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moved in with us … well, you can’t always be saying hello to someone if they live there, can you? It’s not like they are a guest anymore.”

    â€œSo you say nothing at all?”
    â€œYeah,” said Hal. “I mean, he shouldn’t really be there, should he? So I pretend he’s not.”
    I couldn’t think of an argument against that. It made a sort of Hal-ish sense.
    â€œAnd now they’ve started threatening you with boarding school?”
    â€œWell, it’s mainly her. I don’t think he really minds much. But she does. She’s been on about it for ages, but now we’re coming to the end of primary school, so it’s getting a bit more urgent. She has brochures for places where they make you play rugby.”
    I looked at Hal and tried to imagine him in rugby gear. It didn’t work. He kept disappearing up his own sleeves.
    â€œOK, Hal,” I said with a sigh. “I think this is a daft plan, but if you really feel you need to take a stand, well, I’ll go with you. But I’m only going to make sure you don’t get into trouble, OK?”
    Ah me, doomed words.

Chapter 7
    S aturday morning came. I could have had a nice lie-in, but no, instead I got up early and bicycled over to Hal’s house before breakfast . There’d been a small change of plan. It seems we would never be able to follow Alec in his van, so now, instead of that, we were going to cycle ahead of him to the hospital and wait there to see what happened. I really didn’t see the point of all this, but Hal insisted.
    Normally I couldn’t have got away with leaving the house at the crack of dawn, I’d have been missed at home, only they were all fussing about getting Larry to the airport in time for his flight and giving him long and complex instructions about how he was to behave himself when he got to Paris and how he was to have absolutely NO alcohol of any description, no way, no, no, no.
    Larry doesn’t drink. Let’s face it, Larry is not one of nature’s rebels.
    But my parents don’t believe this. They believe all that stuff they read in the papers about Teenage Drinking. Larry is not exactly what you would call a typical teenager. I probably will be, when I get to that age. I will most likely be a
total handful, get studs everywhere, wear the most way-out things, listen to really objectionable music. I will drive my parents up the walls. They’ve had it easy with Larry. They won’t know what hit them. I am looking forward to it.
    I got a list of instructions too, of course, before they left for the airport, about how I wasn’t to open the door to strangers, and I wasn’t to light any fires or leave the cooker turned on and how they’d be right back as soon as Larry’s plane boarded. I waved them off at the front door, and as soon as they’d left, I leaped onto my bike and scooted over to Hal’s.
    My kooky friend, I said to myself as I rode out of our estate; along the main road; past the Centra shop; around the corner into Hal’s estate; past all the nice, calm-looking gardens with their flower beds and their little gates with notices about BEWARE OF THE DOG and their WELCOME mats on the doorsteps and wishing wells in the middle of the lawns—all those houses with their curtains closed and sensible people inside them in their beds, which is where I should have been. My weird friend. Rosemarie and Gilda were beginning to look much more acceptable. At least they wouldn’t have me up at the crack of dawn bicycling around town on a mad escapade like this. They wouldn’t have the imagination for it to start with.
    Hal was waiting for me at his gate, looking pale and anxious, with his bike.
    Alec’s painter’s van stood in the driveway, a little white van with a ladder on the roof rack and ALEXANDER DEN-HAM
INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR PAINTWORK NO JOB TOO SMALL painted on the side of it in rainbow