The kid Andy (Andrew) would soak up this kind of high-brow beer talk in a absolute opposite reaction to the way he dozed, dicked around and daydreamed through every lesson in the whole of his lifetime at the school he ‘attended’ (just across from the park) and he would rock back deep in the old armchair they had rotting down there in the cellar, a near halo of spiders webs forming slowly around his head while his grandfather spoke. Time passed and the kid was ‘dead impressed.’ And if the arguments developed by Curtis got a little strange, or strained a little from the path of reality, then Andrew could always watch the dust swirling and squirming in the light from the halogen lamp they had set up or try to belch in the form of a tune or something like that, as teenagers then were most liking to do. That Andy always was a loner and ‘a kid that lived in his own head,’ no mistaking that. He cried on a slightest excuse from anything and according to those who liked gossip, he often looked from out of windows for an inordinate period of time, as if caught in some thoughts that he could not find ways to communicate in human words. Some lads that were in his Metalwork class at school said Andrew (Andy) was a No Brain but that was just conjecture, and in a certain way in any case it was proved wrong by the Doncaster events as they began to unfold.

*

It is not clear exactly when their cellar chats gave way to what might be termed more practical experiments and investigations. School records show that Andrew became a serious truant in mid-September and a neighbour what looked in thru their dirty kitchen window reported that around the same time Curtis and Andrew had moved the microwaver (as he called it) off of the work surface (and presumably down to the cellar). So mid-September looks like it might have been the time, tho much more than that cannot really be told.