Geography has never exactly been my strong point but I’d say St Albans has to be two and a half hours’ drive from here. So maybe Niker’s right about the vegetable shop after all.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll go right after school.”

“You’re such a good boy,” she says and then she reaches up towards my head and gives me this little dry, tender tap. “Beautiful,” she murmurs, hand in my hair, “beautiful.”

I pull away. “It’s horrid,” I say, “my hair.” And I tell her how they used to call me “Chickie”.

“I don’t see Chickie,” she says and then: “Pass me my bag.”

Jammed down the side of the seat is one of those triangular witches’ bags, faded black leather with a large gold clasp. I extract it and hand it to her as instructed. From the musty interior she draws out a mirror in a suede case.

“Now,” she wipes the surface with the back of her liver-spotted hand. “What do you see?”

She holds the mirror up to her own face. And this is what I see: A spooky old bat with snow-white hair, weird black eyebrows and about a million wrinkles.

“Come on,” she urges, “come on.”

“I just see a lady.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Well an old… erm, an elderly lady then.”

“Liar,” she says. “Tell me what you see.”

But I can’t.

So she says, “You see an old hag. A wrinkled old hag. Yes?”

“Maybe.”

“So do I.” She puts away the mirror. “It always surprises me. You see, I expect to see the girl I was at twenty. With skin and hair like yours. And yet whenever I look – there’s the old hag.” She laughs quietly.

“Right.”

“So you’ll go to Chance House for me?”

I’m not sure where the “so” comes from in this. There doesn’t seem any “so” about it. But I nod like the sad guy I am.

“Good. Thank you.”

“Everything OK?” asks Catherine, coming by.

“Oh yeah. Great.”

“Good.” She moves on but not before Albert bursts into song:

“Run rabbit, run rabbit, run run run.”

“Stop it,” says Edith Sorrel. “Stop that at once!”

“Don’t be afraid of the farmer’s gun!” squawks up Mavis.

“Right on,” says Niker.

“He’ll get by…” continues Albert in a gravelly lilt, “without a rabbit pie…”

“Stop the singing,” says Edith. “Don’t sing. I asked you to stop.”

“Ole misery guts,” mutters Albert.

“Run,” Niker encourages the Chicken, “run rabbit…”

Edith draws herself to her feet. She is tall. She reaches for her stick. For one insane moment I think she intends to hit someone. But of course she only means to walk away.

“Run,” sings Albert jovially to her stiff, retreating back, “rabbit, run, run, run.”

I follow Edith into the corridor. Each stride looks painful.

“Can I help?”

“No,” she says “No. Go away. Leave me alone.”

“Don’t mind her,” says Matron. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”

But, as Edith shuts the door of her room, I have this horrible feeling that she does mean something by it. All of it.

I don’t go to Chance House. Not right after school anyway. But I find myself wanting to go. The whole walk home to Grantley Street I keep thinking, “I ought to be going to Chance House. Why aren’t I going to Chance House?” And it’s not just because I told some batty old woman that I would go, it’s because I feel, about as powerfully as I’ve ever felt about anything, that the house is standing somewhere close, waiting for me. Maybe being batty is catching.

Grantley Street is a thin strip of houses, wedged between two roads. Our front door opens straight on to the pavement of Grantley and our rear patio on to The Lane, which is lucky considering it could open on to The Dog Leg. The Dog Leg can be scary. More about that later.

Our back gate is a nine-foot barricade of wood with a deranged row of nails banged in along the top. It’s about two years since Mum made with the hammer, so the points are a bit rusty now. I perform complicated manoeuvres with the gate lock, the bolts and chain and then, once inside, remove a loose brick from the garden wall to get at the house keys. A moment later I’m letting myself into the kitchen.

“I can see you,” I announce in a loud voice.

I wish I could stop doing this. I’m not quite sure who I’m expecting to find in our kitchen. Niker. A burglar. Dad. But it’s part of the routine now, a habit, a mantra. Saying it protects me, gives me one-up on Whoever’s There. Proves I can’t be startled, taken advantage of. Trouble is, I have to do it in every room in the house.

