'I'll say it works! She did me wrist a couple of years back. Miraculous, it was. But the wife and I were sure she'd made you up.'

'Made me up?'

'Even before her stroke, she was a little...away with the fairies, like. We thought you were one of her,' he did a horror-film voice, 'drowned boys, like, from the lake.'

'Oh. Well. She'd fallen asleep by the time I left-'

'Just like her, that is! Bet she locked you in, an' all?'

'Actually, she did, so I never thanked her for fixing my ankle.'

'Tell her now, if you want.' The builder sort of vaccuumed up his coffee so it didn't burn his lips. 'No guarantees she'll remember you, or speak, but she's having quite a good day. See that yellow building, out the back, just through them trees? That's us.'

'But...I thought this place was...miles from anywhere.'

'Here? Nah! Just between Pig Lane and the quarry. Where the gypsies camp in the autumn. This whole wood's only a few acres, y'know. Two or three footy pitches, tops. Hardly Amazonia. Hardly Sherwood Forest.''There's this kid, Ross Wilcox, in the village. He was one of those kids on the ice, last year, when you found me, just outside your house...'

Very old faces go muppety and sexless and their skin goes see-through.

A thermostat clicked on and a heater starting humming.

'There, there,' Mrs Gretton murmured, 'there, there...'

'I haven't told anyone this. Not even Dean, my best mate.'

The yellow room smelt of crumpets, crypts and carpet.

'At the Goose Fair last November, I found Wilcox's wallet. With loads of money in it. I mean, loads. I knew it was his 'cause it had his photo. You've got to understand that Wilcox was picking on me, all last year. A lot of it was...pretty evil stuff. Sadistic. So I kept it.'

'So it goes,' Mrs Gretton murmured, 'so it goes...'

'Wilcox was frantic. But the money was his dad's and his dad's a total psycho. 'Cause he was so scared about that, Wilcox had a bust-up with his girlfriend. 'Cause of that, his girlfriend got off with Grant Burch. 'Cause of that, Ross Wilcox nicked Grant Burch's motorbike. Well, his brother's. Tore off on it, skidded at the crossroads. Lost' this could only be whispered 'half his leg. His leg. You see? It's my fault. If I'd just...given him back his wallet, he'd be walking. Hobbling up to your old house over there on a sprained ankle last year was bad enough. But Ross Wilcox...his leg stops at this...stump.'

'Time for bed,' Mrs Gretton murmured, 'time for bed...'

The window had a view of the yard and the house where Joe the builder lives with his family. A crocodilish dog waddled by, holding a giant red bra in its grinny mouth.

'Ziggy! Ziggy!' A puffing, angry giantess ran after. 'Get back 'ere!'

'Ziggy! Ziggy!' Two little kids ran after the giantess. 'Get back 'ere!'

Was there a sharp Mrs Gretton inside the senile Mrs Gretton, listening to me, judging me?

'I sometimes want to stick a javelin through my temples, just so I can stop thinking about how guilty I am. But then I think, well, if Wilcox hadn't been such a git, I would've handed it over. If it was anyone else's, 'cept Neal Brose maybe, it'd've been like, "Hey, you idiot, you dropped this." Like a shot. So...it's Wilcox's fault too, isn't it? And if consequences of consequences of consequences of what you do're your fault too, you'd never leave your house, right? So Ross Wilcox losing his leg isn't my fault. But it is. But it isn't. But it is.'

'Full up to here,' Mrs Gretton murmured, 'full up to here...'

The giantess'd got one end of her bra. Ziggy'd got the other.

The two little kids shrieked with bliss.

I hadn't stammered once, the whole time I'd been talking to Mrs Gretton. S'pose it isn't Hangman who causes it? S'pose it's the other person? The other person's expectations. S'pose that's why I can read aloud in an empty room, perfectly, or to a horse, or a dog, or myself? (Or Mrs Gretton, who might've been listening to a voice but I'm pretty sure it wasn't mine.) S'pose there's a time fuse lit when it's a human listening, like a stick of Tom and Jerry dynamite? S'pose if you don't get the word out before this fuse is burnt away, a couple of seconds, say, the dynamite goes off? S'pose what triggers the stammer's the stress of hearing that fuse going ssssssss? S'pose you could make that fuse infinitely long, so that the dynamite'd never go off? How?

By honestly not caring how long the other person'll have to wait for me. Two seconds? Two minutes? No, two years. Sitting in Mrs Gretton's yellow room it seemed so obvious. If I can reach this state of not caring, Hangman'll remove his finger from my lips.

