Poodle’s very secretive. I had to be careful not to be seen. But I thought I knew where he was going, and it turned out I was right. There’s a place on a piece of wasteland, down behind the White City development. There’s a bit of canal there, and some grassed-over slag heaps. There’s a quarry filled with brambles, then there’s a bridge, then an old metal gate, and then, beyond that, there’s the clay pits. This is Poodle’s secret place, where he does his secret things. And the reason I know this, Mousey, is that it used to be our place as well.

There must have been over a dozen pits, once. Some were up to a hundred feet deep. They used to climb down to the bottom on ropes and send up the clay in buckets. Now the pits are all flooded out, and people use the place as a dump. I’ve given all the flooded pits names. The biggest is the Long Pond, and people sometimes go fishing there, among the old cars and abandoned junk. It’s safe enough, if you stay on the low end of the bank. The water’s shallow. You can play boats. But some of the other pits are deep, and the bank gets slippery in the rain. There’s one that I call the Pit Shaft. It’s only a few dozen feet across. But the bank is so steep that if you fell in, you’d probably not get out again. Sometimes you see animals that have made that mistake. Drowned rats; even dogs. I stay away from the Pit Shaft now. Then there’s the Crescent; the Sugar Bowl; the Three Little Injuns; and the Sink. None of those are completely safe, except for the Crescent, which is mostly filled in, with just a deeper bit at one end. Elsewhere by the clay pits, there are old abandoned cars, and shopping trolleys, and carpets, and piles of wooden pallets and crates, and bundles of comics and magazines. Even ovens and fridges too, and TV sets with the fuses blown. It’s a good place if you need somewhere to hide, or to meet the kind of people that your parents might not approve of. I could tell by the way he approached that Poodle went there all the time.

I can walk pretty quietly. I managed to get right up close to Poodle before he realized I was there. I hid behind a big rock and watched as he made himself comfortable. He was sitting inside a rusted old car, reading a copy of Fiesta. He looked like he was expecting someone.

He jumped when he finally saw me, and tried to hide the magazine. “Oh. It’s you, Ziggy,” he said.

“Come here often, do you?”