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following the path towards the café, up the stairs into the unlit hallway. My mates weren’t back: there was no light shining off the big window that fronted the silent ball room.
    It was absolutely dark. I put my face up close to the glass and stared at the black shape I knew was the climbing frame; the Wendy house, a little square of paler shadow, was adrift in plastic balls. I turned on my torch and shone it into the room. Where the beam touched them, the balls leapt into clown colours, and then the light moved and they went back to being black.
    In the main crèche, I sat on the assistant’s chair, with a little half-circle of baby chairs in front of me. I sat like that in the dark, and listened to no noise. There was a little bit of lamplight, orangey through the windows, and once every few seconds a car would pass, just audible, way out on the other side of the parking lot.
    I picked up the book by the side of the chair and opened it in torchlight. Fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.
    There was a sound.
    A little soft thump.
    I heard it again.
    Balls in the ball room, falling onto each other.
    I was standing instantly, staring through the glass into the darkness of the ball room.
Pudda-thudda,
it came again. It took me seconds to move, but I came close up to the window with my torch raised. I was holding my breath, and my skin felt much too tight.
    My torch beam swayed over the climbing frame and out the window on the other side, sending shadows into the corridors. I directed it down into those bouncy balls, and just before the beam hit them, while they were still in darkness, they shivered and slid away from each other in a tiny little trail. As if something was burrowing underneath.
    My teeth were clenched. The light was on the balls now, and nothing was moving.
    I kept that little room lit for a long time, until the torchlight stopped trembling. I moved it carefully up and down the walls, over every part, until I let out a big dumb hiss of relief because I saw that there were balls on the top of the climbing frame, right on its edge, and I realised that one or two of them must have fallen off, bouncing softly among the others.
    I shook my head and my hand swung down, the torchlight going with it, and the ball room went back into darkness. And as it did, in the moment when the shadows rushed back in, I felt a brutal cold, and I stared at the little girl in the Wendy house, and she stared up at me.
    The other two guys couldn’t calm me down.
    They found me in the ball room, yelling for help. I’d opened both doors and I was hurling balls out into the crèche and the corridors, where they rolled and bounced in all directions, down the stairs to the entrance, under the tables in the café.
    At first I’d forced myself to be slow. I knew that the most important thing was not to scare the girl any more than she must have been already. I’d croaked out some daft, would-be cheerful greeting, come inside, shining the torch gradually towards the Wendy house, so I wouldn’t dazzle her, and I’d kept talking, whatever nonsense I could muster.
    When I realised she’d sunk down again beneath the balls, I became all jokey, trying to pretend we were playing hide-and-seek. I was horribly aware of how I might seem to her, with my build and my uniform, and my accent.
    But when I got to the Wendy house, there was nothing there.
    â€œShe’s been left behind!” I kept screaming, and when they understood they dived in with me and scooped up handfuls of the balls and threw them aside, but the two of them stopped long before me. When I turned to throw more of the balls away, I realised they were just watching me.
    They wouldn’t believe she’d been in there, or that she’d got out. They told me they would have seen her, that she’d have had to come past them. They kept telling me I was being crazy, but they didn’t try to stop me, and eventually I cleared the