A thermostat clicked off and a heater stopped humming.

'Took for ever,' Mrs Gretton murmured, 'took for ever.'

Joe the builder knocked at the door frame. 'Getting on okay?'A black-and-white photo of a submarine in an icy port hung by my coat. The crew all stood on deck, saluting. Old photographs always go with old people. I zipped up my black parka. 'That's her brother, Lou,' said Joe. 'Front row, far right.' Joe placed his chipped fingernail by a face. 'That's him.' Lou was little more than a shadow cast by a nose.

'A brother?' That was familiar. 'Mrs Gretton talked about how I mustn't wake her brother.'

'What, just now?'

'No, last January.'

'Not much hope of waking Lou. German destroyer sank his sub in 1941, off the Orkneys. She,' Joe nodded back at Mrs Gretton, 'never really got over it, poor love.'

'God. Must've been terrible.'

'War.' Joe said it like it answered most questions. 'War.'

The young submariner was sinking into blank white.

Through Lou's eyes, mind, we're the ones sinking.

'I should be off.'

'Rightio. And I've got a damp course to get back to.'

The path back to the House in the Woods crunched underfoot. I picked up a perfect pine cone. Coming-soon snow'd shuttered up the sky. 'Where are you from, Joe?'

'Me? Can you not tell from how I speak?'

'I know it's not Worcestershire, but-'

He turned his accent up to its maximum. '"I'm a Brummie, our kid."'

'A Brummie?'

'Aye. If you're from Brum, you're a Brummie. Brum's Birmingham.'

'So that's what a Brummie is.'

'Another of life's great mysteries,' Joe waved goodbye with a pair of storky pliers, 'unveiled.''DEAD!'.

Or that's what it sounded like. But who'd shout that word in a wood, and why? Had it been 'Dave'? Or 'Dad'? Just where the faint path from the House in the Woods meets the path to the lake, footsteps came pounding my way. Between a pair of wishbone pines I squeezed myself out of sight.

The word arrowed through the trees, much nearer. 'DEAD!'

Seconds later Grant Burch flew by at full pelt. He wasn't the shouter. Terror'd turned him pale. Who could've scared Grant Burch like that? Ross Wilcox's dad the mechanic? Or Pluto Noak? He'd gone before I could even think of asking him.

'YOU'RE DEAD, BURCH!'.

Philip Phelps crashed round the bend, just twenty paces after Grant Burch. Not any Philip Phelps I've ever seen, mind. This Philip Phelps was cracked and crimson with a pure rage that'd only be calmed by Grant Burch's broken body limp in its claws.

'DEEEAAAAAAD!!!'.

Philip Phelps's got bigger in the last few months. I'd never noticed till I saw him roar by my hiding place.

Soon the boys and the fury were swallowed up by the wood.

How Grant Burch pushed docile Philip Phelps over the edge, I'll never learn. That was the last time I'll ever clap eyes on them.

The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or a Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yes, Sir, No, Sir Three Bags Full, Sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault for ever, or one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step, and think Hey, life isn't such a shit-house after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.

There are always more.My OXO tin's hidden under a loose floorboard where my bed was. I got it out for the final time and sat on my window sill. If the ravens leave the Tower of London the tower'll fall, Miss Throckmorton told us. This OXO tin is the secret raven of 9 Kingfisher Meadows, Black Swan Green, Worcestershire. (The house won't actually fall but a new family'll move in and a new kid'll claim this room as his own and never, once, think about me. Just as I've never once thought about who was here before us.) In the Second World War this same OXO tin went to Singapore and back with my granddad. I used to press my ear against it and listen for Chinese rickshaw pullers or Japanese Zeros or a monsoon puffing away a village on stilts. Its lid's so tight it guffs when you open it. Granddad kept letters in it, and loose tobacco. Inside it now there's an ammonite called Lytoceras fimbriatum, a geologist's little hammer that used to be Dad's, the sponge bit of my only ever cigarette, Le Grand Meaulnes in French (with Madame Crommelynck's Christmas card from a mountain town in Patagonia not in The Times Atlas of the World, signed Mme. Crommelynck and Her Butler), Jimmy Carter's concrete nose, a face carved out of tyre rubber, a woven wristband I nicked off the first girl I ever kissed, and the remains of an Omega Seamaster my granddad bought in Aden before I was born. Photos're better than nothing, but things're better than photos 'cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

The removal lorry shook itself into life, grated its gears, and lumbered down Kingfisher Meadows to the main road. Yasmin Morton-Bagot and Mum lugged a last box into Mum's Datsun. Dad called Yasmin Morton-Bagot a Hooray Henrietta once, and maybe she is one, but Hooray Henriettas can be as tough as Hell's Angels. Julia fitted a laundry basket, a wound-up washing line and a bag of pegs into Yasmin Morton-Bagot's Alfa Romeo.

