'Best garden pond in the village it'll be, Mr Broadwas said, once my shrubbery's got a grip. Have a pleasant tootle round Tewkesbury, did we?'

'Very pleasant, thank you,' said Mum, as a tubby man with joke-shop sideburns trundled a large, white, lidded wheelie bucket round from the front of the house. 'Mr Suckley, this is my husband, and that's my son, Jason. Michael, this is Mr Suckley.'

Mr Suckley gave me and Dad a 'How do'.

'That's the pond,' Mum said to him, 'please, Mr Suckley.'

Mr Suckley wheeled his bucket to the edge of the pond, balanced it there, and raised a sort of gate. Water sluiced out, slooshing with it a pair of enormous fish. Not the tiddlers you get in plastic bags from the Goose Fair. These beauts'd've cost a packet. 'The Japanese revere carp as living treasures,' Mum told us. 'They're symbols of a long life. They live for decades. They'll probably outlive us.'

Dad's nose looked very, very out of joint.

'Oh, I know your fork-lift gizmo was an unexpected expense, Michael. But think what we saved by using granite instead of marble. And surely the best pond in the village should have the best fish? What's the Japanese name for them again, Mr Suckley?'

Mr Suckley emptied the last dribbles into the pond. 'Koi.'

'Koi.' Mum peered into the pond like a mother. 'The long gold one's "Moby". The mottled one we can call "Dick".'

Today'd been so full of stuff that Mr Suckley should've been the end. But after tea I was playing darts in the garage when the back door slammed open. 'Get a-way!' Mum's shriek was mangled with anger. 'GET AWAY, you dirty great BRUTES!'

I ran to the back garden in time to catch Mum hurling her Prince Charles and Princess Diana mug at a gigantic heron, perched on the rockery. Tea floated out like liquid in zero gravity as the missile passed through a belt of sunlit gnats. The mug exploded when it hit the rockery. The heron raised its angel's wings. Quite unhurriedly, one mighty flap at a time, it climbed into the air. Moby was flapping in its beak. 'PUT my FISH DOWN!' yelled Mum. 'You damn BIRD!'

Mr Castle's puppety head popped over the garden fence.

Mum's staring at the heron, appalled, as it shrinks into the lost blue.

Moby's flipping in the Day of Judgement light.

Dad watched all this through the kitchen window. Dad isn't laughing. He's won.

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

Spooks So here I was, tying cotton to Mr Blake's door knocker, cacking myself. The knocker was a roaring brass lion. Here be the fumbler who should be in bed, and here be the beast who bites off his head. Behind me, in the playground, Ross Wilcox was willing me to balls it up. Dawn Madden sat next to him on the climbing frame. Her beautiful head was haloed by the street lamp. Who knows what she was thinking. Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley spun on the witch's hat, slowly, assessing my performance. On the high end of the seesaw perched Dean Moran. Pluto Noak weighed down the low end. His fag glowed. Pluto Noak's why I was where I was. When Mr Blake'd confiscated the football after Gilbert Swinyard'd booted it into his front garden, Noak'd said, 'If you ask me, that old git deserves a' (he'd licked the words) 'cherry-knocking.' 'Cherry-knocking' sounds a pretty term but prettiness often papers over nastiness. Knocking on a door and running off before the victim answers sounds a harmless prank, but cherry-knocking says, Are we the wind, or kids, or have we come to murder you in your bed? It says, Of all the houses in the village, why you?

Nasty, really.

Or maybe it was Ross Wilcox's fault. If he hadn't snogged Dawn Madden so tonguily, I might've sloped off home when Pluto Noak mentioned cherry-knocking. I might not've bragged how Hugo my cousin does it by tying one end of a reel of cotton to the knocker and then drives his victim crazy by knocking from a safe distance.

Wilcox'd tried to snuff the idea out. 'They'd see the thread.'

'No,' I counter-attacked, 'not if you use black, and let it go slack after knocking so it's lying along the ground.'

'How'd you know, Taylor? You've never done it.'

'I bloody have. At my cousin's. In Richmond.'

'Where the fuck's Richmond?'

'Virtually London. Ace laugh, it was, too.'

