“No, not yet,” I said.
Mrs Pardoe’s ginger cat was in the road though and I watched it to see if it was going to go to Grizzly’s bin.
“What are you looking at then?” Milly said.
I picked her up and sat her on the windowsill. “Look. Watch its shadow.”
The cat trotted through the beams of the street lights.
“It’s a small cat … now it’s growing and growing … now it’s huge!” The shadow shrunk and grew, shrunk and grew again as the animal trotted along the pavement. “It’s pretending to be a lion.”
“Is it?” she gasped.
The cat slunk along, pressed tight against the wall, its tail swinging and twitching.
“It’s stalking, catching prey,” I whispered, making it all dramatic.
Milly’s eyes were wide. “You mean it’s chasing a mouse, but actually it’s pretending it’s going to catch a … a hippopotamus?”
I don’t know why she said hippopotamus. “Well, yeah, but probably an antelope or zebra, that kind of thing.”
“It’s like real but not real,” she said, “and magical.” I smiled. The cat disappeared over a wall. Milly sighed. “Will you come downstairs now? We’re all waiting.”
“Hang on a minute,” I said. I thought I’d show her the helmet and see what she thought, see if she could imagine it too. “Close your eyes a second.”
“I can’t close my eyes,” she said, dead serious.
“Why not?”
“When I do, I keep seeing the meteor and it scares me. What’s going to happen to us?”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” I said. “It’s just going to burn bright for a minute and then it’ll be gone. It’ll be pretty. You’ll like it.”
“Really?” Then she leaned over and whispered, “Tell me the truth. Do you love your new trainers the best?”
I looked down at my feet, turned out my ankles.
“I helped pick them,” she said, staring at my feet too. Milly was only six. I couldn’t tell her that I was disappointed I didn’t get a new bike.
“They are the absolute best trainers ever,” I told her. I put on my Roman helmet, with fierce eyeholes and a terrifying square mouth and curved crest on the top, now held up with sticky tape. “Tell me the truth. Do I look like a gladiator?”
“No, because I know it’s you,” Milly giggled “Now come on, we’ve got a treat.”
“Smart trainers, hey, son?” Dad said from the sofa, taking up two spaces as usual. He spread his hands out towards the coffee table. “We’ve got all your favourites, plus … secret ingredient on the chicken.” He winked and chuckled.
“Garlic,” Mum said, with a knowing nod, and went out to the kitchen.
“Chocolate?” Milly said. “Could it be chocolate?”
“Chilli,” Kirsty said. “I think it’s chilli.”
We did this every time, tried to guess what that extra-special flavour was. We’d probably guessed right a long time ago but Dad would never tell.
“What do you think, Leo, my little dreamer? What’s your best birthday guess?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Leo doesn’t know much about anything, apart from playing gladiators!” Kirsty said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit babyish playing pretend games? No wonder you’ve only got one dorky friend.”
Kirsty had loads of friends and everyone liked her but they didn’t know how mean she could be sometimes.
“I think it’s lovely,” Mum said, before Kirsty and me could argue (although gladiators were not lovely!). She was coming back from the kitchen with my birthday cake. It was all lit up and ready to blow out. “Here we are. Dad made it specially.”
Three sponge layers oozed chocolate cream with a load of sweets all spilled over the top. Awesome.
“As it’s your birthday, you can have cake first,” Mum said.
“Can I as well?” Kirsty said. “I am the oldest.”
“And me,” Milly said.
“We’ll all have a big piece of cake first,” Dad grinned.
“Are you going to make a wish?” Milly said.
I blew out the candles, thinking it was a long time until next year to get a new bike.
“Stop it, Leo,” George said, spinning around on his computer chair. “You’re supposed to be helping with our presentation.”
“I’m doing research,” I said.
“Yeah, right.” George swung back to his computer. “Write your ideas down. And get off my bed, you’re messing it up.”
Sometimes I’d forget what I was supposed to be doing and be battling a new gladiator, swept away by the roaring crowd. If I wasn’t doing that in Clarendon Road I’d be at George’s house and he would help us do our homework (he did most of it). George liked books and words. They were his favourite things.
“George?”
“What?”
“How come things from the past are so deep under the earth? I mean, where did all the stuff on top of ancient ruins come from?”
The Romans left a ragged flint wall here, in our town, straight as an arrow along the back of the Rec, which you can still see. They left pots and coins and buckles and pins in the earth, which we stared at when Mr Patterson, our teacher, took us on a field trip to the museum. We stared at the artefacts and I imagined all the people who might have owned them, wondering about what they were like and what their stories were. Were some of them gladiators like me?
“I don’t know,” George said. “It’s erosion or compost or something.”
I opened his book on Romans to find something interesting. I looked at the pictures and caption boxes and read one out.
“Romans invented amphitheatres and arches, and realistic-looking statues, socks—”
“Socks?!”
“That’s what it says, socks and baths, and a law that we still have today, which says you’re innocent until proven guilty.”
“Although if you’re guilty you know you’re guilty, even if nobody proves it,” George said.
“There was also a man called …” I passed the book to George because it was one of those words that looked impossible to say.
“Ptolemy,” he pronounced “Toll-a-me. It’s a silent ‘P’.”
“Oh, right. Anyway, he mapped the stars and joined the dots, and named them after a whole mysterious collection of mythical beasts and animals and gods and heroes. I think I would have liked him, George.”
I had posters of the universe and everything in it stuck up in my bedroom. You could get posters inside Dad’s newspaper every Sunday for free until they covered your ceiling.
I