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shouldn't.
    ' That your brother?' Toby said.
    Alice nodded. James stared at Toby with a look of mistrust.
    ' Mum's looking for you', James said.
    ' I've got to go', Alice said to Toby.
    She ruffled Miro's hair, checked nothing was coming, and then skipped back across the street.
    ' See you in school', Toby said and then went on his way, carrier bag of dead fish slung over his shoulder dripping slimy goo from a hole in the corner, all the way down the back of his T-shirt.
    ' Who was that pansy?' James said on the short walk back towards the house, his arm around his sister's shoulder just to show her who was boss.
    ' No-one', Alice said again.
    ' Yeah well, didn't mum and dad tell you already, you can't trust anyone from the countryside. They're all inbred and stupid and if you make friends with him, he'll suck your brains out.'
    Alice wriggled away from him and ran towards the front door. James set chase, but Alice got there first. She was a good sprinter, and had grown much taller at this age than James ever had, and was now only a few inches shorter than him. At the door, her father caught her in his arms.
    ' Lunch time', Peter said.
     
    The house was a mess. All of the furniture had finally been put where it belonged, the bed's were up and the essential items had been unpacked, but the two front rooms were chaos, the hallway was a nightmare of torn cardboard, unlabelled boxes and bubble wrap, and amongst it all somewhere were the car keys.
    Over lunch, Alice asked her parents what inbred meant, and James couldn't help but snigger at the very specific definition her father gave.
    Peter certainly didn't beat around the bush when it came to explaining things, and despite the rest of the world feeling uncomfortable with certain topics of conversation, he never seemed to feel embarrassed. It was a consequence of being a doctor, he would say, where he'd learnt from his years at university that giving someone a specific and detailed answer to a question was the only way to deal with it properly. There was no point in getting excited or embarrassed. He had, after all, given James the birds and the bees talk when he was 11, which James had passed on with certain pride to his sister, the bits at least that he could get across without laughing.
    In the afternoon, James complained that he couldn't find his teddy bears, his racing cars, his action men and other vital everyday items he'd need in order to get through the rest of the day without issue, while Alice set up her room the way she wanted it, having made sure all of her boxes were labelled in advance and easy to discover amongst the assorted chaos of everyone else's stuff. Afterwards she read, and wrote in her diary that today two things had happened. She'd moved from the city to a house in the country, and she'd already made a new friend. A boy with sticky out ears and dirty hands, with a dog called Miro and a bag of mouldy fish. She knew the fish wasn't really mouldy, but she liked to add her own touch to the story, whether it was true or not. She was a writer after all.
    She drew a picture of Toby emptying the contents of his bag onto the road, and made sure she enhanced both his teeth and his ears. She dotted freckles across his face and drew a pile of fish on the road under the bag.
    The view from the window of her bedroom in her old house had been the 'George and Dragon' pub on the corner, and the neon lights of the kebab shop. Here she could see nothing but rolling fields and pollution free skies, and it made her happy. She could even see stars begin to twinkle as the sun fell away.
    She thought about her best friend Kaylee, the rest of the people that sat on her desk at school, Lydia included, her old teacher Mrs Carr, and the headmaster Mr Pincer, and then she thought about her new school, the one that she'd be starting on Monday, and how excited that made her feel. She was happy she already knew Toby, but she hoped that he'd wash his hands at least before turning