‘Never up until now,’ I said. ‘But things are different now I’ve got my wishes!’

Evan put on his lost-in-thought look again. ‘Look, if you’re saying that you can just change the laws of physics whenever you like . . . That’s kind of . . . hard to accept. Without a lot of evidence. Could you do, like, an experiment to prove it?’

‘Sure thing. Like what?’

‘Well then – can you make water flow uphill?’

‘Easy-peasy lemon-squeezy!’ I said. ‘I wish for a bottle of water.’ It appeared in my hand. ‘Now, watch this.’

The road we were standing on was a hill – not a steep one, but enough so that if you rode a bike up it, it was harder work than you expected – I knew from experience. I spilt the water on the ground, and of course it immediately started to run down the hill, following all the little cracks in the pavement.

‘I wish you’d start running uphill, water!’ I told it.

The water collected itself and then started to crawl uphill, like a glistening, silvery snake. We watched it get smaller and smaller as it crawled away from us.

Then Evan looked at me.

I looked at Evan.

And we both burst out laughing.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

When we stopped laughing, I said, ‘What shall we wish for now then? Anything you like, just tell me.’

Evan looked thoughtful again. He looked as if he was about to speak, then stopped.

‘What?’

‘No, nothing, I’ll leave it to you. They’re your wishes. You choose.’

He looked at me expectantly, and I got a feeling there was something he wanted me to say, but I had no idea what it was.

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘You were talking yesterday about Gulliver’s Travels. Wouldn’t it be fun to go really giant, so everyone was tiny . . .?’

‘Er, yeah,’ Evan said. Then he seemed to get more interested in the idea. ‘Yeah, that would be really great!’

‘Let’s do it!’ I said. A strange excitement started to prickle in my belly. ‘We’d better go somewhere with a bit more space, though. Otherwise we’ll be tripping over houses and stepping on cars and stuff.’

‘We could walk up to the Common.’

‘Walk?’ I said. ‘No need to bother with that!’ And it occurred to me then that I wouldn’t need to walk anywhere ever again, if I didn’t want to. Not that I’ve got anything against walking, in fact sometimes I quite like it, but it’s a bit, you know, time-consuming. ‘I wish we were up at the Common.’