'Should work.' Pluto Noak spoke. 'Trickiest part'd be tyin' the thread in the first place.'

'It'd take balls,' Dawn Madden wore snakeskin jeans, 'would that.'

'Nah.' I'd started it all. 'It's a piece of piss.'

Tying a thread to a knocker when one fumble means death is no piece of piss, however. Mr Blake had the Nine o'Clock News on. Through the open window wafted fried onion fumes and news about the war in Beirut. Rumour has it, Mr Blake's got an air rifle. He worked at a factory in Worcester that makes mining equipment but he got laid off and hasn't worked since. His wife died of leukaemia. There's a son called Martin who'd be about twenty now, but one night (so Kelly Moran told us) they had a fight and Martin's never been seen since. Someone'd got a letter from a North Sea oil rig, another from a canning factory in Alaska.

So anyway, Pluto Noak, Gilbert Swinyard and Pete Redmarley bottled out so they were pretty damn impressed when I said I'd loop the thread. But my fingers were fumbling one simple granny knot.

Done.

My throat'd gone dry.

Dead carefully, I lowered the knocker on to the brass lion.

The crucial thing was not to flunk it now, not to panic, not to think what Mr Blake and my parents'd do to me if I got caught.

I backtracked, trying not to scuff grit on the path, unspooling the cotton.

Mr Blake's prehistoric trees cast tigery shadows.

The gate's rusty hinges squeaked like glass about to shatter.

Mr Blake's window snapped open.

An air rifle went off and a pellet hit my neck.

Only when the TV noise'd deadened did I realized that the window'd snapped shut. The bullet must've been a flying beetle or something. 'Should've seen your face when the window went,' snargled Ross Wilcox as I got back to the climbing frame. 'Shat your cacks, it looked like!'

But no one else joined in.

Pete Redmarley flobbed. 'Least he did it, Wilcox.'

'Aye,' Gilbert Swinyard gobbed, 'took guts, did that.'

Dean Moran said, 'Nice one, Jace.'

By telepathy I told Dawn Madden, Your spazzo boyfriend hasn't got the nerve to do that.

'Playtime, kiddiwinkies.' Pluto Noak swivelled off the seesaw and Moran crashed to earth and rolled into the dirt with a squawk. 'Gi's the thread, Jason.' (The first time he'd called me anything but 'Taylor' or 'you'.) 'Let's pay wankchops a call.'

Warm with this praise, I handed him the spool.

'Let us go first, Ploot,' said Pete Redmarley, 'it is my cotton.'

'Yer lyin' thief, it ain't yours, yer nicked it off yer old biddy.' Pluto Noak unspooled more slack as he climbed up the slide. 'Anyway, it takes technique, does this. Ready?'

We all nodded, and took up innocent stances.

Pluto Noak wound the thread in, then delicately tugged.

The brass lion knocker answered. One, two, three.

'Skill,' mumbled Pluto Noak. That skill splashed on me.

A blunt axe of silence'd killed every noise in the playground.

Pluto Noak, Swinyard and Redmarley looked at each other.

Then they looked at me too, like I was one of them.

'Yeah?' Mr Blake appeared in a rectangle of yellow. 'Hello?'

This, I thought as my blood went hotter and waterier, could backfire so shittily.

Mr Blake stepped forward. 'Anyone there?' His gaze settled on us.

'Nick Yew's dad,' Pete Redmarley spoke like we were in the middle of a discussion, 'is selling Tom's old Suzuki scrambler to Grant Burch.'

'Burch?' Wilcox snorted. 'What's he sellin' it to that cripple for?'

'Breakin' an arm,' Gilbert Swinyard told him, 'don't make no one a cripple, not in my book.'

Wilcox didn't quite dare answer back. To my delight.

All through this, Mr Blake'd been firing us this evil stare. Finally he went back in.

Pluto Noak snorted as the door closed. 'Fuckin' fierce or what?'

'Fierce,' echoed Dean Moran.

Dawn Madden bit her bottom lip and sneaked me this naked smile.

I'll tie fifty threads, I thought-telegrammed her, to fifty door knockers.

