id="u13e4d54d-04ea-55aa-a9fc-bb3af68191a2">
for David
1948 – 1986
in loving memory
Take him, earth, for cherishing
“Ring a ring o’ roses,
A pocket full of posies,
Atishoo, Atishoo,
We all fall down!”
CONTENTS
Oliver Wright was walking home from the bus stop with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. You never knew what you might find in a London street. He’d picked a five pound note up once, all screwed up like an old sweet paper. He didn’t get much pocket money, and even for that he had to do jobs. That five pounds had been riches.
As he turned the corner into Thames Terrace a cold wind blew up suddenly from the river and made him prickle with cold. It felt like January, not June, and the coldest, wettest summer he could ever remember. July would be worse, August worse still because there’d be nothing to do, and no summer holiday. His father was in hospital, having a hip operation, and his mother was fully occupied, running the house like an army camp. He thought back wistfully to other holidays, several of which he’d spent with his cousins, Prill and Colin Blakeman. When those three got together odd and frightening things happened. Oliver and his curious hunches about spooks and hauntings usually started off as a bit of a joke, but he was the one who always got to the bottom of things, the one who always rooted out the reason for these strange adventures of theirs. Nothing interesting was going to happen this year though, not if he’d got to spend the summer all on his own.
The Wrights lived at Number Nine, the shabbiest house of all in a gloomy-looking old terrace. It was painted mud brown, and was full of old people, and it belonged to a special society that provided homes for the elderly. Oliver thought it was a ridiculous house for them to choose because it was so very tall and narrow, with fifty-seven stairs between the cellar and the attic. The old people never went down to the cellar, of course. It was infested with spiders and running with damp, and the attic was just a storage area, with one tiny bedroom for him.
He kicked gloomily at a stone and watched it bounce into the gutter. He liked their house with its views of the Thames and his bedroom under the roof, it was home. But on a wet Friday afternoon, with the whole weekend yawning drearily ahead, he wished there was another family in the street. Nobody lived there now, except the Wrights, and a few young trendies with their sports cars and their window boxes. The buildings opposite were old warehouses, shut up and abandoned, and at the bottom of their garden there was only the river. One end of the terrace looked out on to a little egg-shaped graveyard, neatly grassed over and raised up, almost two feet higher than the pavement. Its church, St Olave-le-Strand, had been pulled down last year, even though his mother had led the local campaign to save it. She enjoyed protests. Beyond the graveyard there was a demolition site filled with excavators and concrete mixers, and an enormous crane that swung an iron ball against crumbling walls and sent them tottering into dust. A huge warehouse was being pulled down and a new office development called River Reach built on the site. That would be something else for his mother to complain about. Why did she have to be so awkward?
Oliver was adopted, as Mrs Wright never failed to tell people. It was as if she thought they might ask difficult questions if she didn’t explain – she looked rather too old to be the mother of such a young boy. He didn’t much like the parents he’d landed with. Mother, with her iron-grey hair and wrinkled face, always so busy ruling Number Nine, and Father, so silent and always buried in exercise books, peering out at him occasionally from behind thick glasses. They were kind enough, in a remote sort of way, but they weren’t really tuned in to his world at all, and Oliver was lonely.
As he walked past Number Five he stopped to look at a black Porsche parked outside. It belonged to a young couple who had moved in last week. He smiled to himself. A car like that would mean parties, and doors banging in the middle of the night – another thing for his mother to complain about. He was just bending down to have a look through the window when a sudden noise at the end of the street jerked him upright again. It was a man’s voice, shouting hysterically, then other voices and someone yelling “Hang on mate, for Gawd’s