‘Don’t go away!’

‘What? Oh. Yes. Right. Come on then—’

Click!

‘Hello, this—’

‘Yo-less? It’s Johnny.’

‘Yes?’

‘Your mum in the hospital tonight?’

‘No, she’s on days this week. Why?’

‘Can you get her to bring her car down to Witheridge Road?’

‘What’s up? You sound as if you’ve been—’

‘Look, shut up! Get her to do it, right? Please! It’s Bigmac!’

‘What’s up with him?’

‘Yo-less! This is important! This is really important!’

‘You know how she goes on when I—’

‘Yo-less!’

‘Oh, all right. Hey, is that a siren?’

‘We’re in a phone box. You’d better get her to bring a blanket or something. And hurry up, it’s dead smelly in here.’

‘That was a siren, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

He put the phone down.

Bigmac wasn’t being sick any more. He hadn’t got anything to be sick with. He was just leaning against the door, shaking.

‘She’ll be along right away,’ said Johnny, as cheerfully as he could manage. ‘She’s a ward sister. She knows all about this stuff.’

Outside, one of the ambulances drove away. Firemen were all over the wreck. Some of them were getting equipment off the engine.

Bigmac stared at the scene.

‘They’re probably fine,’ lied Johnny. ‘It’s amazing how people can—’

‘Johnny?’

‘What?’

‘No one’s fine who looked like that,’ said Bigmac, in a flat voice. ‘There was blood all over.’

‘Well—’

‘My brother’ll kill me when he finds out. He said if I have the cops round again he’ll throw me out of the window. He’ll kill me if he finds out.’

‘He won’t, then. You didn’t do anything. We were just hanging out and you felt ill. That’s all.’

‘He’ll kill me!’

‘What for? No one knows anything except me, and I don’t know anything. I promise.’

*

It was gone eight when Johnny got home. He left his coat in the shed until he could sneak it in and sponge it off, and said he’d been round at Yo-less’s, which was true, and was a pretty good way of avoiding questions, because his parents approved of Yo-less on racial grounds. To object to him being round at Yo-less’s would be like objecting to Yo-less. Yo-less was dead handy.

Anyway, it wasn’t as if anyone had cooked any dinner. Mrs Yo-less had made him a hot chocolate when he was there, but he hadn’t accepted a meal, because that suggested you didn’t have them all that often at home and you didn’t do that. She’d put Bigmac to bed. Bigmac with his skinhead haircut.

He microwaved himself something called a Pour-On Genuine Creole Lasagne, which said it served four portions. It did if you were dwarfs.

The phone went as he was carrying it upstairs. It was Wobbler.

‘Yo-less just rang me.’

‘Right.’

‘Why didn’t you get them to put Bigmac in an ambulance?’

‘Who with?’

There was a moment of silence from Wobbler as he worked this out. Then he said, ‘Yuk.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, people’d ask questions. Bigmac’s been in enough trouble as it is, what with his brother and one thing and another.’