“I can see you!” I yell into the sitting room. Then I thunder upstairs and repeat myself in Mum’s bedroom, in mine and finally in the bathroom. This little quirk started about three years ago, when Dad left and Mum took the extra shifts at the hospital. “No choice, now,” Mum said. The good news is I don’t do the cupboards any more. I used to shout into the larder, Mum’s wardrobe and the airing cupboard. This has to be progress.

Of course, I don’t yell if Mum’s home. Well, I did once, blasted into the kitchen shrieking, “I can see you!” at the top of my voice. Mum was sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee.

“That’s lucky,” she said, “or you’d need new glasses.”

They call it obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Or compulsive-obsessive or Chance House Bonkers or something. People do it with hand-washing. I read that in the newspapers. They wash their hands again and again and again, four times, six times, twenty times. Then as soon as their hands are dry, it’s back to the basin again, wash, wash, wash. Washing until they bleed. By comparison I have to be a mild case. Almost normal in fact. Norbert Normal.

Anyhow. I’m in the house. I’d like to tell you that I get a chocolate biscuit and then go straight on to the computer. Well, I do get the biscuit but then I go upstairs to paint my models. Niker, when he came round, called me a “Saddo”. I didn’t tell him we don’t have a computer because of the money. I told him I like painting model soldiers. Which, as it happens, I do. That was a little while after the Grape Incident. Which took place in The Dog Leg. Anyway, I didn’t tell Mum anything about anything. But she’s not stupid. She’d watched me avoiding The Dog Leg, even though it’s the quickest way to school. And one afternoon she asked:

“Is someone on your back?”

“No.”

“Someone bullying you?”

“No.”

“Do you want to invite anyone home for tea?”

“No!”

“If someone’s on your back,” she said, “you can always try to make a friend of them. Ask their advice. Get them to help you with something. Invite them home. It sometimes helps.”

“Right.”

How come grown-ups are always so smart about your life, but not quite so smart about their own? Slap, slap, slap. That was Dad hitting her on the landing. Well, hitting her on the face actually, out on the landing. Or maybe on the shoulders. I didn’t really want to look. I could hear plenty enough. Anyhow, I didn’t notice her trying to make him into a friend next morning.

So what happens? Niker comes home. I didn’t think for a moment he’d accept the invitation. In fact, it took me three weeks to pluck up courage to ask him, and even then I had to write the time and date down and pass it to him like some secret note. I thought he’d laugh. But he just looked at me and said: “Yeah. Why not.” Of course Mum had planned to be there, but she hadn’t reckoned on a juggernaut jackknifing on the A23 and ploughing into six other vehicles. Like every other member of nursing staff in Sussex, she was called into Accident and Emergency. So when we got home there was a note on the table and a lasagna in the oven. Niker doesn’t like lasagna.

“No computer and no food,” said Niker. “On the other hand – no parents.”

I had never intended to show Niker the lead soldiers – the ones that were my father’s when he was a child. Dad had bought them in Willie Sureen, Sloane Street, with his own pocket money on one of the rare occasions he’d accompanied my grandfather on business to London. No more than half a thumb high, each man is intricately cast, from the sharp tip of his spear to the insignia on his tricorn or the buttons on his spats. Highlanders of the ’45 rebellion who died at Culloden, French officers who fought against Wolfe in Canada in the Seven Years War, a single Grenadier guard on his knees with a bayonet, a little drummer boy. Each delicately painted in Humbrol enamel, every silver belt buckle, cross-gartered stocking, black sporran tassel executed perfectly, every soldier a tribute to the skill of my father, who has such large, ungainly hands.

No, I never meant to show Niker these soldiers, which I keep wrapped in tissue paper in the Huntley and Palmer Superior Reading Biscuits tin in which Dad presented them to me on my eighth birthday. I intended to show him the small, less detailed plastic models, also my father’s, from the American War of Independence. Cavalry, artillery, foot soldiers, painted more sporadically by Dad, and left in their grey or blue plastic for me to finish. And painstakingly, with my sable brushes and thinners, I have been finishing them. The rifles of these soldiers are flexible, durable, whereas the smallest, most accidental, tweak can snap the sword of one of the lead soldiers.

