Cover

Dedication

To Mairi Kidd, who mothered my boys

Prologue

Prologue

“I don’t bloody like it.”

“Language, Kenny,” I said to my brother. “You don’t have to bloody well say bloody all the bloody time. It’s not clever, and it’s not funny.”

I copied the whining voice of Mr Kimble, our English teacher. But it was wasted on Kenny, as he didn’t go to my school.

“But it is bloody cold,” Kenny said.

“I know.”

“And we’re bloody lost.”

“I bloody know.”

I looked around. It had stopped snowing, but the path had almost vanished. I saw white fields and stone walls. The black skeletons of trees climbing out of the frozen earth. The sky was a sort of pale grey, like a seagull’s back. In fact, the sky was the weirdest thing about it all. You couldn’t see any clouds, or any of the blue in between the clouds. Just this solid grey nothing like cold porridge, going on for ever.

I had Tina, our Jack Russell, on the lead. She’d enjoyed the snow to begin with, snapping at it and chewing mouthfuls, as if she’d caught a rat. But now she looked as fed up as us. She was getting on a bit, and the cold had got into her bones.

“And there’s worser words than bloody,” Kenny said. He had his big hands thrust into the pockets of his jeans to hide them from the wind. “There’s this boy, Milo, at school, and he knows all of them.”

“What?” I snorted. “He knows every bad word there is?”

“Yeah.”

“What, every bad word in the whole world?”

“Yeah, course,” Kenny said. “Well, maybe not in the world, but in England. Cos, yeah, there might be bad words in other countries he doesn’t know, like the Chinese for knob and the African for arse.”

“African isn’t a language, Kenny,” I told him. “It’s not even a country. There are loads of countries in Africa and hundreds of languages. They all have mucky words in them.”

“Whatever,” Kenny said, getting annoyed. But at least his mind wasn’t on the snow and the cold and the mess we were in.

“Go on then,” I said.

“What?”

“These bad words Milo told you, let’s hear them.”

“You won’t tell Dad or Jenny that I know them?” Kenny asked.

“Course not. I’m not a grass.”

“You told them where I hid the turkey.”

“I had to,” I said. “Otherwise there’d have been no Christmas dinner.”

Kenny nodded. He could see the logic in that.

“OK, then,” Kenny said. “Right …”