T minus five minutes, I reckoned.

The net curtain in Mr Castle's bedroom twitched. Mrs Castle came close to the glass like a drowned face. She peered down at Mum, Julia and Yasmin Morton-Bagot.

What big eyes Mrs Castle has.

She felt me watching her and our eyes met. Quick as a minnow, the net curtain twitched back.

Julia received my telepathic signal and looked up at me.

I half waved.'I've been sent to get you.' My sister's footsteps clopped into my room. 'Dead or alive. Could start snowing any minute. The radio said ice sheets and woolly mammoths are moving down the M5, so we'd better get going.'

'Okay.' I didn't move off my window-sill perch.

'Much louder without carpets and curtains, isn't it?'

'Yeah.' Like the house hasn't got any clothes on. 'Much.' Our quiet voices boomed and even daylight was a notch whiter.

'I always envied you your room.' Julia leant on my window sill. Her new hair suits her, once you get used to it. 'You can keep an eye on the neighbours from here. Spy on the Woolmeres and the Castles.'

'I envied you yours.'

'What? Up in the attic like a Victorian pot-scrubber?'

'You can see right up the bridlepath to the Malverns.'

'When a storm was on I thought the whole roof was going to lift off, like in The Wizard of Oz. Used to petrify me.'

'That's difficult to imagine.'

Julia toyed with the platinum dolphin necklace Stian'd given her. 'What's difficult to imagine?'

'Difficult to imagine anything ever petrifying you.'

'Well, behind my fearless faade, little brother, I am regularly scared witless by all manner of things. But how stupid of us. Why on earth didn't we just swap rooms?'

The echoey house asked its far corners but no answer rebounded back.

Our right to be here is weaker by the minute.

Some snowdrops'd come out in the boggy spot, by Dad's greenhouse. By Dad's ex-greenhouse.

'What was the name of that game,' Julia stared down, 'when we were kids? I described it to Stian. Where we'd chased each other round and round the house and the first one to catch up with the other won?'

'"Round-and-Round-the-House".'

'That was it! Apt title.' Julia was trying to cheer me up again.

'Yeah,' I let her think it was working, 'and you hid behind the oil tank one time and watched me sprint past for thirty minutes like a total prat.'

'Not thirty minutes. You caught on after twenty, at most.'

But it's okay for Julia. On Monday her cool boyfriend will land in Cheltenham in his black Porsche, she'll just hop in, and off they'll zoom to Edinburgh. On Monday I've got to go to a new school in a new town and be the New Kid Whose Parents By the Way Are Getting Divorced. I don't even have a proper uniform yet.

'Jason?'

'Yeah?'

'Any idea why Eliot Bolivar stopped writing poems for the parish magazine?'

Just six months ago Julia saying that'd've mortified me, but my sister'd asked it seriously. Was she bluffing, to draw me out? No. How long'd she known? But who cares?

'He smuggled his poems into that bonfire Dad lit for his Greenland paperwork. He told me the fire turned all his poems into masterpieces.'

'I hope,' Julia bit at a spike of fingernail, 'he hasn't given up writing altogether. He's got literary promise. When you next run into him, tell him from me to stick at it, will you?'

'Okay.'

Yasmin Morton-Bagot fumbled through her glove compartment and got out a map.

'The weirdest thing,' my fingers drummed the OXO tin, 'is leaving the house without Dad. I mean, he ought to be running around now, turning off the boiler, the water, the gas...' This divorce's like in a disaster film when a crack zigzags along the street and a chasm opens up under someone's feet. I'm that someone. Mum's on one side with Julia, Dad's on the other with Cynthia. If I don't jump one way or the other I'm going to fall into bottomless blackness. 'Checking windows, one last time, checking the lecky. Like when we went on holidays up to Oban or the Peak District or somewhere.'

I haven't cried about the divorce once. I'm not going to now.

No bloody way am I crying! I'll be fourteen in a few days.

'It'll be all right,' Julia's gentleness makes it worse, 'in the end, Jace.'