'Dozy old fucker,' mumbled Ross Wilcox. 'Must be blind as a bloody bat. He treaded on the thread, most like.'

'Why,' Gilbert Swinyard answered, 'would he even be lookin' for a thread?'

'Gi'us a go now, Ploot,' said Pete Redmarley.

'Nokey-dokey, Sneaky Pete. Too much of a laugh, this. Round two?'

Mr Blake's knocker knocked once, twice- Immediately the door flew open and the cotton reel was jerked out of Pluto Noak's hand. It clattered over the tarmac under the swing.

'Right, you-' Mr Blake snarled at the non-existent cherry-knocker who wasn't cowering, terrified, on his doorstep, or anywhere else.

I had one of those odd moments when now isn't now.

Mr Blake marched round his garden, trying to flush out a hiding kid.

'So how much,' Gilbert Swinyard asked Pete Redmarley in a loud, innocent voice, 'are the Yews askin' Old Burcher for that scrambler?'

'Dunno,' said Pete Redmarley. 'Couple of hundred, prob'ly.'

'Two hundred and fifty,' Moran piped up. 'Kelly heard Isaac Pye tell Badger Harris in the Black Swan.'

Mr Blake walked up to his gate. (I tried to keep my face half hidden and hoped he didn't know me.) 'Giles Noak. Might have known. Want to spend another night in Upton cop shop, do you?'

Wilcox'd grass me off, for sure, if the police got involved.

Pluto Noak leant over the side of the slide and dropped a spit-bomb.

'You cocky little shite, Giles Noak.'

'Talkin' to me? I thought yer wanted that kid who just banged yer knocker and ran off.'

'Bullshit! It was you!'

'Flew back up here from yer door in one giant leap, did I?'

'So who is it?'

Pluto Noak did a fuck you chuckle. 'Who is it what?'

'Right!' Mr Blake took one step back. 'I'm calling the police!'

Pluto Noak did this devastating imitation of Mr Blake. '"Officer? Roger Blake here. Yes, well-known unemployed child-beater of Black Swan Green. Listen, this boy keeps knocking on my door and running away. No, I don't know his name. No, I haven't actually seen him, but come and arrest him anyway. He needs a good ramming with a shiny hard truncheon! I insist on doing it myself."'

That my cherry-knocking'd led to this was horrifying.

'After what happened to your waster of a father,' Mr Blake's voice'd turned poisonous, 'you should know where human sewage ends up.'

A sneeze exploded out of Moran.

Here's a true story about Giles 'Pluto' Noak. Last autumn his then girlfriend Colette Turbot'd been invited by our art teacher Mr Dunwoody to Art Club. Art Club's after school and it's only open to kids Dunwoody invites. Colette Turbot went and found it was just her and Dunwoody. He told her to pose topless in his darkroom so he could photograph her. Colette Turbot said I don't think so, sir. Dunwoody told her if she squandered her gifts she'd waste her life marrying pillocks and working at checkouts. Colette Turbot just left. Next day Pluto Noak and another mate from Upton pork scratchings factory appeared at lunch in the staff car park. Quite a crowd gathered. Pluto Noak and his mate each got a corner of Dunwoody's Citroen and rocked it over on to its roof. 'YOU TELL THE PIGS WHAT I DONE,' he yelled at the staffroom window at the top of his voice, 'AND I'LL TELL THE PIGS WHY I DONE IT!'

Loads of people say 'I don't give a toss'. But for Pluto Noak, not giving a toss's a religion.

So anyway, Mr Blake'd taken a cautious step or two back before Pluto Noak reached his gate. 'Talk about someone's father like that, yer've gotta see it through, Roger. So let's sort this out like men. You and me. Right now. You ain't scared, right? Martin said you've got quite a talent for smashin' up disobedient teenagers.'

'You,' when Mr Blake found his voice it'd gone crackly and sort of hysterical, 'you don't know what you're damn well talking about.'

'Martin knew well enough, though, didn't he?'

'I never laid a finger on that boy!'

'Not a finger.' It took me a moment to realize the next voice belonged to Dean Moran. 'Pokers wrapped in pillowcases's more your style, weren't it?' You never know with Dean Moran. 'So it didn't leave any marks.'