So there they were that day, the plastic models, on my desk. The horses, the riders, the gun carriages, the infantry and even one or two odd cowboys, a belly-scuttling Indian, a First World War soldier, titbits to entice. And the paint of course. And the brushes. I knew it was a risk. But that was what I was doing – risking.

Niker scanned my room. “What’s in that tin?”

The Huntley and Palmer tin. Had I been looking? How could he possibly have known? Why hadn’t I hidden it, stashed it under the bed, secreted it in Mum’s room?

“What tin?”

“This tin.”

I feel cold even now when I think of him opening it. His hands on the stiff, slightly rusty lid. Him pulling and peering and me just standing there. The tissue was discoloured, brittle.

“What have we here, Norbert?”

He drew out a Highlander, red jacket, green kilt, tam-o-shanter, a running man, heels kicking, thin bladed bayonet to the fore.

“Jeez,” said Niker, looking at the exquisitely painted criss-cross leg garters, “did you do this?”

“No, my dad.”

“It’s good.” And he put the soldier down, turned it gently this way and that, admired it. “Very good.”

He unwrapped and looked at every soldier in the same way, taking time and care, asking me what I knew about the uniforms.

Two hours later Mum found us both sitting at my desk, paint brushes in hand. The lasagna, which I’d forgotten to turn down, was burnt, but there were fifteen chestnut horses with black bridles, blue saddle-cloths and fifteen horse stands. Niker had painted mud and grass on his stands. And also flowers.

Mum’s smile was so broad. But premature. Nothing changed at school. In fact it remained so much the same I sometimes think that Niker never came to my house at all. But then I sometimes think that my father, with those heavy hands, could never have painted the Highlanders. And he did.

So here I am again, sitting at my desk with the smell of turps about me and thinking about Niker because it’s preferable to thinking about what I’m actually thinking about. Which is Chance House.

You know how it is when there’s something niggling you, and you do your best to refuse it, chain it up in some dark and faraway place, only to have it come yap yap yapping back at you like some demented dog? Well, yap yap yap, here it comes again. Chance House.

“You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

I’m really not painting. I’m just waving a brush about. So I might as well – yap yap – go downstairs and get Mum’s road atlas. This is how she finds me, crouching over England with a piece of string in my hands.

“Geography prep?” she asks, practical as ever.

“Yap.”

“What is it?”

“Distance in miles from here to St Albans. How far do you reckon, Mum?”

“You’re the one with the string.”

“Right. Fine. Ninety miles. Would it be ninety miles?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Could we go there?”

“Why?”

Good question.

“Day out?”

She sits down, kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on a little pouffe.

“Bit far for a day out,” she says. My mum is a small person, with a small face and a little puff of blonde hair. She looks exhausted.

“Can I get you a cup of tea?”

“God bless you, Robert.”

It’s only teabag tea but, the way she takes it, it could be water in a desert.

“I’d really like to go to St Albans. In fact, I think I have to go to St Albans.”

She shuts her eyes.

“Do you think we could?”

“Mmm.” She’s asleep. I lift the teacup from her lap. Where her skirt has ridden up I can see blood throbbing in her varicose vein.

In the kitchen I make myself a sandwich and then I return to my desk.

“It’s really not far,” yaps Edith Sorrel.

That’s when I decide to set the dream alarm. It’s not an exact science but it sometimes works for me. All I have to do is think about whatever it is that’s bothering me and then set the alarm for 3am. I’ve tried many different times of night but all my best results have come from 3am. Too early in the night and my dreams don’t really seem to have got going, too near the morning and they seem to be petering out. At 3am, I’m normally in the middle of some seething epic. As soon as the alarm goes, I start scribbling. I write down everything I can remember in my dream diary. Even the stupid and inconsequential stuff. Mainly that actually. I note all the colours, the people, the buildings, the looks, the feelings. But I don’t try to make sense of anything. In any case there often isn’t much sense to be made. But in the morning it’s different. Once or twice I’ve woken with some completely crystalline idea about a problem. An idea which often bears no relation to whatever I scribbled down in the night, but it’s still there like some perfect jewel on my pillow. Of course, it’s not always like that. Much more often I have to go back to the diary, reading and re-reading until something jumps out at me – a word, a colour, a phrase, a clue. Something to work with. Naturally, I always hope for the jewel. But somehow I can’t see that happening with Chance House.

