The One Safe Place Read Free Page B

clouds in search of him. Surely he'd already been wherever he was supposed to go. He hoisted the Benign Lumps concert into place over his ears and pedalled fast onto the waste ground occupied by workers' cabins, which was the start of the quickest way home through the council estate.
    The cabins weren't much narrower than the houses of the estate. Inside were bare metal desks with pens locked up in them, filing cabinets stuffed with paper, graphs on the walls—nothing worth breaking in for. They weren't even a challenge like the new and supposedly unbreakable park benches. A man carrying a clipboard and wearing a pen for a necklace came out of one cabin to watch Darren with an expression like the one all the teachers at secondary school turned on him, especially when they thought he wasn't looking. Darren considered performing a wheelie to spray him with mud, then contented himself with his best spit, which travelled at least twelve feet and spattered the open door of the cabin. A shout of "You dirty little—" was blotted out by the Benign Lumps as he sped off between the backyards, his teeth chattering with mirth.
    He could see over the fences by standing on the pedals, but there wasn't much to see except kitchens and back rooms repeating themselves beneath tiny bedroom windows like spyholes for watching out for the police. Where the gutters were clogged with windblown litter, the walls under them looked spongy with January rain. He saw a toddler trying to climb on a car engine covered with a tarpaulin in one yard, a needle and bloody syringe in the next, where the grass straggled like a dosser's beard. A woman toothy with several colours of plastic clothes-pegs glared out of her yard at him as he raced behind Mozart Close, a Doberman snarled at him from behind a fence of Mendelssohn. He spat over the fence and screeched left behind Haydn, feeling as if he'd become the pounding drums and the guitars and singers trying to outshriek one another, and saw several children from his old school blocking the alley ahead.
    It wasn't seeing them which made him brake—he would have enjoyed watching them scream and cower against the fence—but in the yard into which they were trooping he'd seen a white rabbit in a green hutch from his last year's classroom. Bugs was the class pet which Mrs. Morris had never let Darren look after during any of the holidays and weekends, though she used to call Darren her little ray of sunshine as if they were sharing a joke, not like any of the multitude of teachers at his new school, none of whom seemed to know or want to know him. He jumped off the mountain bike and ran it into the yard and shook the headphones off. "Eh, whosit, give us a hold of Bugs."
    "Don't, Henry. Mam said nobody but us was to."
    "Tell your sister to shut her hole, Henry. It's not yours to say who can hold it. Give the bugger here."
    The girl sidled behind the two friends she'd brought home. She was twisting a toggle of her duffel coat so hard that moisture oozed out of the cloth. "I'm getting mam."
    "You get her," Darren said over the whine and tish of the earphones. "Tell her Darren Fancy's in your yard and all he's after is a hold of Bugs, and see if she wants to get on the wrong side of us."
    All he wanted was to stroke the animal, the way Mrs. Morris had let him. His hands were remembering how soft its fur was, except that having to argue was mixing up the sensation with the muffled spiky throbbing at his neck. He ran the bicycle at Henry, and the boy backed away, tripping over the prop of the clothesline which sagged between the corners of the yard. As Henry sprawled on his arse on the concrete and began to howl like a factory siren, his sister dashed out of the gate. "I never touched him," Darren said, not for the first or the dozenth time in his life. "Don't you two be saying I did him when I never. I'm holding Bugs and then you can if you want."
    He let the bicycle drop against the fence and stooped to the hutch,