bark, bark.

  And another shout. “Zoltan, get back here.”

  The man had lost control of the dog. It wasn’t going to be a beating. It was going to be a mauling.

  I stepped back from the fence and ran at it. Fear made me strong. I got one arm and one leg over the top with that first leap.

  But then disaster. The carpet should have been snagged on the razor wire. It would have been, if it had been barbed wire. But the blades weren’t like spikes. They didn’t catch. They cut and slid, and the carpet slipped down inside the fence, with me in a heap on top of it.

  “Come on, Nicky, come on!”

  I was up again. Over went the carpet.

  “Hold the end of it on your side,” I said, and Kenny came over and did it. He looked along the fence, back the way he had come.

  There it was. The black monster, running as fast as a racehorse. And behind it, the guard, a bit of a fatty, puffing and panting.

  I ran back again and jumped. It wasn’t as good as my first attempt. I hooked one arm over the top, but that was it. The dog was almost on me. It was going to get me and drag me down and bury its slavering snout in my belly and eat my guts.

  I swung my right leg over. I felt the razor slice the carpet, felt its hard edge cut my trousers, felt its delicate edge begin to work its way into my flesh. But I didn’t care.

  Zoltan was here.

  Zoltan was leaping.

  Zoltan’s jaws closed on …

  Thin air. With a snap like a cracked whip.

  I was on the ground with Kenny pulling me up. Zoltan was going insane on the other side of the fence.

  “Stupid dog, filthy dog,” I said, and a few other things that I can’t write down. And then we laughed like loonies as we half carried, half dragged the pallet away from the fence and into the dark bushes around the Bacon Pond, a hundred metres away.

  On the way home we agreed on our next steps. Tomorrow morning, we were going to come back and get that Rolex. It was our treasure. Ours.

  Thirteen

  I didn’t sleep for more than ten minutes that night. I was buzzing. Buzzing with excitement. Buzzing with energy. Buzzing with fear. Buzzing from the adrenaline rush of nearly getting my knackers chewed off by Zoltan.

  We’d stashed the pallet in the bushes, but it wasn’t very well hidden. So we had to go back early in the morning to finish the job. At the weekends there were fishermen down by the pond from the crack of dawn, but not on weekdays. A few might come down later in the morning, and you’d get some kids mucking about as well. So we didn’t have long to do what we had to.

  For once it was me waking Kenny. I watched him for a minute first. He always looked happy when he was asleep. You wouldn’t think that someone could smile and sleep at the same time, but Kenny could. Not a big stupid grin, but just a half smile, like someone who knows an amazing secret.

  I touched his arm. He didn’t wake up, so I gave him a bit of a shake. Then he opened his eyes, looked at me in panic for a second, and then smiled again.

  “Pirate time,” I whispered.

  He threw the covers off, and I saw that he’d gone to sleep in his clothes.

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  Downstairs, Tina appeared in the kitchen. She was normally as yappy and bouncy as a puppy at the thought of going out, but I don’t think she’d recovered from her scare of the day before. Maybe she could tell that we were going back to the pond, because she didn’t start chasing around looking for her lead.

  “Not walky time, Tina,” I said.

  Tina was one of the thickest dogs you’ll ever meet, so telling her stuff didn’t normally have any effect on her. But this morning she turned around and went upstairs. I knew what she was up to. She liked to sleep in the warm spot in the bed you’d just got out of. Mine or Kenny’s, she wasn’t fussed.

  I grabbed some crumpets from the bread bin, and we ate them, raw and cold and clammy, on the way to the pond. The sky was the darkest blue you can imagine, with the stars still shining in it.

  Fourteen

  We reached the pond before sunrise. It was cold and still and quiet. The world was just light enough for me to make out the trees and the bushes and the water.

  The pallet was where we’d left it. Me and Kenny carried it round to the far side of the pond, where we’d been fishing the day before. I could see the island sticking out of the water.

