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By Root 1136 0

over the Downs. His hair was turning white gold in the sun. He wore stupid cut-off shorts that had once been a pair of my jeans and were way too big for his skinny hips, though Mum had gathered the waistband and sewn in elastic so they didn’t fall down. He was into dens that year. He’d made one for us in Bristol that Mum didn’t know about, in the allotments beyond the railway embankment. But the Downs were miles better. Up at the Hedgehogs we had a mound each, under the beech trees, our castles where we laid siege to each other and fought shrieking battles with pretend swords made out of twigs. I’d already found my own secret den before Keir and Mick arrived, one I shared with some scabby-looking sheep, among scrubby bushes in a valley full of sleeping sarsens. I wanted to keep that one to myself, and I wouldn’t take him there. Keir was furious, and shouted he’d go off to find his own. He disappeared for a whole afternoon and never came back until after tea, by which time Mum was panicking and about to send John off to search for him. Mick said Keir could look after himself, and what was to harm him in the countryside? Mum’s lips went thin and I could see her picturing Keir squashed like a rabbit on the verge of the A4, or impaled on rusty old farm machinery in the corner of a field.

So it was this wonderful golden afternoon with a breeze ruffling Keir’s white-gold hair, and we’re walking along beating twigs against the side of our legs, for no reason, really, except that’s what you do when you’re eight, and Keir says, Why won’t you show me your den? and I go, Because it’s mine, stupid, it’s secret. Then I thought of how I could get him off my back, and I said: ‘Can show you something else, though.’

We went through the hunting gate and down the track that crossed the Gallops. (‘What’s this?’ asked Keir, and I said, ‘It’s for training racehorses, pus brain.’) After Mum had brought me, I’d often come here alone, not right up to the cottage because I was scared of the two young men, but I’d scrambled through the wood into the overgrown garden, where the grass was so long you could wriggle unseen close enough to watch the comings and goings.

Today the black car wasn’t parked by the gate outside the cottage. So we walked down the track in the open, bold as buggery, as Frannie would say.

‘Fu-hu-huck!’ said Keir–his dad’s favourite word–when he saw the cottage. ‘That’s a den? It’s someone’s house, innit?’

‘No way. It’s a wreck, but someone’s camping there. With computers.’

I took him past the rusty folding chairs and the table littered with beer cans–Keir picked several up and shook them, hoping there were dregs left, but the only one that still held any lager also held a dead wasp and that stopped him in his tracks. We went up the steps–I was certain there was no one in–and I rapped at the front door self-importantly as if I was an expected guest. To my surprise, it gave, and I half fell into the hallway, almost wetting myself in terror. Keir was by now at the other end of the garden.

I picked myself up, expecting the sound of a chair scraping on the kitchen floor, or footsteps on the narrow stairs as someone came to investigate. Silence.

Nobody home. I’d been right all along. They’d left the front door unlocked because this wasn’t Bristol: this was a tumbledown old hovel in the middle of nowhere that you’d never find unless you knew it was there and, anyway, they were probably stoned when they’d left. I knew the difference between ordinary cigarettes and the lumpy ones that made people giggle, and I knew which ones Louis and his posh friend had been smoking when Mum and I came to the cottage.

Keir was back already, hovering on the doorstep, trying to make out he hadn’t run off like a scaredy-cat.

‘Where’s the computers?’ he said. Just like a boy.

In here,’ I said, pushing on the door in the hallway without the slightest idea whether I was right, but thinking I should look like I knew. It wouldn’t budge, to Keir’s disappointment–maybe Louis and his mate weren’t so stupid and had locked it, or maybe the wood was warped