‘Don’t blame me,’ said his mother, ‘if his school work suffers next day.’

That dreadful evening his mother left him as usual at the corner and saw him across the road. He could remember that, and remember too how he’d looked to see if gran was at her gate. When he’d made sure she wasn’t, he’d wandered on to the building site to cajole the cat out of the nest she’d made for herself among the rubble. It was late March, a fine afternoon and still broad daylight at four. He was stroking the cat, thinking how thin and bony she was and how some of gran’s fish and chips would do her good, when – what? What next? At this point the curtain came down. Three hours later it lifted, and he was in Plumtree Grove, walking along quite calmly (‘Running in terror with that Man after him’), when whom should he meet but Mrs Wilson’s Brenda out for the evening with her boy friend. Brenda had pointed at him, stared and shouted. She ran up to him and clutched him and squeezed him till he could hardly breathe. Was that what had frightened him into losing his memory? They said no. They said he’d been frightened before – (‘Terrified out of his life’) – and that Brenda’s grabbing him and the dreadful shriek his mother gave when she saw him had nothing to do with it.

Petunia Street was full of police cars and there was a crowd outside their house. Brenda hustled him in, shouting, ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him!’ and there was his father all white in the face, talking to policemen, his mother half-dead on the sofa being given brandy, and – wonder of wonders – his gran there too. That had been one of the strangest things of that whole strange evening, that his gran had set foot in their house and his mother hadn’t gone out of it.

They all started asking him questions at once. Had he answered them? All that remained in his memory was his mother’s scream. That endured, that shattering sound, and the great open mouth from which it issued as she leapt upon him. Somehow, although he couldn’t have explained why, he connected that scream and her seizing him as if to swallow him up, with the descent of the curtain.

He was never allowed to be alone after that, not even to play with John in the Wilsons’ garden, and he was never allowed to forget those events he couldn’t remember. There was no question of going to gran’s even under supervision, for gran’s arthritis had got so bad they’d put her in the old people’s ward at Upfield Hospital. The Man was never found. A couple of years later a little girl from Plumtree Grove got taken away and murdered. They never found that Man either, but his mother was sure they were one and the same.

‘And it might have been our Richard. It doesn’t bear thinking of, that Man roaming the streets like a wild beast.’