  “That island looks like you in the morning,” I said to Kenny, and I ruffled his hair. “With your hair all over the place.”

  Kenny stared out over the water. “Can you see the dead man?” he asked.

  “I think you could only see it … him … his arm, I mean, when a wave moves the water,” I said. “Anyone could have found him. OK, let’s get this thing launched.”

  The pallet was on the mud, and I thought it would slide in easy if I shoved it with my foot. I was wrong.

  “Give us a hand,” I said to Kenny, and together we pushed and kicked and heaved it in. Like I said, the water was very shallow near the shore, and it wasn’t deep enough for the pallet to float.

  In my head it was all dead easy. I thought I’d just slide the raft in, and it would float like the Kon-Tiki, and then I could step onto it from the shore. But it was turning out to be a lot trickier than that.

  After getting drenched yesterday, and ruining my best trainers, I didn’t want to get wet again. But I realised that there was no choice. At least I had my old crappy trainers on. Well, I didn’t mind, as long as it was only my feet this time. I splashed out into the water, shoving the raft ahead of me with my foot. It moved a little easier now that the water was starting to lift it.

  “Should have worn your wellies,” Kenny said from the edge.

  “I haven’t got any wellies. And if I did I would take them off and throw them at you.”

  “Don’t be a grumpy head,” he said. I’d never heard him say that before. He must have picked it up at school. Only it sort of rang a bell with me, too. Was it something Dad used to say to him when I was small? Or maybe not Dad, maybe …

  At last the raft was floating. Sort of. It didn’t look quite right. I thought more of it would be up above the water, but it was so low that the waves I made by splashing about were washing over the top layer of planks.

  But I kept thinking, It’s OK, it’s wood. Wood floats. Boats are made out of wood.

  “Are we being pirates yet?” Kenny said.

  “Yeah, nearly,” I replied. I had a vague feeling there was something I’d forgotten, and I didn’t want to step onto the raft until I remembered. Annoyingly, it was Kenny who thought of it.

  “Paddles,” he said. “For paddling.”

  I felt like an idiot. But I didn’t want to own up to it.

  “We don’t need them,” I said. “We’ll just use our hands. It’s not far.”

  In fact, now that the time had come, the island did look quite a long way away.

  “I’ll jump on it first, then you can join me,” I said.

  “I’m not bothered,” Kenny said.

  I looked over at him, and he had on a face I hadn’t ever seen before. He was looking around as if he was dead interested in the trees and bushes, and his face was oddly blank. I thought for a second he was going to start whistling, only Kenny didn’t know how to whistle.

  Then I realised what it all meant. He’d checked out the raft, and he didn’t think it was going to work. For the first time in his life, Kenny didn’t want to do something – and the reason was that he’d worked out that it was stupid.

  I was kind of happy and sad at the same time. But also a bit annoyed. I was determined now to go and get the watch, and the fishing rod, and make Kenny think I always knew what I was doing.

  “Kenny, you better stay here and keep a look out,” I said. “If any baddies come, you shout me, OK?”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” he said.

  Then I noticed that the raft had begun to drift away from me. It was now or never. I jumped, and I landed right in the middle of it. Just for a second I felt like a surfer on the ocean, with my arms out and my legs bent at the knees.

  And then, with an impact that was too gentle to be a jolt, I realised that the raft had sunk down and settled in the mud at the bottom of the pond. I stepped off the raft and up to my knees in water, and the raft rose out of the sucking mud. I stepped on it again, and it sank down to the bottom.

  I heard a sound behind me.

  “If you’re laughing, Kenny, I’ll smash this pirate ship right over your head.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  Then I couldn’t carry on being serious. It was too stupid. I was laughing as well.

  I dragged the raft back into the bushes – I didn’t want to leave it there on the side of the pond. It would be like a big black arrow pointing to the treasure. I was thinking again about trying to swim out to the watch. Maybe not now. I’d want my swimming trunks, and a towel ready. But even as I was thinking that, I was also thinking that I was never going to do it, because I’d promised Dad. I realised that our dream of riches was over.

