The Dead of Summer. Camilla Way

the room, down the stairs and out the front door, where I fell smack bang into Denis who was about to ring the bell.

      Denis trotted beside me while I gradually calmed down. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his flab jump about. Eventually we stopped at a railway bridge and hung over the wall, looking down at the train tracks below us. The bridge was covered in graffiti and I recognised one of the tags. I’d seen that same word sprayed in various colours and sizes on every wall, lamppost and bridge in south-east London. ‘Enrol’, it said, and whoever he was he’d been a busy lad. As I stood there with Denis I found myself wondering about this Enrol person; why he felt the need to announce himself like that in foot-high letters wherever he went. Maybe he just wanted to prove he was there, I thought. Show the world he existed. As I stood there that morning looking at his name repeated fifty times on the bricks, I thought that that was a strange thing to want to do. But I wonder what ever happened to him? I wonder where he is now? I guess his plan worked: I didn’t forget him, did I?

      ‘You seen Kyle?’ asked Denis eventually.

      I turned to look at him and felt my mood lift a bit. It was good to see him even if he did stink of BO that day. ‘Nah,’ I said.

      He pulled a Mars bar from his pocket and began to munch. ‘Me neither.’

      We walked on, towards Deptford.

      ‘Where do you think he is?’ I asked.

      ‘Dunno,’ said Denis. ‘He said something about going to Point Hill.’

      I didn’t know where Point Hill was, and didn’t much care if we found Kyle or not. It was just good to be out of the house and going somewhere. Denis started telling me a long and complicated story about his Uncle Richard who lived in Broadstairs and had once met Big Daddy and we got on the bus up to Blackheath. From there we walked over the common towards Greenwich Park but instead of heading towards the donkey rides and ice cream vans, Denis led me to a little side park – a field at the top of Blackheath Hill from which you could see all of London stretched out below. Denis pointed to someone sitting on a bench. Kyle.

      When we reached him he didn’t seem particularly surprised to see us and barely glanced up. He looked tired, his eyes dull and sunken in his scrawny face. We sat in silence for a while, listening to Denis get his breath back and looking down on the city below us. The river flickered green and silver through the mangled, scrambled, silent mess of streets and parks and cranes and buildings, a billion windows blinking back up at us. Denis went off to buy ice lollies and we lay on our fronts on the scratchy yellow grass to eat them.

      ‘There’s a cave underneath this hill,’ said Kyle, finally.

      ‘I know,’ said Denis, sucking the big toe off his Funny Foot.

      ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Kyle.

      A sharp bite of pleasure. ‘A cave?’ I said.

      ‘It’s called Jack Cade’s Cavern.’ He began carefully squashing ants with his lolly stick.