Sometimes Piggy came along. He was meant to look after Mousey when his mother was asleep. He was a bit older than Mousey, but he wasn’t anything like him. He was fat and stupid, and he was afraid of everything. He used to cry like a little girl when Mousey made him watch what we did. Sometimes he cried so hard that he could barely breathe, and his heart beat so fast that we thought it might burst. It was lots of fun, actually. Even better than the mice. It was like we’d taken all my fear and made it go into someone else. There’s a story like that in the Bible, you know. Jesus and the Gadarene. Jesus came across a man possessed by a whole load of demons. And he made the demons leave the man and go into a herd of swine. Then Jesus made the herd of swine jump off a cliff into the sea, where they all drowned, and the man was saved. It’s a pretty cool story, actually. And it’s in the Bible, so it must be true.

And then, something awful happened. It was after the Christmas holidays. Bunny had been dead for a year. And Miss McDonald came into school with a ring on her finger, and said that from now on, we had to call her Mrs. Lumb. She’d got married over Christmas, to another teacher at Netherton Green. She showed us the pictures and everything. We all got a bit of wedding cake. Everyone was excited. Except for me and Mousey, that is. Mousey because he rarely got excited about anything, except for the games in the clay pits. Me, because something important had changed, and I didn’t even know what it was.