  “We need to make it more floaty,” I said to Kenny. “If we could shove something airtight in between the two layers of planks, it should make it floaty enough to carry me.”

  “Carry us,” Kenny said in a matter-of-fact way. “You promised I could ride on it.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “But you didn’t seem to want to just now.”

  “I could tell it was rubbish.”

  “Thanks for letting me know.”

  Kenny smiled. “Miss says you only learn things when you do them. So sometimes you have to try it even if you muck it up.”

  “You are annoying sometimes, Kenny.” I smiled. “OK, let’s hide this stupid thing and get home before Dad’s back from his shift.”

  Fifteen

  We made it back before Dad was home, and we both went back to bed. Tina was under my duvet and I brushed her out, as I didn’t much like being in bed with a dog. She went slinking off to Kenny.

  Ten minutes later I heard Jenny’s car pull up. She had a crappy little Toyota that sounded more like a lawnmower than a real car, and only the driver’s door opened, so she always had to get out first and then let my dad out.

  Jenny wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t thin either. She had one of those faces that looks like it’s smiling even when it isn’t, but it was OK, because she nearly always was. I mean, it would have been tricky if she looked like she was smiling when she was about to belt you one. But I don’t think Jenny had ever belted anyone in her whole life.

  She used to know my dad when they were at school, and she sort of saved him when he was in a mess after my mum had gone. She helped him get his job and she sorted him out in other ways, too. She didn’t live all the time with us, but she stayed over quite often, when they were on the same shift together.

  My dad liked his job, but it was tiring – he used to work nights half the time and days the other half, so he didn’t know if he was coming or going.

  I heard him pound up the stairs. He slammed his fist on my door, but I could tell that he wasn’t mad or anything.

  “Up you get, you lazy sods,” he said in the loudest voice you could use that wasn’t a shout. “I’m bloody starving, so we’re having a big fry-up.”

  I heard Kenny cheering from the next room. He sounded like a one-man football crowd.

  My dad wasn’t the best cook in the world, but he could make a mighty fry-up. Twenty minutes later we were in the kitchen, with plates full of bacon and eggs and sausages and fried bread and fried tomatoes. Well, Kenny didn’t have any tomatoes – he always says “they look like eyeballs”, and I sort of see what he means.

  My dad was always happiest when he was doing a fry-up. He had a tea towel over his shoulder because he’d seen some chef on the telly do that, and he had this stupid apron with a picture of a body-builder in his pants on it, so it sort of looked like my dad’s head was on this big massive body. He had four pans all frying at the same time, and he was jiggling and rattling them to keep the eggs and bacon and everything from sticking.

  When my dad was really happy, like now, he’d sing opera kind of songs, except with made-up words, either English words or just nonsense ones that sounded a bit Italian.

  Jenny was watching all this and she was laughing like mad, and Kenny was joining in with the singing. Now Kenny is great in many ways, but not even I, his best friend and his brother, would say that he was a good singer. In fact, Kenny’s singing is like a goose and a dog having a scrap.

  Anyway, it was all brilliant, and everyone was happy, and then, for some reason, I said it. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the photo in the shed. Maybe it was because it’s me that’s got something wrong with my head, and not Kenny. Or maybe it was because happiness makes me sad.

  What I said was, “Dad, where’s Mum?”

  Sixteen

  The mad noise – the clattering pans, the rattling plates, the singing, the talk – all stopped. Dad looked at the floor. Jenny looked out of the window, at the morning rain. Kenny stared at me with his mouth open.

  “She went away, son,” Dad said.

  “I know, Dad. But where did she go?”

  “Just … away.”

  “Why did she, Dad?” That was Kenny.

