‘No, no, we never met you!’

‘I’m alive, then? You do know something, right?’

‘Get off, I can’t breathe!’

‘Come on, tell me!’

‘You’re not supposed to know what’s going to happen!’

‘Who says? Who says?’

There was a yowl behind him. Wobbler turned his head. Bigmac looked up.

Guilty the cat stretched lazily, yawned, and hopped down off the bags. He padded confidently alongside the mossy wall, moving in his lurching diagonal fashion, and disappeared around the building.

‘Where’s it going?’ said Wobbler.

‘How should I know? Get off’f me!’

The boys followed the cat, who didn’t seem at all bothered by their presence.

He stopped at the church door and lay down with his front paws outstretched.

‘First time I’ve seen him go away from the trolley,’ said Bigmac.

And then they heard it.

Nothing.

The faint noises of the town didn’t stop. There was the sound of a piano from a pub somewhere. A door opened, and there was laughter. A car went by slowly, in the distance. But suddenly the sounds were coming from a long way off as if there was some sort of thick invisible wall.

‘You know those bombs …’ said Wobbler, not taking his eyes off the cat.

‘What bombs?’ said Bigmac.

‘The bombs Johnny’s been going on about.’

‘Yeah?’ said Bigmac.

‘Can you remember what time he said? It was pretty soon, I think.’

‘Brilliant! I’ve never seen anywhere bombed,’ said Bigmac.

Guilty started to purr, very loudly.

‘Er … you know my sister lives in Canada,’ said Wobbler, in a worried voice.

‘What about her? What’s she got to do with anything?’

‘Well … she sent me a postcard once. There’s this cliff there, right, where the Indians used to drive herds of buffalo over to kill them …’

‘Isn’t geography wonderful.’

‘Yeah, only … there was this Indian, right, and he wondered what the drive would look like from underneath … and that’s why it’s called Head-Bashed-In Jump. Really.’

They both turned and looked at the chapel. ‘This is still here in 1996,’ said Bigmac. ‘I mean, it’s not going to get bombed …’

‘Yeah, but don’t you think it’d be better to be sort of behind it—’

The wail of a siren rose and fell.

There were faint noises in Paradise Street. Someone must have moved a blackout curtain, because light showed for a moment. Someone else shouted, in a back garden somewhere.

‘Great!’ said Bigmac. ‘All we need is popcorn.’

‘But it’s going to happen to real people!’ said Wobbler, aware that real people could include him.

‘No, ’cos the siren’s gone off. They’ll all be down their bomb shelters. That’s the whole point. Anyway, it’d happen anyway, right? It’s history, OK? It’d be like going back to 1066 and watching the Battle of … whatever it was. It’s not often you get to see an entire pickled onion factory blow up, either.’

People were certainly moving. Wobbler could hear them in the night. A sound from this end of the street was exactly like someone walking into a tin bath in the darkness.