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her and sighed. ‘I was just saying he should go home while we do our boring business. Go ahead, Harry.’
    â€˜Agnes has some people she made from cookie dough,’ said Mrs Sole. She made a reticent gesture with her hand. ‘She’s playing in the stream with them, why don’t you go have a look. We won’t be long.’
    â€˜Nah, thanks, I’ll just go home,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh, she’s not playing house or anything,’ said Mrs Sole kindly. ‘In fact, I think she’s drowning them.’
    My father laughed in a peculiar way, a phony, dinner party laugh. ‘Well, you won’t want to miss that,’ he said.
    I wagged my head. It did sound kind of interesting. ‘Okay.’ I moved away from them.
    â€˜He’s at shule ,’ Mrs Sole said softly behind me – a remark which meant nothing to me then and didn’t recur to me until I was seventeen, when it made me sit bolt upright in bed and rollick my head in my two hands.
    Now, though, I just continued down the bank to the girl.
    She had moved downstream from her original position and was kneeling by the water again farther on. I approached her in the semi-dark. The low voices of the grownups fell away behind me. Bashful, I walked with elaborate caution over the soft earth of the bank and stared down at the stream as I went. As I came closer to the girl, I saw something white in the water. I stopped to squint down at it. It was one of her figures. She’d put it in the water to float along, I guess. It had snagged on a twig and the current was nudging it and slipping around it on either side. I pulled an appreciative face: it was pretty good, pretty real-looking, almost like something you could get in a store. A girl figure, hand painted with a red skirt and yellow hair and pink skin. As I watched, it worked free of the twig and went turning and bouncing downstream.
    â€˜Here conies your figure,’ I said. I followed it from the bank until I was standing over her. ‘It’s going by.’
    For another second, the girl didn’t even look up. She just went on, arranging her three other figures in the sparse waterside grass. Then, slowly, she did look. A long, slow look up at me. Very queer. She had a small brownish face, grim, constricted; a face like a monkey working out a chess problem. Kneeling there in her little green jumper with her little bare knees in the dirt, she made her eyes go all wide and magical.
    â€˜That one’s my sister,’ she said.
    She said it in a half-whisper, intoned it, with low echoing notes. A witchy business there in the shadows. Without thinking, I took a nervous peek back over my shoulder, checking to make sure my Dad and Mrs Sole were there. They were – still talking in the gloaming under the trees. Standing very close, Dad gesticulating in the small space between them. Now and then the sound of their voices rose wordlessly over the gurgle of the stream.
    I turned back to the girl. I shrugged. ‘Yeah. My friend Freddy has a sister. He wants to drown her too. He says he wants to set her on fire while she’s asleep.’
    But the girl took no more notice of me. She’d returned her attention to the figures in the grass. Arranging them, pacing them through some mysterious, girly hoo-ha. I stood over her, hands in my pockets, observing distantly. The figures were two men and a woman, just as life-like as the one she’d drowned. One of them even looked like a soldier, which was admirable enough. I wasn’t too sure about this cookie-dough angle – it smelled of sissiness – but I couldn’t help thinking: You could make whole armies of these things. Any kind of soldiers you wanted. Romans, say, with swords and shields. Or the guys from the Alamo. You could work out whole massacres not sold in any store. You’d be the only one who had them.
    I relented, squatted next to her. ‘So, like, you made these?’
    She