  I hated myself for starting this. But there’s no way of putting words back in your mouth once you’ve let them out. It’s like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

  “She couldn’t cope,” Dad said. The light in the kitchen was too bright. It was making his eyes sparkle.

  “There was a kid at school,” Kenny said. “He said it was me. He said it was because I’m special.”

  “It wasn’t you, Kenny,” Dad said. “It was everything. It was me, as well. I should have … I don’t know. There’s things I should have done different. She loved you, Ken, she did.”

  “So tell us where she is, Dad.” That was me again. “You must know. Someone must know.”

  “She wasn’t from around here, Nicky,” Dad said. “And she didn’t have much family. She went back down South, I think. And we moved out of the old house. Do you remember the old house?”

  “Not really. Sort of. There was a tree in the garden.”

  “We had a swing,” Kenny said.

  Kenny was a year older than me, and sometimes he remembered things that I didn’t.

  “We jumped off the swing onto the bouncy castle,” he said.

  Jenny was looking at my dad now. Even her face looked sad.

  “You could try to find her, love,” she said, her voice as soft as rain. “For the boys. Just to see … I wouldn’t …”

  My dad shook his head. “I wouldn’t know where to look. I heard she’d maybe gone abroad. Anyway, it’s too late. It’s too … gone.”

  Suddenly my dad looked old. He tried to undo the string on his stupid apron, but his fingers couldn’t get it, so he pulled it over his head, and it got caught up and tangled.

  “I’m tired,” he said, and he went upstairs.

  “Did you even try to find her, Dad?” I said after him. “Did you try at all?”

  “I hate you,” Kenny said, to me, I think. And then he went out as well, and I heard the shed door scrape open and then scrape shut again.

  “You should go and see if he’s all right,” Jenny said. “I’ll tidy this mess up.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Jenny. “I didn’t mean to … I just … I think I thought I should ask, while everyone was in a good mood. I didn’t mean it to end up like this.”

  “Your dad does his best, you know,” she told me. “He’s a good man.”

  I nodded. And then I went out to see Kenny.

  Seventeen

  “What are you doing, Kenny?” He was hunched in the corner of the shed, holding something in his arms.

  “Go away.”

  I went over to him. I wanted to say sorry. Or say something.

  Then I saw what he was doing. He’d blown up the lilo and he was squeezing it in his arms, as if it was something precious.

  I put my hand on his arm. He shrugged it off.

  “Leave us alone,” he said.

  Where we’re from, people sometimes say “us” when they mean “me”, but the way Kenny said it made me think he did mean “us” and not “me”.

  He wiped his face with his sleeve, smearing snot and tears together.

  I felt a lump in my throat like I was trying to swallow a walnut.

  I tried to put my arm around him, but Kenny flailed at me. He was a strong kid, and when he got angry he could do some damage. I didn’t mind getting hurt. In fact, a part of me wanted him to hurt me, to punch me in the mouth, to knock me out. But I knew he’d be even more upset when he realised what he’d done, and I didn’t want that to be my fault as well.

  So I left him there in the shed, hugging the lilo bouncy castle, thinking, I suppose, about the things that we’d lost.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself then. I didn’t want to be in the house, and it was too cold to wander around. I looked in my pockets. Three quid and some coppers. Not even enough to get into Leeds and back.

  So I thought I’d go to the library. I could look on the internet for ways to sort out the raft.

  The library lady was kind of old-fashioned. Strict, but nice. She used to tell me what sort of books I’d like. She sometimes got it wrong, but other times it was as if she had read my mind. You could tell that she wasn’t too keen on people using the computers, but she put up with it because it got kids into the library.

  Usually she’d say something like, “I’ve got something for you, Nicholas,” but today she just looked up at me from behind her desk. There was a man with her. He had that kind of soft hair like a baby’s, and it was moving around in the breeze from the heater, and he had a brown jacket on that looked like it was made from dried horse manure. I wondered if the library lady was going to pack it in, and if the man was going to replace her. I’d have been sad if that happened.

 

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