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plants, so electric-bright they looked suspiciously fake. Coming out into the goods area he swore under what breath he had left as he saw the gates were closed. Closed, yes. Locked, no! He ran over and pushed back the heavy latch, dragging the gate towards him just enough so he could slip through; as he did, coming between the palms and young trees, he saw three figures running towards him.
    Adam pulled the gate to – no time to try and find something to jam it shut with – and ran for the main road. If they caught him, getting done over by three people was, he supposed, better than getting done over by five of them. Got to look on the bright side. Traffic was heavy going up the hill, but if he could get across it would slow the others down too. And then he saw a bus coming down the other way … would his luck hold?
    Relying on the kindness of your average car driver is no way to cross a busy road, but Adam had run out of choices and just had chances left. Spotting a marginally bigger gap between an approaching red Fiesta and a silver, old-style Micra, he stared at the white-haired lady Micra driver, waving and pointing at the bus, and stepped into the road.
    The gamble paid off as the woman, frowning, slowed down just enough to let Adam get to the middle of the road and then dash between another two cars to the other side. He ran the hundred metres down the hill to the bus stop, watching the three pursuers hovering, pissed off, on theopposite side of the road, trapped by the stream of cars. Panting, he put out his hand and waited for the bus to stop; as the doors hissed open he flashed his travel card and went to sit right at the back.
    Without bothering to look round, Adam raised his hand and flicked the finger at the rear window to whoever might be watching. So much for a quiet walk to sort stuff out in his head …

10
Joyful impression
    After a supper during which no one said much about anything, and, in particular, nothing about Charlie, Adam went to watch some TV. He was a curious mixture of pumped up, knackered from all the running and nervous as hell about what he had to do next.
    What he had to do first was just sit tight and wait for his parents to go to bed, which, judging by what they’d been like over the last week, wouldn’t be too long. There was nothing much on any of the channels; films had either started or weren’t anything he wanted to watch, there was no comedy, no crime, no cartoons. Rubbish.
    He got up and flicked through the small collection of DVDs they’d got, but, as they’d mostly been acquired by his mum, there was nothing remotely interesting there. Which left the videos. There were five packed shelves of them, going back God knew how many years, and, looking at the dust, most of them hadn’t been out of their cases for ages. It was like being in a cellar looking at a collection of fine wines, as quite a few of the films had been taped off the TV and had handwritten labels on the spine – ah,
Wayne’s World,
Aug ’99, a very good year for laughs …
    It was odd how videos, once the total business, were nowkind of antique, like music cassettes. Adam finally picked up
Duck Soup,
Charlie’s favourite Marx Brothers movie, thinking that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d used his Walkman – probably not since the previous year, when he’d got an mp3 player for a combined birthday/Christmas present.
    It took Adam a good twenty minutes hunting to discover the remote tidied away in the cupboard where his mother kept a huge amount of assorted family snapshots, in no particular order, along with the bottles of drink – the orange liqueurs and other odd-coloured, strange-smelling liquids – that no one touched unless everything drinkable had run out. Logical. Where else would you put a remote?
    He’d just settled down and was fast-forwarding to the film when his mum popped her head round the door.
    â€˜We’re