Once I’ve decided to use the dream alarm, the evening normally passes mournfully slowly. But not tonight. It only seems a moment before I’m in bed. Then it’s just a matter of going through the ritual. I lie on my back, close my eyes, and relax my body, starting with my feet. When all my limbs are so heavy that the mattress seems dented with them, I turn to my mind. This is when it can get tricky. I think about the problem – in this case Chance House – but I try not to direct my thoughts. It works better if I can keep everything loose and unfocused. If images come, and they do, I attempt to follow them, but not to pursue them, so they can choose their own way. It normally takes a while for the vague, meandering flow to begin. But Chance House conjures itself at once, arriving exact and massive in my imagination. It’s a huge edifice of dirty cream brick. Wide, concrete steps lead to a forbidding door. The door handle is a twisted ring of metal, fashioned like a rope. I imagine myself walking up the steps, grasping the handle in both hands and passing boldly into Edith’s past and my future. But that’s not what happens. I do walk up the steps. But the moment I touch the door, there is a flash and a bang and the house disappears. Or that’s what I believe at first. A little while later, as I stand in the dark, it occurs to me that maybe I have disappeared.

Next thing I’m aware of is Mum shaking me by the shoulders.

“Robert,” she says gently.

At once I’m in action mode, it can’t be more than three seconds before I’m bolt upright, pencil in hand.

“Room,” I write in my dream diary. “Small, cosy, warm, not unlike my bedroom.”

“Robert?”

“People: me, Mum. Atmosphere: everyday, normal. Colours: pale but bright, morning colours.”

Mum gets up and opens the curtains. It is bright. In fact, it is morning.

I grab for my clock, focus. Focus again.

“You set the alarm for three am,” says Mum. “You silly chump.” She smiles, touches me lightly on the head.

“What!”

“Lucky I noticed, eh?” says my mother.

I fall backwards on to the bed. She re-set the alarm. She re-set the alarm! I don’t believe it. I pull the duvet over my head.

“Come on now,” she says, “seven-thirty. Chop chop.”

She leaves.

I wail, I moan, I thump the mattress. Then I get dressed.

“I’m on lates,” says Mum over breakfast. “Do you want me to walk you to school?”

“No,” I say. “No, thanks.” Niker says only girls and wusses are walked to school.

Mum notes what I eat (one slice of toast with strawberry jam), what I drink (nothing) and then she follows me to the bathroom and fiddles about while I clean my teeth. She watches me put my library book and football boots in my school bag and then I watch her as she takes them out again. She puts the boots, which are mud-free, in a plastic bag, examines the library book, remarks, “Haven’t you read this before?” and then replaces both items in the bag. After which she checks the time.

“You don’t have to go yet,” she says.

It’s twenty to nine. The journey to school – via The Dog Leg – is about five minutes. “I like being early,” I say. “I get to use the computers.” Actually Mr Biddulph doesn’t get in till nine-thirty and the computer room is locked like Fort Knox. But Mum doesn’t know that.

“I’ll get you a computer one day,” she says. “I’ll save up.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“I know you didn’t, love.”

“Mum…”

“Yes?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

I peck her quickly on the cheek and go out the back way. As I shut the patio gate, I wave and then turn as if I was going in the direction of The Dog Leg.

Only the locals call it The Dog Leg. Its real name is the Cut, because that’s what it is, a zig-zag passage that acts as a short cut between The Lane and Stanhope Avenue. Some people say it’s called The Dog Leg because that’s how it’s shaped – like the back leg of a dog. Personally, I think that would make for one pretty deformed dog. The passage goes twenty yards east, then right-angles north for ten yards, then sharp east again for another ten and finally sharp north before coming out into daylight under the arch of two Stanhope Avenue houses, which are joined at the second floor level like some architectural Siamese twins. Other people say the passage is called The Dog Leg because that’s what happens there. Dogs lift their legs. At the lamp-posts. If only they knew.

