BY THE MIDDLE of summer, Marty had taken to sleeping in the allotment shed in a sleeping bag in order to keep an eye on the pumpkin. Grandad would sometimes join him if his back wasn’t playing up too much. Every night before going to sleep, Marty would signal to Gracie with his flashlight that he was okay. Gracie would stand in her bedroom window and flash her flashlight back in a secret code. Marty slept well at night, having spent all day tending the pumpkin and being out in the fresh air, but he sometimes woke in a cold sweat convinced he’d heard the new-sneaker gang hanging about. Gracie tried to convince him that they’d forgotten all about it now that the summer holidays were in full swing and that they were probably somewhere else making some other poor kid’s life a misery.

The pumpkin was now enormous. It filled the seedbed completely, and Grandad had had to build a scaffold around its edges with planks. Grandad had been whispering his wishes to it, and so had the lady from allotment 7. Sadiq had had a quiet word, and John Trinidad had been whispering to it for hours. The only one who hadn’t quite come up with a wish yet was Colin the milkman. With every wish, it had swelled, round and fat, gourdy and bumpy on the bottom. It was a truly magnificent sight.

And the bigger it got, the bigger the buzz about the pumpkin became. People started to visit. First it was just random people passing by who stopped to gawk at it and take a picture with it, but soon, as word spread, more people came. Grandad had watched them come, one after another, and had put a bucket nearby so he could charge them fifty pence each. The money would come in handy, of course, when they were buying supplies to take with them to Paris. Then, one day, a thin, jittery man turned up in a gray trench coat, a camera hanging around his neck and a pen stuffed behind his ear. He stood looking at the pumpkin, hands on his hips.

“You okay?” Grandad asked.

“Mornin’, sir,” he replied. “This ’ere your pumpkin?”

Grandad took off his hat and studied him a moment.

“Maybe…”

Grandad had owed enough money to random people over his lifetime not to admit who he was immediately.

The man smiled. “Gavin Reading, Nightly Gazette.” He took a card from his coat pocket and handed it to Grandad. Marty was picking peas and shelling them, popping them into his mouth like sweets. He moved closer in order to listen.

“We’d like to do a little feature. In the paper. Nothing fancy. Picture of this here pumpkin and you, if that’d be all right?”

Grandad cocked his head.

“It might be, if the price was right…”

The man laughed.

“We’re only the local paper…”