There are two lamp-posts, not the concrete sort you see in ordinary streets, with the lozenge of orange light at the top, but ones that look as if they’ve come out of Narnia. Old-fashioned, fluted metal lamp-posts in pale green surmounted by hexagonal glass lamps which glimmer with that soft gas mantle light. Sticking out horizontally, just below the lamp itself, is a fluted green metal arm with a bobble on the end, which looks like a place you might hang a coat if you were given to hanging your coat on a lamp-post. Alternatively, if you were given to climbing lamp-posts this would be an excellent place to sit. It’s where Niker sits. Niker climbs like a spider.

I didn’t see him the first time, even though he was directly in front of me. I suppose that’s because I was going along with my head at the five-foot level and he was perched another five foot above that. So when the first apple landed I thought it was just Norbert bad luck. Because, as it happens, there is this large Bramley apple tree on the first bend of the passage. In any case I wasn’t exactly thinking of apple as ammunition, just apple as fruit, and fruit does occasionally fall off trees and hit people on account of the laws of gravity. So it was only when the second apple landed, squidgy and rotten and directly on my head, that I thought to look up. Or maybe it was the laugh that made me look. He’s quite a good marksman, Niker, and I think he hit me another four times before I managed to turn the corner. Afterwards, as I scraped the gunge off my coat with a stick, I wondered why I hadn’t thought to return fire. But I think I would have missed anyway.

Of course the next time I went via The Dog Leg I checked the lamp-post (which you can see from the entrance) before going in. Only that time he was up the second lamp-post, the one you can’t see until you turn the middle bend. This post doesn’t have a convenient apple tree near by. So he had a plastic bag. He was wearing gloves and he threw something loose and brown that splatted on the back of my neck. I thought it was mud – until I breathed in. When I got to school I washed it out of my hair, but the smell was still on my collar.

“Norbert,” Niker said at Break. “Did anyone ever tell you, you stink?” He was sitting on the playground wall next to Kate, who was swinging her legs and eating a cheesestring. “You should take a bath.” He jumped off the wall into a puddle, soaking me, but also himself.

“E-jit,” Kate said and laughed.

As soon as I got home that afternoon I changed and stuffed my shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket. But Mum has a nose like a bloodhound.

“What happened?” she asked.

“I fell over.”

“On your back?”

“Yes.”

“In a pile of dog muck?”

“Yes.”

“Robert?”

“Yes, Mum, I fell over on my back. In a pile of dog muck. People do, you know.”

As I bathed, I thought about what Kate meant by “E-jit”. Or rather – who she meant. I decided she meant Niker and that’s why I didn’t stop using The Dog Leg. Not then anyway. No. I walked through it every day. Right up until the Grape Incident.

I’m not saying I wasn’t scared. The Dog Leg’s a spooky place anyway. Mum says it’s not mortar that holds the walls together but graffiti. And the more often our neighbours creosote their back gates the more elaborate the spray painting gets. It makes the houses looked marked, as if all the victims from the Great Plague ended up with homes backing on to the Cut. And then there’s the broken glass and the smell of urine – and I don’t mean dog urine either. Because dog urine doesn’t smell, does it? And even though the passage is a perfectly ordinary path made of perfectly ordinary concrete, footfalls really echo there. There always seems to be someone behind you, or coming towards you. It’s difficult to locate exactly where someone else is in the passage until you’re right on them. Or they’re on you. But then it should be safe because so many people use it: dog-walkers, shoppers, business people on their way to the sandwich shop, everyday grown-ups going about their everyday business. So maybe it is only me that smells fear there.

The apple-throwing happened in the autumn. And it wasn’t until the summer that Niker devised the grape thing. There were two new boys in class that term, Jon Pinkman and Shane Perkiss, Pinky and Perky, and he did it to them too. So it wasn’t just me. I wasn’t the only one. Pinky only stayed one term.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about that now. I just want to explain why it is that I head south today – towards the sea – instead of east towards school. It’s one of about seven routes I use. I never decide in advance which way I’m going to go on the basis that Niker still manages to intercept me on an unnerving number of occasions, so he either has to be psychic or he’s put some sort of implant in my brain. If it’s the implant then I reckon he can’t know where I’m going until I know where I’m going, so the later I decide the less time he has to get there before me. You could call it paranoid, but then anyone whose been through The Dog Leg with Pinky and Perky and a bunch of grapes has the right to be paranoid.

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